🚀 go-pugleaf

"pavan03" <Monsieur_Lynx@brown.edu> wrote in message
news:68f44414.0311131204.d863f8b@posting.google.com...
| [...]

|    Take any object I posess. If something
| were to happen to it, say someone were
| to damage it, it would produce a feeling
| of anger in me, correct?

Not necessarily.

| Look at this analogy VERY carefully:
| changes to one object would cause an
| emotion in a *completely* different
| location!!  That object has nothing to do
| with what I  experience!  Why can't this be
| explained using some scientific process?

It was, decades ago.

| If an identical object that belonged to
| someone else were to be damaged, the
| same feelings of anger would not be
| produced in me.

I discussed how and why  the stuff of your
analogy happens, within a nervous system,
in my reply to your prior post.

As you experience the object you posess,
your brain is optimizing it's energydynamics
with respect to the sensory and motor neural
[nerve cell] activation that occurs within your
brain.

This energydynamics optimization =always=
takes a particular 'form'. Within it, neural
activation that would cause more neural
activation is minimized, and neural activation
that causes less neural activation is maximized.

Call the former "excitation", and denote it as
"E", and call the latter "inhibition", and denote
it as "I", and the optimization of your brain's
energydynamics can be described mathem-
atically as the minimization of the ratio of
excitation to inhibition, or E/I-minimization.

So as you experience the object you posess,
E/I-minimization happens.

Many, many things have been going on within
your brain as you experienced your posession,
but everything that happens within your brain,
happens in this E/I-minimization way.

Put the object away, and go about your daily
affairs.

A week later, take the object out and experience
it some more.

You 'recognize' it as being 'familiar', and that
recognition happens be-cause, when you ex-
perience your posession again, the degree
of energydynamics optimization that your brain
achieved while you formerly experienced your
posession - the E/I-minimization - is relatively-
quickly converged upon once again.

One of the many, many things that was going
on within your brain as you experienced your
posession was that the activation-relationship
of the part of your brain that functions to actualize
the subjective experience of "emotion" was
becoming 'optimally'-aligned, via E/I-minimiza-
tion, with respect to your sensory and motor ex-
perience with respect to your possession.

When someone else damages your posession,
the modifications to its structure, and/or its func-
tionality, result in your sensory and motor ex-
periencing of it being immediately rendered
different from the way it was prior to your pos-
ession's being damaged.

This rapid change in your sensory and motor
experiencing of your posession results in a
rapid de-optimization of the neural energy-
dynamics within your brain. Excitation rapidly
increases and inhibition rapidly decreases [the
ratio of excitation to inhibition, E/I, rapidly in-
creases]. Your formerly-aligned "emotion" be-
comes rapidly unaligned, and this is experi-
enced as stereotypical "anger".

In the second half of your analogy, because
the object in question is not your posession,
you had less sensory and motor experience
with it, so less E/I-minimization happened
within your brain with respect to its structure
and functionality, so, when it is damaged,
the relative change you experience in E/I
within your brain is relatively-small, and
there is only a relatively-small de-alignment
of "emotion", so you experience relatively-small
"emotionality".

What's here is extremely over-simplified, but
it is, essentially, what happens within your brain
as the differential responses to the objects'
being damaged occur.

It's 100% the rigorously-coupled internal and
external energydynamics.

What's here also describes what's going on
in Iraq these days, and what happened here
in the U. S. A. after the terrorist attacks of
2001-09-011.

The Same-Stuff has underpinned all War -
all of "man's inhumanity to man", since the
dawn of Human History.

So these are not 'whimsical' matters, and it is
important that they be gotten-straight.

K. P. Collins

| [...]