Emotions are intrinsically good and bad

[Edwardo Piet]

You said that you were miserable but fought to get help because you saw it as a possibility that you wouldn't be miserable forever: i.e. the future may be less miserable if you get help.

So if there was an emotion you did not detect, it was probably the emotion of "hope". If there wasn't, then it was just your survival instinct.

Either way, the rational judgement of getting help so you can feel better is separate from any emotions of feeling better.

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Emotions are experiencial if they are anything at all. When you experience something, either you experience that emotionally as an emotion or you don't and you experience it as a non-emotion.

The point is that you only ever experience the present moment in any moment that is present, you experience that acuteness which cannot be aggregated, time is irrelevant. Intensity is more important than time.

I also pretty much think that emotions are intrinsically good and bad (although I think that's a very narrow way of framing my premise), but I recognize that nothing from that entails that "time is more important than intensity". In fact, all we experience are intensities in the moment, and I fail to see how it makes any sense to aggregate them together. Just as it makes no sense to aggregate different people's conscious experiences together as one individual, it makes no sense to aggregate any particular individuals experiences at different times together, into a feeling. However long a feeling lasts, that feeling is experienced as an experience, like all other experiences are experienced as experiences, and it only lasts as long as it lasts. This is all tautological, but the point is that regardless of however long a feeling (or emotion) lasts, it makes no sense to aggregate it with other feelings and emotions. It doesn't matter how many emotions you feel or how long they last, what matters is the quality, peaks, and valleys.

I also have an additional premise: Negative emotions are more important than positive ones. Positive emotions are intrisincally important, but negative emotions are intrinsically far more important. So much so that positive emotions are only really important if negative emotions aren't around to spoil them.

You don't recognize this asymmetry so you have no way of arguing that a rapist is doing anything wrong because you don't have a premise that says the suffering from the rape victim is far far more important than any pleasure from the rapist. Ratting on about wisdom and emotional judgements doesn't get you anywhere because that isn't a logical argument. It's a premise that doesn't lead to anything useful. Obviously wisdom is wise. That doesn't tell you what is wise. Maybe emotions can be helpful guides to wisdom, although I disagree, but even if you're right about that that still doesn't tell you what that wisdom is. You have still made no argument for why negative emotions are more important than positive ones.

I haven't made an argument for that either, but at least I have it as an additional premise, and I don't pretend that I can just say "emotions are intrinsically good and bad" and just declare victory.

Now, let me just say one last thing here and this is just some point I am making.  I think it could be the case that the knowledge of good and bad is wired into us.  I think it might be an instinct.  Even though we have that knowledge, the only way to actually see good and bad value would be through our positive and negative emotions.

I think it's far less spectacular than that.

I think you're making two key errors:

1. You're saying that emotions cause goodness and creating an unnecessary two-step process. It's like the same mistake Daniel Dennett points out that people make about consciousness (one part about consciousness he actually gets right, until he goes a step further and says it's an "Illusion") . . . people say that the conscious workings of the brain allows consciousness to emerge. But the reality is that the conscious workings of the brain is consciousness. There is no extra step of 'and then consciousness emerges'.

2. It's not that emotions are intrinsically good because they allow us to find goodness. I mean, for starters that would make them extrinsically good and goodness would be intrinsically good. A goodness, that emotions enable us to find, that you're still yet to explain.

No, it's not that emotions allow us to find goodness. It's that emotions themselves are literally good and bad in that the bad ones are badness and the good ones are goodness. I would also argue though that it's paramount to have the additional premise that there's an asymmetry between them and negative emotions are far more important than positive ones. It's more urgent to fix the world's shittiness than it is to try to get to utopia. And when someone is already doing 'okay' or 'alright' then positive emotions on top of that are merely a bonus. The really important part is removing the pain and suffering (negative emotions).

There's nothing magical about emotions, nothing special, nothing spectacular. It's not mysterious that they're all we really ultimately care about (even if we think otherwise) because they are literally what allow caring itself. And the 'hard-wiring' is no mystery. Evolution has merely given us ways to survive and reproduce because of the very mundane process-of-elimination approach of natural selection, which is rather a law of the universe, and emotions are merely the path that evolution has happened to take for this planet or at least for us humans and perhaps other higher mammals.

Consciousness, is even less spectacular. It's a mere side effect of brain advancement, an effect that has no effects, an epiphenomenon. We're very lucky or very unlucky to have it. But it doesn't cause positive or negative emotions. It doesn't cause anything. It's an effect that has no effects, like I said. When you experience a positive or negative emotion, that emotion is a state of consciousness. And that state is the piece of good or bad luck. Again, there's no second step.