About Feelings - Part 1 of ??

General musings about feelings.

Introduction

Why write about feelings?

I want to write about feelings. It is just so important.

As humans, we don’t have immediate access to the world, we instead relate to the world through our feelings. Similarly, we don’t have access to most of our knowledge and skills, we only feel intuitions about how things should be and what we should do. We don’t even have access to our internal state of mind! For instance, although we can make guesses, we just don’t know at any point of the day how much energy we will have before getting tired.

Indeed, everything that we perceive, that we think, is mediated through feelings. This makes understanding - and thus studying -  them quite important.

Furthermore, feelings do not only carry bits of information. They also gate many mental abilities. Shocking things are remembered naturally, while boring stuff requires rote learning and effort. Fun things naturally capture your attention, while repetitive intense intellectual tasks stress you out and require focus. Shame will make it hard to defend yourself publicly, while confidence will embolden you.

If on top of understanding your feelings, you could control them, you would have access to much better mental abilities. Imagine: freeing yourself of peer pressure, learning anything much more easily, focusing on anything without strain!

I believe understanding and controlling oneself is a natural bottleneck to almost all things of interest.

For instance, let’s consider learning. When learning new things, most obstacles are not rational. Like, when learning a language, the main bottleneck is not intelligence, or rationality. It is planning, focus and motivation.
Even with mathematics, I have seen many people perform all kinds of formal and intellectual feats within video games, and then struggle when they have to do much easier things, but in the context of maths. Just because maths sometimes feels bad, meaningless, and even adversarial.

Or, consider politics. Politics should be about discussing and enacting policy, and policy should be about plans for the greater good. Unfortunately, discussing complex high-stake issues requires a lot of self-control. A lot has been written about how Politics is the Mind Killer. It’s all too easy to avoid actually talking about the topic, and go for more emotionally salient topics. Politics typically devolves into discussions of people, individuals and groups, as opposed to housing, finances, and proper economics.

And finally, consider changing your mind. Changing your mind is not a purely intellectual practice: your beliefs are linked to everything. Your plans, the meaning of your actions, your morals, how you relate to others, your coping mechanisms, etc.
For small very factual beliefs, like “My friend went to the climbing gym yesterday”, it is very easy to change your mind.
But other topics are much harder to change your mind about: it is extremely painful to accept that a closed one died and that you will never see them again, that your romantic partner betrayed you or is abusive, or that your ideology/religion has core beliefs that are factually and morally wrong.

Great projects (both collective, and long-term personal projects) are too often limited by understanding and controlling yourself. I have met all too many people who restrict their own ambitions because of self-esteem issues, who do not dare try stupid shit for fear of not coping well with failure, or who are not properly building habits over time for lack of trust in the process.

Why would I write about feelings?

Sometimes, I fantasize about The Book. I would just direct people to The Book. The Book would systematically explain how feelings work. It would feature a rich typology of feelings, for each feeling a history of the discovery of said feeling and of its facets, exercises that make it easy to recognize that feeling within you and exercises to flex your mind-muscles that control these feelings.

Unfortunately, The Book does not exist. Feelingology is not a real science, yet. Feelings are, for now, too hard to study. They can not be observed under a microscope or held in your hands, so you can’t show them to others once you have identified one. Furthermore, if you want to study by yourself, many core feelings are so potent - or on the contrary, so fleeting -  that you don’t have the luxury to pause and reason straight for even 5 minutes while you are going through them. In other words, if you want to study the feeling of a panic attack, it is a quite hard: going through a panic attack makes it extremely hard to study anything.

As a result, I have never found a good scientific approach to studying feelings. I have found many other approaches in the wild, but they usually suffer from one of two problems. On the one hand, they are often too specific, like focusing on some emotion, on mnemonics, on drug reports, or on recovering from some kind of trauma. On the other hand, when they are general, they add too many distractions, like spiritual and religious stuff.

That’s why I am writing this.

First, I would want to read more writings like mine, trying to tackle feelings in all of their glory, beyond mere emotions, in an objective manner. And I think producing such pieces of writing is a good way to spawn more of them.

Second, I work with others a lot. And so far, I have been sharing my skills mostly orally, which does not scale much. With my current abilities, I don’t think my writings will be enough by themselves for sharing the skills. Instead, hopefully, they should accelerate what I usually convey orally: I do find myself stating the same things quite often.

And finally, the last reason is the most self-centred one: when I was younger, I longed for such a thing. And I just like to do things that would have pleased my younger selves.

What even are feelings lol?

Here, when I write about feelings, I talk about all that is or can be felt.

That’s it.

Emotions? Feelings. Sensing your balance? Feeling.

Apples? Not feelings. The feeling of biting a crisp apple? Feeling, it’s in the name.

The suspicion that someone is trying to screw you over? Feeling.

The feeling of remembering a fact that you had not thought about for a long time? Feeling.

Some technical intuition that something is wrong in a technical diagram? Feeling.

Literally, if you can feel it, it’s a feeling. This covers many more experiences than just emotions or perceptions.

Or as Wikipedia puts it: “Feelings are subjective self-contained phenomenal experiences.”. But I am not sure if that makes it any clearer lol.

General Musings

Now, it should be clearer what I want to write about, and why. Regardless, the topic is quite hairy.

You are not expected to internalize what’s written below after just one read. I am not that good of a writer yet. Let alone internalizing it, you are not even supposed to immediately make sense of all that is written.

It is more like, just some context that helps understanding how I think about it, and how to make sense of some incoming posts.

Our feelings are not reality. Reflection makes this salient.

Sometimes, we say things like, “electronic music is good”, or “Italian food is good”. When we do, the literal interpretation of those sentences is wrong.

Indeed, only very rarely can we correctly make such a general statement as “Italian food is good”. What we should mean instead is “I like Italian food”.

It is just a part of growing up, to realize that our tastes are not objective facts about reality. It is not that Italian food is intrinsically “good”, it is that I feel good about Italian food.

As we mature emotionally, we come to understand these ideas more deeply:

1. Our likes are subjective.

2. Our likes can still be connected to physical reality, they are not completely random. We can like some food because it is sweet, made of fresh ingredients or because it contains dried tomato. All of these things are physical.

3. Our likes can also be linked to social phenomena. Like being raised in a family that eats tripe, or being part of a group of friends that drink beer.

But let’s pause. Why must we learn those truths in the first place? These truths can seem obvious when you think about them. Why do we have to reflect on them, and work to internalize them over time? Why don’t they start out feeling obvious?

The underlying reason is that: Until you reflect on a feeling (in the above case, the feeling of liking something), it does not feel like a feeling. It feels like a fact about reality. Until you think about it, it just feels like your favourite food is in itself good. So much so that it feels wrong when someone says it is not good.

In the same way, until you reflect on optical illusions, lights, colors, saccades, and the limits of our vision, what you see just feels like what is there, rather than a perception separate from reality.

Until you reflect on anger, when you are angry, it just feels like people are trying to piss you off, not like you are taking everything personally.

Until you reflect on your beliefs, they just feel like facts about the world, not facts about how you relate to the world.

This is a crucial point.

Reflecting is the key to gaining perspective, by pausing, and taking a step back.

Without taking that step back, you are in your feeling, like a fish in water, you don’t see it. You are so tunnel visioned that you can’t even see that you are in it.

An extreme example of this lack of reflection is when someone shouts “I am not angry!”. They are so angry that they can’t see it. Or, in a sadder style, when someone has been depressed for so long that they do not even realize that something is wrong: being constantly tired and unmotivated is just the normal state of affairs.

This can lead to vicious cycles, wherein people never gain perspective, and stay stuck in a feeling. For instance, someone can be so traumatized that merely thinking about the trauma hurts. This makes them avoid thinking about the trauma, which prevents reflection. As a result, they remain trapped within their trauma, as they can never step back from it through reflection.

On the contrary, the more you reflect about a feeling, the more you see that it is not reality, and more a facet of yourself. And the more often you go through this process, the more natural it becomes.

Feelings form most of our beliefs

Until you internalize the above, it might seem like we are very grounded in reality, that what we see is what it is. After all, when you don’t reflect on your feelings, it feels like you have a very strong immediate grasp of reality!

When we see a screen in front of us, we do not think the words “There is a screen in front of me”. We just see a screen. The same is true for nearly all of our perceptions.

Until you reflect about the tells of some deepfake or photo editing, they often just seem real.

Similarly, when we feel hopeful, dismissive or hesitant, we do not think “Oh la la, I am dismissive”. We just feel that a thing will turn out positive, negative or uncertain.

When we feel trusting, skeptical or downright paranoid, we again do not think “I am trusting/paranoid”. We just feel that the people around us are more or less trustworthy.

Until you reflect about it, or break suspension of disbelief, it just feels like the characters in the novel that you read, or the TV Show that you watch, are real, do things and have emotions. We can even attribute motives to them, that are not explicitly shown anywhere!

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Our feelings and instincts precede word-based reasoning. We usually get an intuition that something is true long before we can articulate it logically through words.

This is the reality of how we, as humans, reason. We largely reason through feelings. By default, we take them as facts. And as I mentioned earlier, it is through reflection that we overcome this initial impression, and realize that they are mere feelings.

This is why most of our beliefs are embedded in our feelings. The world is wide and far-reaching. We simply do not have the time to make all of our beliefs explicit, by consciously grounding them in words, and reflecting on them.

Through work and practice, we can align some of our feelings to some of our conscious beliefs. This process takes skill, time, dedication and ongoing effort. It is thus neither practical nor necessary to do this for every belief. But it can be well worth it for the most important ones, like deep moral convictions.

If you don’t explicitly work by reflecting around your deep moral convictions, reasoning through the ways they contradict each other, about what they ought to mean in practice, and how to change your actions so that they are more aligned with them, your morals will be at the mercy of fickle feelings.

There are many feelings, and most of them are complex.

While reading or being told about specific feelings helps with identifying them, most feelings have not been amply documented and indexed in a compact encyclopedia of all feelings.

But fortunately, one can develop the skill to identify feelings by oneself, without relying on others having done the job.

Given that there are so many feelings relevant to our lives, developing this skill is quite useful.

So far, I have written in generalities, things that apply to almost all feelings. Just to give an idea, and also because it’s fun, I’ll now list many specific categories of feelings.

For each of these categories, we could investigate all the different feelings it contains. And for each feeling, we could then explore all of its subtleties, manifestations, triggers, and so on and so forth.

But the goal here is just to give an impression of how far-reaching and deep feelings go.

Obvious Feelings

Here are some categories of feelings that anyone can relate to, without needing much reflection.

The 5 basic senses: sight, hearing, smell, touch and taste.

But each of these could be broken down. For instance, sight can be split between reading, object recognition, light, color, and motion sensing.

Likewise, hearing could be split between loudness, timbre (what does a sound sound like), pitch (what note is being played), and even phoneme recognition (what consonant/vowel is a person speaking).
And so on and so forth.

Some less common external senses: temperature, pain, balance, pressure, pinching, proprioception and spatial awareness. These are still senses, but are rarely treated as such.

Some less common internal senses:  These are senses that deal with things that happen within our body, rather than perceptions of the outside world. Like, feeling time, rhythm, physical tension, physical numbness, tingling, tickling, itching, muscle contracting and stretching, energy and tiredness.

The feeding senses: hunger, satiety, and thirst. These feelings are quite universal.

Here too, we can go deeper. For instance, hunger can be refined into starving, regular hunger, appetite and cravings. Starving can be recognized by its painful pangs. Regular hunger leads to comical belly growls.  Appetite is the hype about being fed. And cravings are compulsions about some overly specific food.

Emotions: This is the one that immediately comes to mind when talking about feelings. There are quite a few lists of emotions, if you want to look them up.

Social Feelings: These feelings are about how we relate to a social situation, or a person. Trust vs paranoia, sadism vs compassion, charm vs creepiness, adversariality vs cooperation, dominance & submission, loyalty vs indifference.

Moral Feelings: These feelings are involved in moral judgments. And if you do not reflect about them, they are your moral judgments. The simple pairs are Good vs Bad, and Right vs Wrong. But moral feelings are rich, and will spawn fairness, justice, integrity, honor, responsibility, honesty, respect, loyalty, purity or dignity.

Language Feelings: These are a bit more interesting. If you have been reading this, it means you can read. It also means that you have a whole range of feelings around language: reading is not a purely mechanical activity.

For instance, you have a feeling of what makes for a grammatically correct sentence. If I write “I will eaten where the apple”, you correctly feel that it is wrong.

You also have a feeling of how a word ought to be pronounced or spelled. Like, “prononced” feels wrong.

These two are quite obvious, but there are even more refined ones, like the intuitive understanding of what words fit what language registers, what makes a sentence sound good or not, which words are typical of which regions, which accents are typical of which countries, etc..

Aesthetics: A great part of being human is that we can develop aesthetic feelings about roughly anything that we spend a non-trivial amount of time on. Just observe anything for long enough, and you’ll start developing aesthetic opinions on it. There is even a webcomic about this.

Some things will feel correct, others wrong. Some will feel harmonious, others discordant. Some will feel normal, others surprising. Some will feel insightful, and others boring.

From Latte Art and graffiti, to video games play styles and bento box arrangement. We can develop aesthetics and express ourselves through any medium.

Technical Intuitions: It might not seem obvious, but technical intuitions are closely related to aesthetics. If you seriously study, practice or work in any field, you’ll start to develop various feelings and intuitions about how things operate there.

Even without explicit and formal reasoning, just by virtue of working in a technical field, you’ll develop these feelings. From mechanics and doctors, to mathematicians and managers, they all build deep intuitions in their field of expertise.

Engagement: This is a class of feeling that relates to how you feel about doing things.

Motivation is the feeling you get when the idea of doing something feels hype. Laziness is the opposite, the feeling you get when something feels like it is not worth the effort.

Avoidance is when the idea of doing something feels bad. Compulsion is its counterpart, but it is more refined: it is not when the idea of doing something feels good (that’d be motivation), it is when the idea of not doing something feels bad. When you feel compelled to do something, you do it not because it feels good to do it, but because it feels bad not to.

Dissonance is what you feel when you do something but don’t want to. Akrasia is its counterpart, which is what you feel when you want to do something but don’t do it.

Useful Feelings

At this point, you might wonder: why identify feelings? Why reflect on them in the first place? Everything so far is obvious!

Let’s start by repeating what we said earlier. Without reflecting on feelings, one is bound to mistake them for reality. This is already a lot, and yet it goes much deeper. Reflecting on a feeling is a necessary step on the path to mastering it.

By mastering a feeling, I mean:

• Predicting when it happens, rather than getting triggered whenever.

• Understanding of the thoughts that leads to this feeling. An understanding great enough that you can decide to feel it by yourself whenever you want.

• Having a sensitivity refined enough that you can identify it passively, including when you are tired or when there’s a lot of noise.

If you wonder why you would ever want to master or control a feeling, read about the ones below. Beyond improving your quality of life, controlling them will make you more productive and powerful. Getting there requires a non-trivial amount of work, and a lot of reflection.

Significance

Significance is a big category of feelings that is useful to master. It’s the category that revolves around engagement.

Meaning, or purpose, is the feeling that there is a good and deep reason behind one’s actions. Meaning feels like what you do is part of a Strong Will, that will lead to Important Results, as opposed to a mere fart of the universe that will dissipate in the next few minutes.

Fiction likes to evoke meaning by increasing immediate stakes, by putting people’s lives at play, or even the fate of the world! Not only is this cheap, it is deceitful: in reality, decisions that impact the lives of people are rarely that immediate and clear cut, and they won’t naturally feel as meaningful.

However, putting in the work to master meaning lets you infuse it anywhere! Including in those boring-but-objectively-important decisions. This is a great skill to develop if you want to feel aligned with what you are doing.

Importance is the feeling that a thing ought to be big in your mind, that it ought to capture your attention. As a result of feeling this, people will tend to fixate on and overthink the thing that feels important, even when thinking about it is useless. People will try to make salient what feels important.

If you ignore a thing that feels important, you usually feel bad. As such, making people feel that a topic is important is the gateway into engaging them with the topic.

This is one of the vital feelings to master. If you don’t, your life won’t be yours, or it will be hell.

There are many people out there getting better at hijacking other’s importance mechanisms. They strive to influence what feels important to you. That way, they can get you hyped up about various ideologies, tribes or products. The more they get you to feel that something is important (which can range from “owning a Rolex” to “my ethnicity” or “ppl who share my opinion about a specific political issue”), the more they can extract money, time, attention and overall resources from you.

And when it happens, it does not feel like you’ve been controlled, it just feels like you have acted according to what feels important to you.

It is a Red Queen’s Race. If you don’t put in enough effort, these motivated people will get better than even you yourself at controlling what feels important to you. Let alone fully steering your life, you need to put in some amount of effort just so that some motivated third-party does not hijack what feels important to you.

Insight, or epiphany, is the feeling that one typically encounters when they understand something deep. This does not mean that they have actually understood a deep thing. That’s just when it typically happens.

I heard the feeling can be replicated with drugs, and that some drug users have trouble coping with it.

Popsci, at its best, aims to help non-technical people understand what a field of science studies, its methods, its main problems and its current state.

At its worst, it’s insight porn. It leaves you feeling like you have read something profound, but aside from appearing slightly smarter, you have not really learnt any actionable or useful knowledge.

Popsci is one of the more benign forms of insight porn. It gets worse. Until you reflect on this feeling, it is very easy to get captured by ideologies. The insights behind libertarianism, or communism will feel universal and potent. Enough to make you look for their truths everywhere.

Going through that phase is a staple of teenagerhood, and usually people “grow” out of it by just getting things that feel more important to think about. Unfortunately, many people don’t get things that feel more important, especially since everywhere is an ideological battleground.

As such, you have people that get convinced that their pet ideology or conspiracy theory is True and Deep, majorly so because they can’t disentangle the feeling of Insight from actual objective insight. And separating the feeling from actual objective insight is not only a matter of feelings, it is also a matter of figuring out what are actual objective insights.

Curiosity or interest is what you feel when you expect that there’s a lot to be learned about something, and that those things are worth learning.

Regardless of how interesting something “truly” is, when we don’t feel interest or curiosity towards it, it is usually a struggle to focus on learning about it.

If you want to be in charge of what you learn, rather than constantly suffering the whims of whatever you happen to feel like, mastering curiosity is quite practical.

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More generally, let’s say you mastered all these feelings. Meaning, Importance, Insight, Curiosity.

Then you’d be able to make yourself truly interested in whatever you set out to do. You could always be 100% engaged with whatever you decide, and reap all the gains that come with it.

Attention

Attention is another category of feelings that is useful to master, whatever you set out to do.

Salience is the feeling when a thing captures our attention. It looks big. The thing is not necessarily important, it is however the big thing in our mind. It might not deserve to be big, but it is.

I would say salience is the most important feeling to master.

If you don’t control it, everything else becomes much harder. Instead of just deciding what’s in your attention, it just depends on how you feel, and what you see, what you encounter, etc.

If you don’t master your salience, you just get trolled. All the time. Constantly.

Everything, everyone is competing for your attention, and is trying to make themself salient to you.

This can be nice things, like your kids, or people you love. But even then, it’s not necessarily healthy: it is challenging for parents to find and maintain healthy boundaries with the never-ending attention demands of children. It’s all too easy to be too strict or too lax, compared to striking the right balance.

And in the worst case, the competition for your attention can be downright predatory, ranging from misleading ads to international scammers and fraudsters.

But more often than not, what’s fighting for your attention is not a specific person. It is mind-parasites that no one really controls. Stuff like ideologies, cults, potent aesthetics, addictive substances and activities, “big ideas”, or “memes”. They have no free-will, no body and no purpose. They simply reside in the minds of people, and require their attention to survive: they’re mind-parasites.

Even though mind-parasites have no free-will, the competition between them is so strong and restless that it mercilessly produces mind-parasites that steal as much of our attention as possible.

If you don’t control your saliency, at best, you become the puppet of someone else. I say “best”, because this is still humane.

But most likely, you just wasted a bunch of your life for no good reason, just because some aimless mind-parasite hijacked your attention and made itself too salient for too long.

Flow, or “being in the zone”, is a feeling that you get when you are fully dedicated to something. While saliency feels like things are big in your mind, flow feels like your mind is of one thing, or that your mind is itself part of something.

In flow, there are no distractions. So much so that it can feel like being in a separate world, or like a form of meditation: in this state, you don’t even notice your troubles from daily life. This can make the state itself desirable, as a form of escapism.

Beyond how good it can feel, some activities require flow. Competing in some intense discipline at the highest level. Tackling some hard intellectual challenges, reachable, but still much past your comfort zone. Beating the hardest levels of some games.

Some activities are massively enhanced with flow. One of the most common ones is just holding a very deep conversation. Flow-enhanced conversations are those conversations that last for hours, without feeling like time is passing at all.

Mastering flow is a simple way of fully dedicating your attention to something.

On reflection, I think that flow is a good feeling to try to master at first. 

It is easier than others. Everyone has encountered it at least once: rather than dealing with distractions, you just need to get back in the zone. It is also less emotionally and socially loaded than other feelings.

It is legible. Most people have heard of flow, of being in the zone, or seen it in movies, series or novels.

It is obviously useful. Yes, in flow, you are just more productive.

Distraction is the feeling you get when your attention changes its focus without you having decided to do so. Mastering distraction is quite important. There are many kinds of distraction, identifying, reflecting on and becoming more resilient to them is possible, and obviously useful.

For instance, a type of distraction is slipping, what happens when you lose grip on your attention. The easiest way to make that feeling of slipping salient is to just be sleep deprived: when you are tired enough, merely maintaining attention can become exceedingly hard, at a point where most of your subjective time is spent slipping, making this salient.

I have personally spent a lot of time struggling against slipping, noticing its early signs, redirecting my attention and building mechanisms that put my attention on guardrails so that it is more resilient to slips. I am now at a point where I can work on complex topics even while extremely tired.

Conclusion

I could write more lines on significance and attention, and I probably will at some point lol. But it is not the topic of this post. I just picked these two examples because their usefulness is obvious to everyone. And also, I am quite proficient at them, so it’s easier for me to write about them.

However, there are many other feelings that I personally have not mastered (and so am less qualified to talk about), but that are still extremely useful. For instance, many scientists that have some nice understanding behind their technical intuitions in their fields. Some sports coaches also have reflected enough on the feelings behind their techniques to be able to teach them to their students.

And I hope there is at least one super nerdy CEO or sales person that has dug much deeper into their social intuitions, and has a much finer understanding and control of them than I do.

Indeed, feelings are wide and varied, you should not over-focus on my two examples because I picked them.

I just wanted to drive home the point that feelings are complex, that you can investigate them, reflect on them and control them. And that you can do so for great results.

More generally, you can reflect on any feelings, and that way, gain some clearer picture and more control on a part of yourself. Regardless of your motivation, whether it is curiosity, productivity, happiness, or being at peace with yourself, I think there’s much to benefit from studying this.

Cheers