Emotion As Dimension

07-09-2024

Im reading this book Metaphors We Live By. Im right now specifically on chapter 12.

and It's making me think about how the world of emotion can be seen as an entire world of it's own orientation, objects, and interactions that can be compared to the physical world.

Perhaps this emotional world is synonymous with the spiritual and/or intellectual world or is differnet altogether.

This brings me back to a theory as to why and how metaphors are useful. When we are approached by a new stimulus and we dont know how to map it, it would seem to make sense that we try our best to make it match something else that we have previously mapped that is similar. Thats how similes are created. "it's LIKE this, but different"

it is a union of alien and familiarity. So becuase of this it is so easy for us to use words that describe drowning to express being overwhelemd "im up to here", "im buried", "i'm in over my head".

These are phrases that are reminiscent of old times in our evolutionary history when we were not masters of our physical enviornment, when we were getting into trouble for lack of our ability to have a good footing on the world around us.

And I wonder if these metaphors combined with the experiences they are drawn from are clues as to where we are in this process of navigating this new space.

There was this phrase in this book:

"while our emotional experience is as basic as our spatial and perceptual experience, our emotional experiences are much less sharply dileniated in terms of what we do with our bodies"

This makes me wonder why? why are the emotions so "fuzzy" while the physical world is so clear?

There's even a metaphor in this phrase that lends me to the answer i want to give.

You see, there was a time when the physical world was fuzzy, and we were just bumping into things. A completly alien experience to how we live our lives today. Imagine if all of these other beings and places and objects we have to contend with and use and collide with and protect were all splotches and we could barely interact with them precisely. Yet still! our feedback is still as piercing and precise even though our vision was not.

Not until we developed vision suitable enough for surviving in this world were we able to even begin to master our spatial orientation in it.

And so that begs the question for me, what would it take for us to become more precise in our ability to sense emotions? how could we aid that development with technology in a transhumanist way? what would we "see?" and how would our new sight change us?