Friday, September 27, 2024

The Body And Emotions

The metaphysical and epistemological relationships between the body and the mind are commonly denied, overlooked, or misunderstood by non-rationalists.  Language can be used in imprecise or "normal" ways even if the literal wording of a sentence could not be true, and wording alone does not always mean that someone believes exactly what they are saying, but some statements about the body would be misleading at best on their own.  Someone might say that their body is experiencing sadness or fear or some other emotion.  While it can enable a person to experience physical sensations (more on this later), it has no capacity for emotion.

The body does not experience things like fear or joy or desire, despite how some people intentionally or casually speak about it.  More than this, it cannot.  It reacts to fear, which can only be experienced by a mind.  That a given person's skin begins to sweat due to anxiety or that their muscles lock up due to psychological stress, not that one person undergoing this requires that anyone else does or will, is a physiological phenomenon corresponding to whatever the mind is perceiving.  If a person has a certain mental state, in their case, their might be an accompanying bodily activity, but only a consciousness can experience anything at all.


Even physical pain, which is not an emotion because it pertains to the body rather than strictly to the mind, can only be experienced through a conscious mind, though physical pain also requires a body.  A mind without a body or a mind in a body with non-functional sensory (the senses are themselves phenomenological, but they correlate to the presence and condition of specific body parts) could still have emotions.  A body without a mind could not because it is not a body that perceives even if it has a mind.  Indeed, one only feels emotions because they are within one's consciousness; the body can behave in certain ways alongside or as a result of emotions, yes, but it is not what actually feels anger, sorrow, or a sense of urgency.

As one of multiple possible examples, sexual attraction is not the state of being physically aroused.  It is a mental state.  It is phenomenological, while genital arousal is physiological, and someone can realize this without being prompted to think of the difference by experiencing the latter without the former (or the other way around).  The concepts are distinct already.  Moreover, a person could experience sexual attraction or mental arousal without any bodily reaction or vice versa.  The former is an emotion and the latter is a bodily reaction that might or might not be triggered by the former.  It is entirely logically possible for one to be present without the other because neither contradicts logical axioms.

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