Some Thoughts On “Feelings”

People talk about “feelings” all the time, and yet there are so many words and ideas associated with feelings that it can be hard to know just what someone is referring to when they mention feelings.  People talk about “trusting their instincts”, “going with their gut”, being on an “emotional roller coaster”, or having a “sense” about what someone will do.  As I talk about feelings a lot on this blog, I thought I’d share some of my thoughts on what I mean by “feelings”.

By a “feeling” I mean any sense of something which is immediately present to you, without the need for any thoughts about why you’re having that sense.  Thoughts may be present along with feelings, or after feelings, but you can have a feeling without having any thoughts.  The classic emotions are feelings in this sense — happiness, sadness, anxiety, lust, and so forth.  I also include more direct bodily sensations such as the pleasure of a delicious meal or the pain of pricking a finger.

Many feelings are directly associated with being positive or negative, and either “feel good” or “feel bad”. But we also get feelings that aren’t necessarily good or bad, but which give us possible information about things.  For example, you might get a sense that someone “can’t be trusted”, or that “the way back to the highway is that way”.  This kind of feeling is sometimes referred to as “intuition” or “instinct”.

In my view, everything that matters, does so by virtue of its effects on our feelings.  Our feelings are the currency on which all value is based.  For example, a new house might be valuable because it gives us feelings of safety and accomplishment, and because it allows us to invite people over for dinner, which gives us feelings of enjoyment.  Perhaps it is an especially nice house, and we get the good feeling of our house being admired by others.  Finding a cure for cancer would be good ultimately because it might reduce the feelings of pain in the world.  And so forth.

From a scientific standpoint, feelings are in a sense “calculated” by the brain.  This means that feelings only exist because our brains are computing them.  For the philosophically minded, this means that pleasure and pain, good and bad, don’t exist “out there” in the world, but are rather painstakingly constructed by the brain.  We happen to prefer making love to being hit in the face, not because one is inherently “better” than the other, but because that’s the way our brains have been wired.  As Shakespeare said (in Hamlet), “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so” — and I would change this to “there is nothing either good or bad, but feeling makes it so”.

Feelings are the result of the process of evolution (since we are result of it), and they give us indicators about the environment and about how to behave, without us having to consciously think about things.  In evolutionary time, “thinking” is likely to be a relative latecomer to the party, and feelings have been guiding animal behavior for long before humans developed thinking as we know it.

Contrary to what is sometimes proposed in popular culture (such as in books like The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho), I don’t believe that feelings (or intuition, or your “gut”) have any direct magical access to the state of the world.  Let’s say you have two job offers, and one looks better “on paper” but you get a strong feeling that you should take the other offer.  I don’t unfortunately believe that you are, say, communicating with a force that knows everything and that is guiding you in the right direction (as romantic as that sounds).

If feelings don’t work by magic, how do they work?  It seems likely that feelings use cues which have been pretty reliable in the evolutionary past.  For example, there are likely to be subtle ways in which the body language of a person who’s lying differs from that of someone who’s telling the truth.  “You” may not even consciously notice these differences, and yet your brain is processing them (without “your” knowledge), and then presents you with the results, in the form of a feeling such as “this person can’t be trusted”.

Because these cues aren’t always reliable, feelings themselves are only “pretty good” at giving us accurate information, and can sometimes be wrong (see earlier posts on this here and here).  This is especially true today in our modern world, where cues may have different meanings than they did in the environments we evolved in.

Feelings play a very important role (the only ultimate source of value, in my opinion), and they’ll show up a lot on this blog.  As always, I love hearing your thoughts.