[TranscendedRealms (OP)]

To begin, I would like to say that I am a hedonist.  Hedonism is a philosophy which states that pleasure gives our lives good value and pain gives our lives bad value.  The goal is to maximize pleasure and minimize pain.  So, hedonism is all about pursuing positive emotions and avoiding negative ones since it is all about being happy and enjoying our lives that gives our lives good value.  But there is the idea of non hedonistic based values which are values independent of those advocated by hedonism.  I think hedonism is true while non hedonism is false.  These arguments I present in this packet are entirely my own personal and unique arguments based upon my own personal experience of having struggled 10 whole years with ongoing misery due to emotional trauma and obsessive thinking.  It was an ongoing battle and I have finally broken free of that cycle. 

Now, I am here to share to you what I have learned from this horrible experience.  I am firmly convinced, based upon my own personal, profound, and powerful experience, that it can only be the emotional value judgments that can give our lives real value.  That is, it can only be our emotions that can make things, moments, and situations of real good or bad value to us depending upon which emotion we feel.  Since positive emotions are always emotional value judgments of good value, then they are the only things that can make things in our lives perceived as good.  Since negative emotions are always emotional value judgments of bad value, then they are the only things that can make things in our lives perceived as bad.  It is, therefore, only through our emotional states that we can perceive good and bad.  Our emotions would have to be like glasses that we need to wear in order to see the value in our lives. 

If you felt a negative emotion (an emotional bad value judgment) and you used a rational good value judgment, then this just creates a big mess here since you have two value judgments going on at once. It's no different than if a sighted person was seeing colors, smelling a certain scent, and hearing a certain noise who, at the same time, had the thought of those colors, that scent, and that noise. To say that the thought itself is a rational form of a heard noise, a smell, and perceived colors would be nonsense and it would just create one big mess here.  That is why we would say that the thoughts alone can only be the idea of sounds, smell, visuals, values, emotions, water, food, pain, love, hate, misery, etc., but that they do not give our lives any real version of those things. 

The emotional value judgments are value judgments that go beyond words.  The rational value judgments are the words while the emotional ones are beyond words (the emotions themselves).  Having real value in our lives is something profound and powerful and, thus, it would have to be something that goes beyond words.  Sure, I have used words in saying all of this.  But those words alone are, again, just thoughts of our emotions being the source of judging our lives as being good and bad while the rational value judgments themselves would still be no real value judgments.  Thinking of value is not the same thing as judging (seeing) value.       

Since positive emotions are the only things that can put us into a state of mind where everything is joyful, beautiful, happy, good, and worth living for, then the only way to live and be an artist is through positive emotions.  Having negative emotions in your life or no emotions at all is simply no way to live or be an artist regardless of your contributions to the world and what types of artwork you create.  Your life would either be bad, horrible, sh1t (negative emotion) or just completely blank and nothing at all (no emotion).

Since I don't think rational value judgments themselves can be any real emotions and since emotions themselves are value judgments, then I don't think the rational value judgments can be any real value judgments either.  They are only being claimed to be real emotions and real value judgments when they really aren't.  You can do all the things in life that would imply that you were hungry or thirsty even if you weren't hungry and thirsty just as how all the factors that would imply good and bad value independent of positive and negative emotions can be evidenced in this world. But, again, that does not mean that you are hungry or thirsty or that you have real good and bad value judged/perceived in your life independent of your positive and negative emotions. After all, there are many people who believe in false ideas all the time such as Thor the God of Thunder. These people have lived their lives as though Thor was real. But Thor was actually not real.

Continuing on here.  Aren't things that sound absurd often true?  Just because my worldview sounds absurd does not mean that it is false since there are so many things that are absurd in this life that are true.  It is just the absurdity of life rule.  There are certain things in this world such as people dying from deadly viruses and, even though this is an absurd thing, it is real.  So, life isn't perfect and it seems to me that many people are expecting a certain value system to be the real value system which is why you see my value system being dismissed as nonsense and false.  But life doesn't always meet our expectations and we don't always get what we want in life.  My value system might certainly be one that doesn't work well for humanity, but, then again, there are many absurd things in this life that just don't work out for us, but said things are true.  Instead, humanity tends to delude themselves of such things because they simply do not like them and wish to have things their way.

I am going to say this last thing here before I finally conclude this description. I am going to point out a quote by a skeptic/neuroscientist who supports the idea of our emotions being value judgments:

Emotions are value judgments too. If they weren't, humanity would not be distinct from other mammals; we would be biological machines with no autonomy, acting purely on instinct. For example, if you are physically hurt, and the doctor treating you causes you pain during treatment, do you become angry and bite him? No, because you are able to override your instinctive anger and fear at someone causing you pain with your ability to reason that the treatment is necessary and the pain is temporary. But a dog can't reason, and will bite to stop the person causing the pain. Both the instinctive emotions AND the reasoned thoughts are value judgments.

   
Therefore, since our positive emotions are always emotional value judgments of good value and our negative emotions always being emotional value judgments of bad value, since emotions themselves are actual qualities (things that exist such as water, food, electricity, etc.), then positive emotions would have to be a quality of good and negative emotions would have to be a quality of bad.  This means that the only way to live the most beautiful, good, and worthwhile life would be if you were in the most profound, intense state of euphoria of your life and the only worst life you can live would be if you were in the most profoundly horrible negative emotional state of your life.  Unfortunately, moments of euphoria are very brief and fleeting which means that your life can only be the greatest for you in brief, fleeting moments.

To conclude this description, I guess you could consider me someone like a sociopath who does not understand empathy since he never had any. Of course, I am not a sociopath and this is just an analogy for saying that I simply do not understand how one can live a life that is truly good, beautiful, and worth living for independent of positive emotions. As a matter of fact, I never recall a single given moment in my life where I perceived real value independent of my emotions. If there was a given moment, then I do not recall. Neither have my rational based values been any real emotional state in my life either. You could fully educate a sociopath on empathy, but the sociopath would still not understand it since he never had it.

Likewise, you could also fully educate me on values, morals, and ethics and how our rational value judgments can be emotional states, but I would never understand that either since this is something that has never been known to me from personal experience. The only way my worldview could change to a new sense of values would, therefore, be if I had a whole new personal experience that could replace all the good values, joy, beauty, misery, badness, etc. that my positive and negative emotions have offered me. Remember, this has to be a real version of those things in my life and not just a matter of empty words. I would pay very close attention to my inner universe. If there is a real form of those things there, then my life would have a real version of those things. If not, then they would not be anything real, they would just be empty words, and there would also still be no real emotion there either. 

As a matter of fact, I think skeptics and neuroscientists have even said that we can't have empathy without emotions, but that we can have emotions without empathy.  I think I have heard them also say that our rational value judgments themselves are not any real emotional state and that the only real emotions are the biochemical emotions defined in my lexicon.  Since you cannot have empathy without emotions, then I don't think you can have any real value and worth in your life either without emotions.  Since emotions are the biochemical induced states, then it would have to follow that, not only can you have no empathy without these biochemical emotions, but you also cannot have any real value in your life either.  This would have to, therefore, mean that rational value judgments themselves are not any real value judgments and neither are they real emotions.

In short, since positive biochemical emotions are always emotional value judgments of good value and since negative biochemical emotions are always emotional value judgments of bad value, then having no biochemical emotions (i.e. the rational value judgments themselves) would have to be no real value judgments since there is good, bad, and neutral (neither good nor bad, aka no value). Sure, you could have a positive or negative biochemical emotion present, but any rational value judgments mixed in with those emotions cannot be any real value judgments. You have positive, negative, and neutral just like you have a positive charge, a negative charge, and a neutral (no) charge.

Positive emotions (a good value judgment) would be analogous with a positive charge, negative emotions (a bad value judgment) would be analogous with a negative charge, and rational value judgments themselves would be analogous with no charge. Therefore, that is why we can't have any real rational value judgments since they are analogous with no charge. Rational value judgments themselves cannot be any real emotions either because, again, positive emotions would be analogous with the positive charge, negative emotions would be analogous with the negative charge, and rational value judgments themselves would be analogous with no charge which is why they can't be any real emotions.

[Bored chemist]

Is good an actual quality like water that we need to "drink?"
No.

[TranscendedRealms (OP)]

Is good an actual quality like water that we need to "drink?"
No.

I think it is.  Read everything I have said first before jumping to the conclusion that I am speaking nonsense.

[Bored chemist]

Is good an actual quality like water that we need to "drink?"
No.

I think it is.  Read everything I have said first before jumping to the conclusion that I am speaking nonsense.

Don't jump to the conclusion that I didn't read it.

[TranscendedRealms (OP)]

For anyone interested, I have modified my opening post to make this the perfect presentation of my worldview.  I improvise further and further upon my explanation until I get it just right.

[hamdani yusuf]

To begin, I would like to say that I am a hedonist.  Hedonism is a philosophy which states that pleasure gives our lives good value and pain gives our lives bad value.  The goal is to maximize pleasure and minimize pain.  So, hedonism is all about pursuing positive emotions and avoiding negative ones since it is all about being happy and enjoying our lives that gives our lives good value.

Whose pleasure and pain are you talking about here? Are they yours as individual human being, or pleasure and pain of most humanity?
What do you think about altruism?
An extreme example of hedonist was perhaps Ted Bundy. Do you think he was morally good?

[Tanny]

First, let me start off by making clear that I suffer from the same obsessive thinking disease which you describe as the source of your suffering.  The length of your opening post, and the number of mine across the forum, would suggest neither of us have yet escaped this condition.

But while I am obsessively thinking about obsessive thinking, I would like to obsessively suggest the following...

Stop thinking.

The source of the problems we both experience is not the content of thought, this or that idea, but the nature of thought.  It is the inherently divisive nature of thought itself which generates the suffering.  Thus it's not really possible to think one's way out of the suffering box because with each thought we are digging the hole deeper.  Good thoughts, bad thoughts, they are all thoughts.

Suffering is not a philosophical problem, it's a mechanical problem.  It's not what we think that matters so much as it is how much we think. 

This is actually very good news, because it means that suffering can be addressed by purely mechanical means.  We don't need to figure out all those many colliding thoughts racing around our brains.  Simple exercises applied patiently over time can reduce the volume of thought, and thus reduce the unwelcome by-products that come along as a price tag.

This is not about becoming stupid.  It's about becoming smart enough to know where the on/off button of the thought machine lies.  It's about being smart enough to apply thought skillfully where it is required, and let it go when it is not. 

You turn on your lawnmower when you need to cut the grass.  When you're done mowing you turn the lawnmower off, you don't leave it running noisily in the garage until the next time you need it.   Like that.

This is only the tip of the iceberg of the so very many obsessive thoughts which clog my brain regarding the limitations of thought.  As addicting as typing all these many thoughts are for me, you'd be wise to avoid them all, and instead just take a basic meditation class.

Don't try to figure out the suffering machine.

Just turn it off.