Good is an actual quality like water that we need to "drink"

[The Transcended Omniverse]

Psychologists often divide emotions into two categories: intrinsically positive and intrinsically negative (i.e. feeling good and feeling bad). I have every reason to think this division is true based upon my own personal experience. After all, positive and negative, good and bad, light and darkness is a well known concept in many movies, anime, artwork, etc.

Feeling good and feeling bad is an actual quality of good and bad that makes things, moments, and situations of either good or bad value to us. Different people will have different emotional responses to different things which means that a certain thing or situation that a person feels a positive emotion from can only be of good value to this individual while the same stimulus that makes another feel a negative emotion can only be of bad value to that person.

The thought and belief of having water in your life will not give you actual water just as how believing that your life is still good, joyful, beautiful, and worth living during your miserable moments or other negative emotional states would not bring your life any of those things either. Sadly, this means that all those famous and genius miserable artists and composers had little to no good value in their lives regardless of what they believed otherwise. Their lives and artistic endeavors were virtually meaningless and empty even though they were deluded otherwise.

So, with all of this being said, positive and negative emotions, also known as pleasant and unpleasant emotions, are intrinsically good and bad. Beliefs and mindsets themselves are not the same thing as emotions because, if you were in the most miserable state of your life and you believed that you were in a positive emotional state such as feeling joyful and excited about a certain idea such as going to the carnival, then you wouldn't be.

It would just be the thought of being excited and joyful, but no real excitement and joy. Our positive and negative emotions would be like our own inner light and inner darkness. It is the inner light we need to truly make our lives and artistic endeavors good and beautiful and it is the darkness we should avoid since that can only make our lives bad and ****. This means that the only way to live and be an artist is through positive emotions.

To conclude this packet, I will point out something interesting here. Emotions themselves are actual value judgments. Here is a response from a skeptic/neuroscientist which supports this:

Emotions are value judgments too. If they weren't, humanity would not be distinct from other mammals; we would be biological machines with no autonomy, acting purely on instinct. For example, if you are physically hurt, and the doctor treating you causes you pain during treatment, do you become angry and bite him? No, because you are able to override your instinctive anger and fear at someone causing you pain with your ability to reason that the treatment is necessary and the pain is temporary. But a dog can't reason, and will bite to stop the person causing the pain. Both the instinctive emotions AND the reasoned thoughts are value judgments.

Therefore, since our positive emotions are always emotional value judgments of good value and our negative emotions always being emotional value judgments of bad value, since emotions themselves are actual qualities (things that exist such as water, food, electricity, etc.), then positive emotions would have to be a quality of good and negative emotions would have to be a quality of bad.

This means that the only way to live the most beautiful, good, and worthwhile life would be if you were in the most profound, intense state of euphoria of your life and the only worst life you can live would be if you were in the most profoundly horrible negative emotional state of your life. Unfortunately, moments of euphoria are very brief and fleeting which means that your life can only be the greatest for you in brief, fleeting moments.

Other Person's Response: Could you give me an example of people who think that their positive emotions are the inner light to their lives as you claim?

My Reply: There are many people out there who struggle with depression. Many hate their lives and they just want to die. They say that having a positive mindset does nothing for them. This supports my worldview quite well because these depressed people are only expressing the truth here. They are merely expressing the need for the inner light back into their lives again. Many people out there don't realize this truth. Depressed people simply come to the aid of therapists, counselors, and mental health professionals who help change their thinking and work on certain therapeutic methods when, in reality, none of these things were the issue.

What really needs to be done for these depressed folks is to somehow find a way to restore their positive emotions. I realize that antidepressants are one method. But something more needs to be done here since our positive emotions are truly the only things we have to make our lives good and worth living for. I don't care if anything I say offends or upsets you. The truth is the truth and it needs to be shared. I, myself, have struggled 10 whole years with the worst misery of my life induced by emotional traumas and obsessive thinking and it is time I shared the truth of my personal experience to the world.

Other Person's Response: I can present to you a number of factors that disprove your worldview and how good and bad really is subjective. I do not think there is an absolute good and bad that you are claiming exists. Everyone is different and everybody finds good and bad value in their lives differently. You claim that your positive and negative emotions are an absolute good and bad in your life when they aren't. It's just your way of seeing what gives good and bad value to your life.

My Reply: I still have to disagree with you. I think there is an absolute good and bad that is hidden from humanity and I am trying to uncover it. It would be no different than how I am digging for a hidden treasure that many people don't realize is there. I am like a metal detector and I am beeping loudly. I acknowledge the factors you have presented which is your own personal basis for a conviction of good and bad being subjective. But I still don't think any of these factors disprove my theory/worldview. Lastly, I think this absolute good and bad would be a scientific definition of good and bad. Would we even call it that or would it instead have a different description such as an emotional definition of good and bad? I am trying to discover this new good and bad that I think is real and other people and scientists can join me in this search for truth.

 

[Father]

Good is however Subjective. one can slay thousands of innocence in the proclamation of doing Gods work and still get a high off that "Good"

 

[Electra]

I am feeling depression at this current moment, I agree with myself that this is a tool that my phyc has put into place to help me slow down, rest, asses, face facts, not make any sudden movements, be patient, ect. I therefore see this depression as a positive aspect as it is needed for my current state.
Isn't it therefore all relative?

 

[The Transcended Omniverse]

To begin, I would like to say that I am a hedonist. Hedonism is a philosophy which states that pleasure gives our lives good value and pain gives our lives bad value. The goal is to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. So, hedonism is all about pursuing positive emotions and avoiding negative ones since it is all about being happy and enjoying our lives that gives our lives good value. But there is the idea of non hedonistic based values which are values independent of those advocated by hedonism. I think hedonism is true while non hedonism is false. These arguments I present in this packet are entirely my own personal and unique arguments based upon my own personal experience of having struggled 10 whole years with ongoing misery due to emotional trauma and obsessive thinking. It was an ongoing battle and I have finally broken free of that cycle.

Now, I am here to share to you what I have learned from this horrible experience. I am firmly convinced, based upon my own personal, profound, and powerful experience, that it can only be the emotional value judgments that can give our lives real value. That is, it can only be our emotions that can make things, moments, and situations of real good or bad value to us depending upon which emotion we feel. Since positive emotions are always emotional value judgments of good value, then they are the only things that can make things in our lives perceived as good. Since negative emotions are always emotional value judgments of bad value, then they are the only things that can make things in our lives perceived as bad. It is, therefore, only through our emotional states that we can perceive good and bad. Our emotions would have to be like glasses that we need to wear in order to see the value in our lives.

If you felt a negative emotion (an emotional bad value judgment) and you used a rational good value judgment, then this just creates a big mess here since you have two value judgments going on at once. It's no different than if a sighted person was seeing colors, smelling a certain scent, and hearing a certain noise who, at the same time, had the thought of those colors, that scent, and that noise. To say that the thought itself is a rational form of a heard noise, a smell, and perceived colors would be nonsense and it would just create one big mess here. That is why we would say that the thoughts alone can only be the idea of sounds, smell, visuals, values, emotions, water, food, pain, love, hate, misery, etc., but that they do not give our lives any real version of those things.

The emotional value judgments are value judgments that go beyond words. The rational value judgments are the words while the emotional ones are beyond words (the emotions themselves). Having real value in our lives is something profound and powerful and, thus, it would have to be something that goes beyond words. Sure, I have used words in saying all of this. But those words alone are, again, just thoughts of our emotions being the source of judging our lives as being good and bad while the rational value judgments themselves would still be no real value judgments. Thinking of value is not the same thing as judging (seeing) value.

Since positive emotions are the only things that can put us into a state of mind where everything is joyful, beautiful, happy, good, and worth living for, then the only way to live and be an artist is through positive emotions. Having negative emotions in your life or no emotions at all is simply no way to live or be an artist regardless of your contributions to the world and what types of artwork you create. Your life would either be bad, horrible, sh1t (negative emotion) or just completely blank and nothing at all (no emotion).

Since I don't think rational value judgments themselves can be any real emotions and since emotions themselves are value judgments, then I don't think the rational value judgments can be any real value judgments either. They are only being claimed to be real emotions and real value judgments when they really aren't. You can do all the things in life that would imply that you were hungry or thirsty even if you weren't hungry and thirsty just as how all the factors that would imply good and bad value independent of positive and negative emotions can be evidenced in this world. But, again, that does not mean that you are hungry or thirsty or that you have real good and bad value judged/perceived in your life independent of your positive and negative emotions. After all, there are many people who believe in false ideas all the time such as Thor the God of Thunder. These people have lived their lives as though Thor was real. But Thor was actually not real.

Continuing on here. Aren't things that sound absurd often true? Just because my worldview sounds absurd does not mean that it is false since there are so many things that are absurd in this life that are true. It is just the absurdity of life rule. There are certain things in this world such as people dying from deadly viruses and, even though this is an absurd thing, it is real. So, life isn't perfect and it seems to me that many people are expecting a certain value system to be the real value system which is why you see my value system being dismissed as nonsense and false. But life doesn't always meet our expectations and we don't always get what we want in life. My value system might certainly be one that doesn't work well for humanity, but, then again, there are many absurd things in this life that just don't work out for us, but said things are true. Instead, humanity tends to delude themselves of such things because they simply do not like them and wish to have things their way.

I am going to say this last thing here before I finally conclude this description. I am going to point out a quote by a skeptic/neuroscientist who supports the idea of our emotions being value judgments:

Emotions are value judgments too. If they weren't, humanity would not be distinct from other mammals; we would be biological machines with no autonomy, acting purely on instinct. For example, if you are physically hurt, and the doctor treating you causes you pain during treatment, do you become angry and bite him? No, because you are able to override your instinctive anger and fear at someone causing you pain with your ability to reason that the treatment is necessary and the pain is temporary. But a dog can't reason, and will bite to stop the person causing the pain. Both the instinctive emotions AND the reasoned thoughts are value judgments.

Therefore, since our positive emotions are always emotional value judgments of good value and our negative emotions always being emotional value judgments of bad value, since emotions themselves are actual qualities (things that exist such as water, food, electricity, etc.), then positive emotions would have to be a quality of good and negative emotions would have to be a quality of bad. This means that the only way to live the most beautiful, good, and worthwhile life would be if you were in the most profound, intense state of euphoria of your life and the only worst life you can live would be if you were in the most profoundly horrible negative emotional state of your life. Unfortunately, moments of euphoria are very brief and fleeting which means that your life can only be the greatest for you in brief, fleeting moments.

To conclude this description, I guess you could consider me someone like a sociopath who does not understand empathy since he never had any. Of course, I am not a sociopath and this is just an analogy for saying that I simply do not understand how one can live a life that is truly good, beautiful, and worth living for independent of positive emotions. As a matter of fact, I never recall a single given moment in my life where I perceived real value independent of my emotions. If there was a given moment, then I do not recall. Neither have my rational based values been any real emotional state in my life either. You could fully educate a sociopath on empathy, but the sociopath would still not understand it since he never had it.

Likewise, you could also fully educate me on values, morals, and ethics and how our rational value judgments can be emotional states, but I would never understand that either since this is something that has never been known to me from personal experience. The only way my worldview could change to a new sense of values would, therefore, be if I had a whole new personal experience that could replace all the good values, joy, beauty, misery, badness, etc. that my positive and negative emotions have offered me. Remember, this has to be a real version of those things in my life and not just a matter of empty words. I would pay very close attention to my inner universe. If there is a real form of those things there, then my life would have a real version of those things. If not, then they would not be anything real, they would just be empty words, and there would also still be no real emotion there either.

As a matter of fact, I think skeptics and neuroscientists have even said that we can't have empathy without emotions, but that we can have emotions without empathy. I think I have heard them also say that our rational value judgments themselves are not any real emotional state and that the only real emotions are the biochemical emotions defined in my lexicon. Since you cannot have empathy without emotions, then I don't think you can have any real value and worth in your life either without emotions. Since emotions are the biochemical induced states, then it would have to follow that, not only can you have no empathy without these biochemical emotions, but you also cannot have any real value in your life either. This would have to, therefore, mean that rational value judgments themselves are not any real value judgments and neither are they real emotions.

In short, since positive biochemical emotions are always emotional value judgments of good value and since negative biochemical emotions are always emotional value judgments of bad value, then having no biochemical emotions (i.e. the rational value judgments themselves) would have to be no real value judgments since there is good, bad, and neutral (neither good nor bad, aka no value). Sure, you could have a positive or negative biochemical emotion present, but any rational value judgments mixed in with those emotions cannot be any real value judgments. You have positive, negative, and neutral just like you have a positive charge, a negative charge, and a neutral (no) charge.

Positive emotions (a good value judgment) would be analogous with a positive charge, negative emotions (a bad value judgment) would be analogous with a negative charge, and rational value judgments themselves would be analogous with no charge. Therefore, that is why we can't have any real rational value judgments since they are analogous with no charge. Rational value judgments themselves cannot be any real emotions either because, again, positive emotions would be analogous with the positive charge, negative emotions would be analogous with the negative charge, and rational value judgments themselves would be analogous with no charge which is why they can't be any real emotions.

 

[Electra]

Thank you for sharing.

I think it may be important to clarify if the objective is long term (pursuing positive emotions and avoiding negative ones).

That doing something temporal that will cause pleasure but bring on a outbalanced cause of 'negative' emotions in due time doesn't fit in this mind frame.

And sometimes you must do something 'negative' to peruse long term 'positive' emotions.

or/ disregard if I am off base XD