This seems like a promising starting point to explore what’s going on, from my perspective.
the thing that follows those first two words is not an emotion, but a claim about the world: “(I am) alone.”
As it happens, I’m currently typing this comment in a room that I’m in by myself. But there’s a specific bodily / emotional sensation that I’m not feeling at present, which I was feeling the last time I said “I feel alone” to someone, despite being in a room with multiple people then.
It’s also the case that I can feel my chair pressing into my body, and the top of the desktop pressing into my leg where I’m awkwardly resting it, and some tension in my arms because they had to stretch to my distant keyboard. (Don’t worry, I’ve since moved closer to it.)
One thing that’s true of my experience (which I expect to be true of the experience of, like, somewhere around 80% of people?) is that I will sometimes get sensations that are connected to ‘beliefs’ as part of my sensorium. That is, they’re more like the haptic sensations corresponding to sitting than they are like my internal monologue or other things that I traditionally think of as “beliefs”. Sometimes this is an embodied sensation, like “it would be inappropriate for me to say something here” might manifest as a tightness of the throat, but sometimes it isn’t.
[Staying with the level of sensation helps build this mapping and keep things ‘accurate’; if I feel a tightness in the throat and I don’t know what belief about the world it corresponds to yet, it’s probably better for me to share the sensation than it is to share my guess of what I’m reacting to about the world.]
Speculation time: sometimes I think embodied emotions are straightforwardly phyisiological; like I get angry and feel it in my arms because my SNS is actually making my arms behave differently. Other times I think what’s happening is something like the proprioceptive sense, but for ‘important concepts’, like relationships / what other people are thinking / how particular fields of math or science work.
Like, imagine we’re drifting on rafts on a body of water; I could see us moving away from each other and call that out to you, and you could presumably also see the same thing. Or there could be the two of us having a conversation, and I could have a sensation that seems basically the same, except it’s metaphorical; “I’m feeling us moving apart” in the weird part of my world-model that’s using a spatial analogy for stances we’re taking towards each other or beliefs we have about each other or whatever. Sharing that seems potentially more useful here, because we might be tracking movement through different ‘metaphorical oceans’.
Acknowledging it as a belief makes it possible to consider “Is this belief true? Why do I believe it is true?” Miscalling it a feeling protects it from testing against reality: “How can you question my FEELINGS?”
One ‘fun game’ you can play with friends is to have person A turn away from person B, who then lightly touches the back of person A, with a randomly chosen number of fingers, and then person A has to guess how many fingers they’re being touched with. (Generally, people do ‘okay’ at this, which is much less well than they expect to be able to do.) Or you can do the cutaneous rabbit effect.
Much less fun to do a demonstration of, and so I recommend just reading about it, are edge cases of pain sensation, like when a man felt intense pain due a nail passing through his boot, despite it missing his foot.
That is, if you view feelings as sense data like any other, it makes sense to apply the same sorts of consistency checks that you would to normal sense data. Like, if you live in a world where your eyes can be fooled, and your feeling of how many points are touching your back can be imprecise, presumably you should have similar sorts of suspicion towards your feeling that your housemate isn’t doing their fair share of the chores.
According to me, the way you fix things like optical illusions is not by closing your eyes, but instead by developing a more precise model of how exactly your vision works.
This seems like a promising starting point to explore what’s going on, from my perspective.
As it happens, I’m currently typing this comment in a room that I’m in by myself. But there’s a specific bodily / emotional sensation that I’m not feeling at present, which I was feeling the last time I said “I feel alone” to someone, despite being in a room with multiple people then.
It’s also the case that I can feel my chair pressing into my body, and the top of the desktop pressing into my leg where I’m awkwardly resting it, and some tension in my arms because they had to stretch to my distant keyboard. (Don’t worry, I’ve since moved closer to it.)
One thing that’s true of my experience (which I expect to be true of the experience of, like, somewhere around 80% of people?) is that I will sometimes get sensations that are connected to ‘beliefs’ as part of my sensorium. That is, they’re more like the haptic sensations corresponding to sitting than they are like my internal monologue or other things that I traditionally think of as “beliefs”. Sometimes this is an embodied sensation, like “it would be inappropriate for me to say something here” might manifest as a tightness of the throat, but sometimes it isn’t.
[Staying with the level of sensation helps build this mapping and keep things ‘accurate’; if I feel a tightness in the throat and I don’t know what belief about the world it corresponds to yet, it’s probably better for me to share the sensation than it is to share my guess of what I’m reacting to about the world.]
Speculation time: sometimes I think embodied emotions are straightforwardly phyisiological; like I get angry and feel it in my arms because my SNS is actually making my arms behave differently. Other times I think what’s happening is something like the proprioceptive sense, but for ‘important concepts’, like relationships / what other people are thinking / how particular fields of math or science work.
Like, imagine we’re drifting on rafts on a body of water; I could see us moving away from each other and call that out to you, and you could presumably also see the same thing. Or there could be the two of us having a conversation, and I could have a sensation that seems basically the same, except it’s metaphorical; “I’m feeling us moving apart” in the weird part of my world-model that’s using a spatial analogy for stances we’re taking towards each other or beliefs we have about each other or whatever. Sharing that seems potentially more useful here, because we might be tracking movement through different ‘metaphorical oceans’.
One ‘fun game’ you can play with friends is to have person A turn away from person B, who then lightly touches the back of person A, with a randomly chosen number of fingers, and then person A has to guess how many fingers they’re being touched with. (Generally, people do ‘okay’ at this, which is much less well than they expect to be able to do.) Or you can do the cutaneous rabbit effect.
Much less fun to do a demonstration of, and so I recommend just reading about it, are edge cases of pain sensation, like when a man felt intense pain due a nail passing through his boot, despite it missing his foot.
That is, if you view feelings as sense data like any other, it makes sense to apply the same sorts of consistency checks that you would to normal sense data. Like, if you live in a world where your eyes can be fooled, and your feeling of how many points are touching your back can be imprecise, presumably you should have similar sorts of suspicion towards your feeling that your housemate isn’t doing their fair share of the chores.
According to me, the way you fix things like optical illusions is not by closing your eyes, but instead by developing a more precise model of how exactly your vision works.