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RadioForest14 t1_jax2jft wrote

Reply to comment by hamburglin in Our emotional experiences reveal facts about the world in the same way our sensory experiences do. Trusting in either requires a leap of faith to some degree. by IAI_Admin

I would hesitate to say that any chemical "controls" our emotions. If it was so simple depression would be a thing of the past.
Truth is we barely know anything about how the brain functions. The belief that we do is based on pure hybris. The replication crisis in medicine and psychology can attest to that.

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hamburglin t1_jax5sz0 wrote

I'm not sure how you came to the conclusion in your second sentence. It's simply illogical outside of major assumptions, in a vacuum.

Your second paragraph also does nothing to support it. In fact, it borders on countering your initial conclusion.

Maybe you're getting tripped up on the word "controls" though. Reality is a set of various systems that come together to produce something. What I'm saying is that hormones, which are known to be tightly controlled to emotions, have an equal or sometimes greater input than raw, real-time senses.

Now, if you want to call memories "senses", or learned behaviors "senses" (not sure why you would), then there might be some play there. But the way the words were stated that I initially responded to, I fully disagree that sensory input is the lone, key driver of how we interpret reality in the moment, and react the next.

Even our human-built computer systems are not that naive.

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RadioForest14 t1_jazq7zd wrote

I don't see anything "illogical" about it. Perhaps you can elaborate? If chemicals controlled our brain, like the medical field and psychiatry has believed (and appears to largely still believe), depression which, in this reductive view, is purely a chemical imbalance. This is why anti-depressants are often quickly given to anyone suffering from depression. But if this was actually true, the anti-depressants must be hyper-effective. The direct effect is however relatively miniscule.
Hesitating from saying that our brain works in any highly specific way (chemicals controlling our brain) and stating that we barely know how the brain functions is hardly contradictory. Also, the support in my small 3-sentence paragraph is the replication crisis: Somewhere around half of all studies published within psychology and medicine is proven false within 1 year after publishing. That is not a healthy and normal figure in science, it is abyssmal, and that's only the studies being tested. This attest to the fact that there are major fundamental misunderstandings and fundamental assumptions within each field which are completely incorrect. Fruit from a sick tree, you could say. That is the support in my short paragraph, it was just summed up by "the replication crisis".

It's definitely the word "control" I react on. Again, it strikes me as overly reductive. There is a significant difference between saying that hormones can control, i.e. dictate, our emotions, and saying that they play an important role in how our emotions emerge and function.

I was actually not talking at all about what you initially replied to regarding emotional experience.

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hamburglin t1_jb0jrix wrote

Then you need to take an official logic course or buy a book on it.

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