Emotions are a tricky part of our consciousness. They cause to do good things, but they also cause us to, a lot of the time, do things we regret. This essay is my attempt at coming up with a model for dealing with emotions.
An emotion is an indicator in consciousness in response to a stimulus. You’re hiking up a mountain and pass through some thorny bushes. They give you tiny cuts. And, your brain lets you know that this happened through the emotion “pain”.
Different emotions occur for different reasons, at different locations, and “feel” different. “Feeling different” is difficult to explain without using circular reasoning because we don’t know what emotions really are or how they are caused in the brain. You really have to “just feel it”.
There are many emotions but they can be separated into two categories: positive emotions and negative emotions. Positive emotions like joy, love, and praise “feel” good while negative emotions like regret, pain, and fear “feel” bad. Because of these feelings, our nature propels us towards positive emotions and away from negative emotions.
According to our best theory, evolution, we naturally chase positive emotions because they are linked with things that are good for our survival [^1] . While negative emotions are linked with things that were bad for our survival. So we feel pain when we get cut because dying would be pretty bad for our survival. And we feel great when we are part of a community because a tribe grants greater security.
But human technology has outpaced human evolution. And now our emotions, which were tuned to promote our survival for the million of years before great technological growth, no longer work. There exist actions that feel good but are bad for us. Notoriously, eating sugar feels amazing, but eating too much of it gives you diabetes.
Conversely, there are actions that feel bad but are actually good for us. Consider intense exercise — it hurts, but it also is the best thing you can do for your health.
I call these emotions Trojan Horses and one must be aware of them. Our natural signals for what is good and what is bad is off in the modern world. Hence, we must replace their function with knowledge about what is good and what is bad to make the most progress towards our goals.
This said, emotions shouldn’t be discarded with. They are still useful because they provide important signals distilled from complex situations tuned precisely by evolution. You can “feel” when someone talking to you is lying. You “feel depressed” when you haven’t made progress recently. So use the emotions as important signals, just divorce your actions from them because of the presence of Trojan Horses.
What about emotions so overwhelming that it’s impossible to not act on them? By definition you can’t do anything while you are experiencing that emotion. But when you’re not, increase your strength through philosophy. Philosophy is a general term. Here it means training your emotional control in milder situations to prepare for more difficult ones. Don’t act on your anger. Don’t act on pain. Accept them. But don’t act on them [^2]. And I believe there is no limit to the amount of control over one’s actions that a human can gain. You can drink hemlock like Socrates and give your life like Seneca. “I must die. But must I die bawling?”
[1]: Technically, it is the survival of our genes and the genes’s ability to survive in turn.
[2]: A controlled way of doing this is called meditation.
Thanks to Harris for reading a draft of this essay.