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Right off the bat, I don't mean to be overly critical but greed is an attitude not an emotion. Also there's no such thing as a negative emotion. Everything we

Right off the bat, I don't mean to be overly critical but greed is an attitude not an emotion. Also there's no such thing as a negative emotion. Everything we feel is a necessary (or at least programmed) reaction to our experience. Also emotions aren't things with sentience that can manipulate you. Either you are at peace with them and rational in how you live them out, or you are not. I hope I don't come accross as pedantic or condescending, I truly do think we dramatize certain aspects of our psyches that would otherwise be healthier. (I don't know anything about LSD but I still feel that you're romanticizing it a bit.)

mantas 9y ago
This looks like a band-aid solution on problems we created ourselves. I was reading quite a bit on this subject and it looks like humans were much more at peace with death a century or two ago. Without using LSDs or whatever. We as a society have changed so much since then. We either need to undo some changes or work out new ways to get along with death. On the other hand, band-aids may be good as temporary solution. But it's definitely not "the right prescription"...
- gboudrias 9y ago
  I should do more research on the subject of social attitudes toward death throughout History. I think you may be right that it helps explain a lot of our less healthy (or more controversial*) habits. It's possible though that life itself feels much more oppressive; though it most likely isn't, our subjective experiences are often extremely alienating and their purpose very abstract (compared to say, plowing fields).
  - mantas 9y ago
    The major change is your average citizen no longer sees death. Not so long ago, death was everyday occurrence. Elders or sick ones dying at home. Some of siblings dying at young age. Wars sweeping by and leaving a trail of corpses. Now people not only die less frequently, but they usually die away in hospitals. The other change expectations of continuity. All religions have some sort of explanation for death. Whatever the explanation was, one of the reasons was to comfort people. Meanwhile today's popular explanation is void. Of course people are scared of unknown emptiness. Both the process and what comes after that are totally unknown today, while they were rather clear not so long ago.
alanwatts 9y ago
>Also there's no such thing as a negative emotion. Everything we feel is a necessary (or at least programmed) reaction to our experience. Have you ever met someone with emotional issues, i.e. anger management issues? There are indeed many people with habitual "programmed" emotional responses which are detrimental to their well being and are extremely difficult to manage. You might like to read the works of the evolutionary pyschologist and athropologist Dr. Paul Eckman. He posits that emotions are valuable life saving forces that help us act quickly in critical situations without having to think. However, our emotional habits have also evolved over many thousands of years, and so many of the emotional responses which may have saved our life as a paleolithic hunter gatherers may no longer be relevant and can have the opposite effect in a civilized society.
- gboudrias 9y ago
  Nowadays I'm back in university, studying psychology (I just started). As far as I know, the problem with anger management is not the anger itself, it's how you deal with it so it doesn't overwhelm you, and so you can have less of it. What I mean is that it's a symptom, not the issue itself. It's normal to be angry when someone is a jerk to you, it's healthy even, and so it's not* inherently "bad" (as we so often portray anger and sadness). The problem is when you let it get away from you. I hope I understand correctly that your last paragraph is agreeing with my comment. If not, then I should have extended the notion of "necessary" to "useful", in the sense that you are describing. However the problem with evo psych is that it's largely non-falsifiable. The part you are describing is somewhat an obligatory aspect of evolution, but evo psychologists and anthropologists tend to draw conclusions that aren't rigorous (in my opinion). This is coming from someone who has 30 credits in Anthropology from a few years back :) Generally there is no harm in theorizing, but I consider psychology and psychotherapy to be too important to allow ourselves to consider untested information. I do agree that other people may find Dr Eckman interesting... I don't but others might ;)
  - alanwatts 9y ago
    >Generally there is no harm in theorizing, but I consider psychology and psychotherapy to be too important to allow ourselves to consider untested information. Psychology and psychotherapy are almost wholly theoretical, subjective, soft sciences, rather than objectively testable hard sciences like physics and biology. >psychiatric diagnosis still relies exclusively on fallible subjective judgments rather than objective biological tests".[1][2] -Allen Frances https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Frances https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Frances

mantas 9y ago

This looks like a band-aid solution on problems we created ourselves. I was reading quite a bit on this subject and it looks like humans were much more at peace with death a century or two ago. Without using LSDs or whatever. We as a society have changed so much since then. We either need to undo some changes or work out new ways to get along with death. On the other hand, band-aids may be good as temporary solution. But it's definitely not "the right prescription"...

gboudrias 9y ago
I should do more research on the subject of social attitudes toward death throughout History. I think you may be right that it helps explain a lot of our less healthy (or more controversial*) habits. It's possible though that life itself feels much more oppressive; though it most likely isn't, our subjective experiences are often extremely alienating and their purpose very abstract (compared to say, plowing fields).
- mantas 9y ago
  The major change is your average citizen no longer sees death. Not so long ago, death was everyday occurrence. Elders or sick ones dying at home. Some of siblings dying at young age. Wars sweeping by and leaving a trail of corpses. Now people not only die less frequently, but they usually die away in hospitals. The other change expectations of continuity. All religions have some sort of explanation for death. Whatever the explanation was, one of the reasons was to comfort people. Meanwhile today's popular explanation is void. Of course people are scared of unknown emptiness. Both the process and what comes after that are totally unknown today, while they were rather clear not so long ago.

alanwatts 9y ago

>Also there's no such thing as a negative emotion. Everything we feel is a necessary (or at least programmed) reaction to our experience. Have you ever met someone with emotional issues, i.e. anger management issues? There are indeed many people with habitual "programmed" emotional responses which are detrimental to their well being and are extremely difficult to manage. You might like to read the works of the evolutionary pyschologist and athropologist Dr. Paul Eckman. He posits that emotions are valuable life saving forces that help us act quickly in critical situations without having to think. However, our emotional habits have also evolved over many thousands of years, and so many of the emotional responses which may have saved our life as a paleolithic hunter gatherers may no longer be relevant and can have the opposite effect in a civilized society.

gboudrias 9y ago
Nowadays I'm back in university, studying psychology (I just started). As far as I know, the problem with anger management is not the anger itself, it's how you deal with it so it doesn't overwhelm you, and so you can have less of it. What I mean is that it's a symptom, not the issue itself. It's normal to be angry when someone is a jerk to you, it's healthy even, and so it's not* inherently "bad" (as we so often portray anger and sadness). The problem is when you let it get away from you. I hope I understand correctly that your last paragraph is agreeing with my comment. If not, then I should have extended the notion of "necessary" to "useful", in the sense that you are describing. However the problem with evo psych is that it's largely non-falsifiable. The part you are describing is somewhat an obligatory aspect of evolution, but evo psychologists and anthropologists tend to draw conclusions that aren't rigorous (in my opinion). This is coming from someone who has 30 credits in Anthropology from a few years back :) Generally there is no harm in theorizing, but I consider psychology and psychotherapy to be too important to allow ourselves to consider untested information. I do agree that other people may find Dr Eckman interesting... I don't but others might ;)
- alanwatts 9y ago
  >Generally there is no harm in theorizing, but I consider psychology and psychotherapy to be too important to allow ourselves to consider untested information. Psychology and psychotherapy are almost wholly theoretical, subjective, soft sciences, rather than objectively testable hard sciences like physics and biology. >psychiatric diagnosis still relies exclusively on fallible subjective judgments rather than objective biological tests".[1][2] -Allen Frances https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Frances https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Frances