So I ran a query through Asta, followed by a long conversation with Mistral, regarding the immediacy/imminence requirement for (basic) emotions. It seems *most* but not all research does place emotions at a more physiological layer and feelings at a cognitively processed (or what I'll call "derived", "inferred", or "higher order") layer. And even though "scared" is abused a lot, I'm satisfied with my "logic chopping". Words have meaning. And part of the *problem* with social media, the loss of meaning, postmodernism, AI slop, propaganda, etc. is that we're too loosy goosy with our words. So accuse me of what you will! 8^D
But a friend of mine who is in the late stages of divorce (the wife is dragging her feet on signing the papers, keeps contacting the husband for intimate conversations, etc.), asked me for my opinion of a circumstance that (I think) falls along the lines of Jon's and Marcus' processes below. Post separation, but pre lawyer, she hosted a party at her place. The husband noticed that an ex of hers was there, *and* that she had old photographs with her and the ex ... "mugging for the camera". But there were no pictures of him and her (husband and wife) on the walls. To boot, the husband "saw how he looked at her", meaning the ex. Based on this circumstance, my friend (the husband) asked me what I thought. I logic chopped everything until he blew up at me ... like everyone does. But in the end, it came down to him conflating the token "sense" with "mentalize". He said he *sensed* that his wife and the ex still had feelings for each other. I tried like hell to get him to parse it differently, to explain that he *inferred* this, not that he sensed it, because the registration of *sensing* preempts one's ability to doubt the ontological status of the mentalized model. Not only is my friend's feeling very derived, with all the assumptions and circumstantial details that implies, but any feelings the wife and ex might have would *also* be very high order. So the trip from the physiological state of the husband, to his high order feelings, to the mentalized model, to the high order feelings of his wife and the ex ... that path is absolutely loaded with a computational explosion of parameters and inferences. He ended up angry at me and hung up. (Normally he talks forever and I have to hang up.) Who knows when I'll hear from him again. C'est la vie, eh? On 9/17/26 12:03 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
Many days I walk across a short bridge to a peninsula to a dog park. Because it is a pinch point, humans either queue or gather on one side or another. During COVID, most people were willing to keep it one way and not to cluster on either side. Kind of like it is bad form to stand by the airplane cockpit door to get into the bathroom. (It is a nuisance to the flight attendants and it gives bad vibes.) The gathering with dogs and acquaintances for the purposes of socializing really annoys me, much like the bad vibes from those that hover at the bathroom. It confuses who takes the lane because it isn’t clear whether they are queued or gathering. Do they want to go or not? I can’t see their facial expression from that distance, so it is hard to say. Yelling would be ridiculous and might not be clear in the wind anyway. Meanwhile, a dog’s vision is good for motion but not for detail at distance. I know there may be dogs on the other side of that bridge, but my dog doesn’t necessarily sense it. And her being deaf doesn’t help. To her, we get to the end of the bridge and suddenly there are 10 dogs of different temperaments staring her down. I find a quick vector off to the side. Nonetheless, feeling ambushed, she gives the “Wanna piece of me?” look to be on the safe side. Because of course she does. The endlessly socializing senior gals inform their dogs “not to react” and look disapprovingly. I fake a warm smile and continue. How about they use their empathy and keep the pathway clear in the first place?
On 9/17/26 11:27 AM, Jon Zingale wrote:
To what extent is this about anxiety, fear, and the perception of threat? I grew up near several roller-coaster parks. As a kid, I felt a lot of anxiety about going on rides with my siblings. That was fear of something anticipated, maybe imagined. Getting off the roller coaster was different. My body had actually been thrown around, safely but intensely, in exactly the way the ride was meant to thrill. Perhaps it was simulating something like being in the toothy maw of a T-Rex. Checking in with my body afterward felt more like a response to something that had actually happened. On a battlefield, I assume both defenders and aggressors feel scared. What is less clear to me is what presenting as scared is supposed to do socially or politically. My band plays 2nd Street Rufina on Friday. Is stage fright the same as being scared? When I see my little boy today after a week at his mom’s, he may need time to warm up. Is that reticence also fear? There is also the response to imagined relations between imagined communities. I often experience something like a generalized fear of being inappropriately classified. That is, perhaps oddly, the subject of quite a few uncomfortable dreams: I am back in middle school, somehow also the age I am now, and no one seems to understand that it makes no sense for me to be there. In my often younger, leftist circles, I feel real pressure to constantly signal virtue: to present as an empathetic cis white male when nothing in my soul could feel further from that description. Socially, I can feel a persistent kind of body dysmorphia, in which my presentation and my being are almost never aligned. I keep hoping that a long observed record of behavior will outweigh the immediate classification, but honestly, who is paying that much attention anyway?
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