Consciousness and emotion (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, October 28, 2011, 14:38 (4775 days ago) @ BBella

BBella: I’m confused how we “feel” emotion without a body to feel it. Our mind can conceive of it and imagine it…but can it actually “feel” it without a body?

Dhw: Of course, as David says, all of this is tied to the mystery of consciousness, and just as we ask how material cells can be aware of themselves, I’m asking how material cells can experience immaterial feelings.

BBella: I’m completely lost at your question above. Can you rephrase it perhaps?

I suspect that we’ve been talking at cross purposes. You’ve distinguished here between mind and body. The brain is part of the body, but I’m wrestling with the materialist view of “mind”, which is that all our emotions, thoughts, ideas (see my second post on this thread), levels of consciousness are what David calls emergent properties of the brain. This may, of course, be right, but no-one has yet come up with any explanation of how little globules of matter can produce such experiences. They remain a total mystery. The other view is that the brain may be a receiver, not a producer, and there is an equally mysterious form of energy that directs it, and that feels, creates, imagines. This is why, earlier in the discussion, I said that eventually we would come back to psychic experiences like your own, or like NDEs and OBEs. During these, the body – including the brain – is clinically dead, but the person retains his/her identity, is conscious, thinks, feels emotions, and in some cases acquires information which he/she could not have acquired by any known method. Such phenomena suggest the possibility that the mind/self/identity may be independent of the brain/body.

The question you’ve asked me to rephrase (but which I’ve now tried to explain instead) is the exact opposite of your own. Yours implies the materialist “explanation” of consciousness, emotion etc., and mine the immaterial one. As usual, I find both explanations hard to swallow, and therefore I remain solidly on my picket fence.

You wrote that you might just be “missing the boat here”. Maybe I am, but I’m sure we’ll end up on the same vessel, heading for the same unknown destination!