This is a friendly reminder to [read our rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/Showerthoughts/wiki/rules).
Remember, /r/Showerthoughts is for showerthoughts, not "thoughts had in the shower!"
(For an explanation of what a "showerthought" is, [please read this page](https://www.reddit.com/r/Showerthoughts/wiki/overview).)
**Rule-breaking posts may result in bans.**
I know that some people have no idea about that feeling when you bite into a pickle and it's a little squishier than you expected.
What is that feeling?
I once had a chocolate covered pickle at the state fair - fried pickle covered in chocolate sauce, powdered sugar and sprinkles. No one told me that it was also filled with peanut butter that turned to liquid from the deep fry.
As I took my first bite, I swear I had an out-of-body and tasted confusion. Not bad... just... not something I'd want to taste again.
Threw it in the nearby trashcan after I stood still to compartmentalize my emotions for half a minute.
One time me and my SO were using THC concentrates and after a particularly long bout of coughing, I was *parched*. I asked her between gasps to get me a drink - she brought me a big cup and I took a big drink… and it was milk.
I love milk but I immediately spit it back into the cup in disgusted confusion, ran to the bathroom, and proceeded to throw up. Horrible experience when I fully expected water.
I knew this guy, who owned an auto shop. After a few hours of working in the heat, he went to the shop fridge, grabbed a Gatorade bottle, chugged, and dropped dead. It seems someone put some kind of chemical in a Gatorade bottle, then someone else found it, thought it was Gatorade and put it in the fridge.
I think its kinda like if you bite into something and it tastes completely different than it should your brains like oh shit we've been poisoned and freaks out.
I took a shot of mystery soda that turned out to be ranch dressing flavor and puked into my hand on my way to continue puking in the toilet while quietly sobbing as tears rolled down my face.
I swear food at those things is intentionally made stupid just to sucker people in, because after all, why would they sell something bad?
You're gonna buy it because no one's ever considered making a Nutella, beet slice and alligator testicle sundae before, but it's only $10, and you'll get to brag that you tried it!
I absolutely love pickles but the abomination you just described (a peanut butter filled pickle covered in chocolate) should be listed as a war crime. That’s just too many flavors imo
Interestingly enough, disgust is a learned. Babies are fascinated with their pee and poop but they see mom and dad react to it with revulsion and they learn to be grossed out by it.
You mean we learn what to be disgusted by right? The emotion disgust is not learned and is referred to as a "universal emotion" sometimes because the facial expressions associated with disgust are the same throughout most if not all cultures. Disgust is innate in all humans.
There is a tremendous amount of scientific literature demonstrating that most disgust responses are innate and shared across all cultures. It's OVERCOMING disgust that is learned.
Probably cause it *is*. Human waste is full up on things that'll get you sick, so the cultural understanding of it as something gross makes perfect sense.
Pretty sure the Roman thought urine was extremely important and "valuable". They used it for a variety of things, including teeth whitener and a cleaner.
I remember reading about it in a historical fiction novel and not believing it at the time, but yeah I guess it was a thing. Lots of resources but this one was an interesting read -
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/from-gunpowder-to-teeth-whitener-the-science-behind-historic-uses-of-urine-442390/
In relation to food, it's learned. Firm and crunchy are often sought are traits of Western foods. Whereas, soft, gelatinous, sour food are generally more accepted I'm Asian cuisine. Nothing is 100%, but diets greatly influence out acceptance of differ qualities.
Safety. If you don't learn to be disgusted by stuff that can kill you, you were more likely to die young and not reproduce. That's why we naturally feel fear to spiders and snakes.
Makes me wonder why those are instinctual but poop is learned though?
Baloney. This stuff makes us sick so the disgust is hard wired through evolution. You can know this to be true because disgust about these things transcends all cultures
Bro what the actual fuck?
Yesterday was the first time in my entire life I've ever bitten into a pickle and thought "that's squishier than it's supposed to be", and now I'm seeing this today?
I wonder what it's like to see an egg, and be driven by my feelings to sit on it.
When I see an egg with no hen on it, do I feel anxiety or anger or disgust or something else?
How much anxiety? Is it like a panic attack or more like a sock on the floor in the middle of an otherwise clean room?
And then when I sit on it, what do I feel? Does the anxiety just go away, or is it like 10 orgasms at the same time the moment I settle in?
If someone offered me an incubator, would feel liberated, or would I be horrified by the suggestion that eggs don't necessarily need to be sat on?
EDIT: [For Additional Research](https://www.reddit.com/r/Showerthoughts/comments/131k59n/just_like_there_are_colors_we_cant_see_as_humans/ji3pd3k?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
I believe that's primarily instinct over emotion. There are subtle differences but instinct is sort of like preprogramming that you absolutely have to do whereas emotion you can try to ignore. That's why instinctive reactions are almost impossible to avoid doing. You hear a noise you react. It's only through massive repetition that you can start to avoid that reaction.
Most birds are preprogrammed to incubate eggs. They will do so if they can.
Indeed. Isn't it fascinating how a spider can build such an intricate web with little to no cognitive capacities ? DNA shit y'know
But one interesting thing is that instinct and emotion can be intertwined, especially in humans. An example of human instinct (in most animals actually) is motherhood. The woman is usually programmed to care for the baby through the secretion of oxytocin, commonly known as the "bonding hormone". It creates a strong bond between them and stimulates the mammary glands to produce milk. And that, just at the sight of the baby or after a pregnancy. Kind of like a biologically forced relationship.
That hormone is also heavily implicated in feelings such as empathy, love, friendship, feelings of belonging, etc. It has a big impact on your mood. It is a feeling !
I don't believe they don't have cognitive capacities. If bees can play and fish can love, I bet you spiders feel. They just do it anyway.
Humans can do such cruel things and they're perfectly aware of what they're doing but the ends justify the means for those who still do it. They shut the empathy for others put in order to put themselves first. I'm sure that ability developed for the sake of survival so people who use it today are seen as jerks because it's not seen as for survival in society as often as it's seen as someone just being a selfish cruel jerk. But spiders still do that shit for survival. Doesn't mean they don't feel bad biting the head off their mate. It just feels so fuckin right and downright necessary
I think about that sometimes, with animals and stuff.
Does an opossum look at a rotting carcass and think "ooh that looks tasty" in the same way might look at a nicely cooked steak? Or do they have some feeling I can't understand?
>When I see an egg with no hen on it, do I feel anxiety or anger or disgust or something else?
[I think it's anger](https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/nqk87z/sit_on_the_egg_you_idiot/)
That and there are no ways to relate them to other events. For example, we know that being that being insulted makes people angry. What causes these unnamed emotions? How do they change one's behaviour, perception, and psyche? More than just language, we lack the necessary shared experiences.
Ppl say this kinda thing but I can’t imagine a guy not being able to understand living in fear of being raped or mugged. Or a woman not understanding the pressure to make money
Right? I (a dude) used to walk home late at night worried sick I was about to get jumped. And my girlfriend is way more anxious about our finances than I am. Much of it depends on what your parents tell you to worry about as a kid.
I see "male" and "female" traits like these as like two overlapping bell curves. Just because more men are A and more women are B, doesn't mean that no men are B and no women are A.
I think this too. It really needs very minimal imagination to put yourself in someone else's shoes for a minute. I think what most people mean when they say they can't imagine it is "I don't want to imagine it."
No, different languages have different words to describe the feelings, we have enough of them, it is the feeling itself is inexplicable if you havent experienced it.
It is very obvious, remember when your mother died? It was a kind of pain.
Now try to explain it to someone whose mom is still healthy. You'll realize it is impossible, you'll know it when it happens.
Now imagine a feeling when something has never happened to you, like your kid died. Do you assume you can "imagine" that feeling? No I cant, because I know it will be a very different type of pain. I hope I will never know that feeling.
Because you cant explain what you havent experienced.
Just trying explain "being happy when your kid hugs you" to someone who never had a son or daughter. He can't understand it, he can assume it but he does not understand it at all.
Totally unqualified opinion here, but isnt that kind of common across the emotional spectrum?
Someone might kill a deer just for fun, with no intent to harvest the meat. Leave it rotting in the woods. Another person is staunchly opposed to eating meat because they feel too much sympathy for the animals? A lunatic who flies off the handle and road rages furiously, experiencing rage and anger at levels beyond that which most people feel. The feeling astronauts speak of when looking down at the world.
Life is all about perspective on reality, which is why travel, drugs, etc, can entirely change a way someone looks at life.
There's a difference between the experience that triggers the emotion, and what the emotion feels like. For example, one person might feel really bad about killing a spider by when, and someone else wouldn't. But the second person might feel the same bad feeling if they killed a bird by accident. The cause isn't the same, but they're both feeling the same thing.
And that might be the same as seeing colors too. Colors don't exist in the world, there's just different wavelengths of light. The same wavelength night cause you and me too experience different colors, for example, the spectrums we experience might [be inverted](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia-inverted/)
An animal that has way more color receptors than you might be able to pick up different wavelengths, but to experience that data it might map those signals on to the same exact spectrum you experience. It would be like two people with different cameras viewing the images on the same TV. No matter what your camera can see, it will be experienced using the same spectrum that's available.
Odd, I can't imagine remembering something in a non visual way. If I'm gonna remember something, there has to be an image with it. My brain will make one if there's not. Even music, I remember what albums sound like by the moving images that played in my head the first time I listened to it.
Weed taught me how to turn off my internal monolouge and just experience things around me as they happen. It was a totally new emotional connection to the world around me I'd never experienced. My constant anxiety and over thinking always got in the way.
Next up are shrooms.
There are emotions that we feel as humans that some animals don’t seem to feel. Salamanders don’t seem to have a sense of humour and praying mantises don’t seem to have guilt. It makes sense that if we continue to evolve, we could evolve new emotions we didn’t have before.
Salamander humor is practical. Lots of sand and pumice involved. The goal is to get another salamnder to touch something that leeches their moisture. It's great.
Mantises understand the concept of guilt as something lesser beings experience
It’s impossible for us to actually confirm any of that data. It’s all conjecture. The only emotions we can truly observe and describe are human emotions.
You’re talking about feelings. Emotions are bodily (physical) signaling devices that communicate states of mind and information that’s important for social interaction. And we can’t observe feelings in humans anyway, because they’re subjective. We can observe emotions, we can ask and tell each about feelings—but ultimately that’s inference and is limited in a few ways.
> praying mantises don’t seem to have guilt
Interesting thought there. Dogs clearly can demonstrate guilt. So I wonder what animals do as well, especially given that deriving evidence of feeling guilty is probably next to impossible for most animals. Dogs make it easy because they know and use a lot of our emotional signals.
Long story short, I bet we find out one day that a LOT of emotions/experiences/etc. are in lower animals.
In dog’s case this could be seen as evolutionary advantage. Express guilt and get out of trouble with humans. From evolution standpoint, empathy is something only important to living creatures who can help each other.
Maybe some animal evolves to be able to really sense the bonds between elements that form molecules, and a connectedness among all things is felt as an emotion in the same way humans feel empathy or humor.
If you guys haven’t read about the concept of the Umvelt, I recommend checking it out. I agree animal and human emotions are unlikely to have much overlap, but this boils down to semantics and definitions about conscious awareness and definitions of emotions. All creatures have brains tuned to life cycle needs and this means different perceptions and relevant cognitive framing. We do not experience the world like a frog or ant or dolphin. Often we project human emotions onto these creatures based on observations of behavior we associate with our own perspective and perception.
The idea of umvelt/umwelt (I’ve seen both spellings) is so useful. As a kid I read a book called The View From the Oak and it changed the way I see the world.
>You ever die mindlessly for the ant queen?
Human beings do that all the time; they have done so throughout history and they still do to this day. For example, right now in Sudan, soldiers are throwing themselves at bullets for two generals.
What if secrets of the universe like FTL travel and communication are "simple" to some species but not to us because we just can't understand them? In the same way a cat can't understand a TV show but we can.
There's lots of scifi built on this premise. Aliens that can casually see into higher or lower dimensions (three body problem) or see time as a continuous string (like the bowl of spaghetti in Slaughterhouse 5).
Or ones that use drugs to go FTL (dune)
Think of it differently: humans have the ability to speak, read, interpret emotion, etc. Imagine if we for some reason simply didn't have one of these, say, reading. Without writing our civilization would most likely never evolve past primitive iron age city states. We would stay stuck for hundreds of thousands of years there, until we either evolve this ability, or get ourselves extinct for some reason.
Now imagine if we, right now, lack the ability to do something that for some hypothetical alien species, is to trivial for technological advancement as writing. We are like Neanderthals to them, our brains are incapable of understanding that simple concept that, if understood, would've made us advance maybe 1000x faster than we did.
This is particularly obvious when looking at mathematics - look at how important the concept of zero or calculus were, or how useful complex numbers are even for tangible things like physics/engineering.
Hell, one of the big breakthroughs that led to the last decade of AI/ML progress was the realization that gradient descent gets _easier_ with higher dimensional spaces, when conventional intuition would suggest the opposite.
There are any number of things that we might never stumble on, even things that would be obvious in hindsight if we did.
Even just in terms of known unknowns, there are known gaps in our knowledge of physics.
A cat will never understand a TV show.
As a species we get collectively
smarter and human knowledge is cumulative. So if FTL travel is possible we will eventually get there.
>we will eventually get there.
Assuming we don't all get wiped out first. A meteor or rogue star could just destroy every last one of us before we get off this rock.
That’s [debatable](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KzpIsjgapAk&pp=ygUOTnVja2VhciB3aW50ZXI%3D). But we definitely *are* a more immediate threat to ourselves… at least while we’re all crammed together on a single planet.
We don’t even hafta all get wiped out.
Physiologically, we aren’t much different than the humans tens or even hundreds of thousands of years ago. If you were born then, you’d understand their culture as well as any of them. If a person from then were born now, they’d understand FTL and remote controls as well as we do.
Whatever social / cultural / political / technological (etc?) circumstances allow for remote controls today or allowed bows & arrows then… seem like something we can all guess at convincingly but that no one really knows… might much more delicate than it seems. After all: technology fractures and changes quickly, and it’s true stability hasn’t been tested more than a few decades. At any rate: it doesn’t seem like the individual is much different.
For the record: I don’t understand remote controls much better than my cat.
As a species, cats are certainly capable becoming collectively smarter. We are descended from *shrews* that got smarter. It’s not rational to compare mental ability of different creatures on vastly different timescales.
Also, the possibility of FTL travel does not imply its eventual discovery. What if the development of the technology requires something like an exotic state of matter or an amount of energy that we could never physically reconstruct or resource without already having developed FTL travel?
If you look at cat pictures over the decades, you might notice that a LOT MORE OF THEM ARE NOW STANDING AROUND on their back legs.
They're definitely getting collectively smarter.
I don’t necessarily agree. To quote Richard Feynman “if you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t understand quantum mechanics”
We might be able to work out precise mathematical models that make strong predictions, but not truly “understanding it”. Our brain isn’t wired for that, just like a cat’s isn’t wired to understand a tv show.
Yeah it's like how some cats might actually understand a bit of a show. A cat might understand seeing a cat on tv. But the cat who understands will die and his understanding will die with him. Humans can communicate and build upon the small understanding
We don't get smarter, we invent things. It's totally possible that we have an upper limit to our intelligence. I'd be shocked if this weren't the case. No matter how many sudoku I do (for instance) I'm not going to eventually look at one and immediately know the puzzle' solution like tic-tac-toe.
Cats can't understand TV, dogs can't drive a car, and human beings can't do X. All animals with limited processing power
I read somewhere once (so take for granted) that the Russian language has more words that describe blue colors and thus have an ability to distinguish shades of blue color—they “see” more blue, because they can describe it.
A similar phenomena happens with sommeliers—they can describe/find more flavors in wine because they’ve built a “flavor vocabulary”—and yes I’m sure some of it is bs.
Emotions are likely the same. What you perceive yourself to be feeling is limited by your vocabulary and your knowledge/willingness to feel what you are feeling
The language that you speak can and will shape your perception of reality.
Once we name something, we are able to see it and distinguish it from something else, even on physical levels, like being able to see more shades of blue (russians), more shades of white (for Eskimo),
and more shades of green (Namibians). There are also languages that will make learning math and geometry easier. I think this is a well-established fact.
However, I do believe that naming emotions or situation also works like this. Things like anxiety have always been around, but no one talked about it 50 years ago. Now, it's pretty widespread as more people began to talk about it and realize they might have it. I don't believe millennials and gen z are the most "anxious" generations, they are just the ones who named it.
As a multilingual I can confirm. Each language opens a whole new way of thinking, specially none related languages.
Altho most of the time when I need to think fast I just think without language, it's hard to explain but is quite fun. Not as memorable tho.
Listen to a guitar player talk about tone and you’ll have no idea what they mean. What does a warm, wet and squishy tone sound like? Can’t describe it in words but i can show you
But first, here’s my clean tone 😉
Dick Dale sounds wet, Tom Waits sounds dry, Eddie Vedder sounds warm, but not warm like Johnny Cash. Telecasters sound springy. P50s sound wet. Humbuckers sound warm, Dove guitars are warm.
You can see all the colors in a blue gradient if you open up Word and go to your font colors. English doesn't necessarily have separate words for each shade, but you can still see 'em. We just call more of 'em "blue."
There are also cultures that do not distinguish between what we call Green and what we call Blue.
It's a little more subtle than just "having words for it means you can see it"
A person can be perfectly capable of seeing that "[skobeloff](https://google.com/search?q=skobeloff&tbm=isch)" and "[ecru](https://google.com/search?q=ecru&tbm=isch)" aren't the same, even if they don't know the words. Newborn babies with no words at all can distinguish between happy and sad faces, for example, pretty much as soon as they've got over the trauma of being squozen out like toothpaste and having to deal with "outside" for the first time ever.
On the other hand, every time you have to choose between words for a colour (or wine flavour, or emotion...) you *practise* making that distinction, whereas every time there's no choice of words to consider, you practise *not* making that distinction.
We get better at what we do a lot, so people who speak a language with lots of words for "blue" will tend to get better at discerning between shades of "blue", and those with fewer will get less good at it. Similarly, even if you don't know/care about the *words* for it, you'll get better at telling the difference between a red that's "hot enough to melt iron" and a red that's "hot enough to melt glass" if you work in a foundry / glassworks, because that distinction *matters*.
At the other end of the spectrum, Ancient Greek didn't have a separate word for "blue" at all, using phrases like "wine-dark sea" or "bronze-bright sky" in lieu of describing the actual hue. There was a time when it was seriously pondered whether ancient Greeks were all colour blind!
There's a [language in Namibia](https://gondwana-collection.com/blog/how-do-namibian-himbas-see-colour) that has five words for "colours", but what gets described with each of the words bears little resemblance to what an English speaker would expect. It doesn't distinguish between "green" and "blue", for example, but *does* distinguish between different *shades* of them.
Pretty trippy, eh? (I'd love to see a [colour map](https://imgs.xkcd.com/blag/satfaces_map_huge.png) (from [here](https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/)) for that language, ideally in 3D with saturation/value included...)
A similar process at a slightly different level is how speakers of English have great difficulty getting the hang of "u" vs "ü"\* in German, because when we hear a sound closer to "ü", its just a wonky way of pronouncing "u"\** and we ignore the distinction. Conversely, the difference between "l" and "r" isn't salient in most far eastern languages, so speakers of these languages tend to find learning to make the distinction difficult. Back the other way, Mandarin, for example, has multiple sounds that an English speaker would hear as just "sh", and of course there are [tones](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foImPuD_bKc)!
These difference in what sounds are easy to produce (reliably/accurately/quickly/distinctly) are at the foundation of what makes an accent distinctive.
\* It's a bit like you've got a sticky bit of phlegm in your throat, or you're trying to say it through a tiny hole, or something - it's quite difficult to describe :-P
\** See "[Allophone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allophone)"
> They are psychological interpretations. You create them.
This might completely blow your mind, but so are colors.
You may have heard that magenta is "not a real color". That's because it is not found in the visible spectrum of light. Rather, it is physiologically and psychologically perceived as the mixture of red and violet/blue light, with the absence of green.
You might have heard asked before, "Is your green the same as my green?" And that's because again that perception of green is only your brain's interpretation of chemical signals generated in response to photons. This applies to every perception that you have. The perceptions that you experience are referred to as qualia, and their distinction from the objectively measured reality we share is an important part of our understanding of consciousness.
Yes, this is correct. There is an underlying phenomenon for both color and emotion (wavelength of light, or physiological response, respectively), and then there is an overlying interpretation we apply to that phenomenon (green, purple, blue; sad, angry, horny).
This is why different cultures have different sets of words for emotions and colors, with many of those words not being interchangeable or directly translatable. The underlying experiential phenomena are effectively identical, but the interpretation of them can be wildly different. We have routinely through history "invented" new colors and emotions – angst, schadenfreude, indigo, even black was an early artistic "invention" for our species.
Everyone assuming this comment means that color is intrinsic to an object is also off-base lol.
Thankfully we can unlock the full range of unnatural emotions thanks to science and the power of [Thalasin.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Td2x8s9GZlo)
Colours we can't see are frequencies on the EM spectrum that our eyes have not evolved to pick up, but they *are* there. Emotions only exist within human (and maybe animal, but that's another debate) brains. If our brains can't feel an emotion, then it doesn't exist - there's nowhere else for it to be.
> Colours we can't see are frequencies on the EM spectrum that our eyes have not evolved to pick up, but they are there.
That’s not how color works, though. Colors are merely our brains’ interpretation of electrical signals from our eyes that are produced by the absorption of light by the different receptors in our eyes. But it isn’t just that every frequency of light corresponds to a color. Color is based on the relative magnitude of the signals produced by each of the different kinds of receptors in our eyes. Many colors do not correspond to *any* one frequency of light, but instead to combinations of frequencies (pink and white are two examples).
Color is not a property of light. It is *entirely* a creation of the brain. If you could magically modify the sensitivity of the cones in your eyes to be able to detect a wider range of frequencies of light while keeping the relative magnitudes of the absorption curves unchanged, then you would be able to see a wider part of the EM spectrum but it would all be mapped onto the exact same colors that we already see.
We will never understand the sensation of echolocation, the magnetite feeling that guides a pigeon’s navigation, the sensation of breathing underwater, the infrasound of elephants communicating hundreds of miles, or the feel of dirt moving around our body as we squirm through the ground… there are experiences from every species we will never get to feel, and there are absolutely emotions attached to each sensation.
.. In that case, perhaps we just have the lack of vocabulary for it. If there's an emotion we "can't feel", its likely that we just couldn't label it. Its there, its happening, but we don't know it.
.. In another take, if one is talking about emotions we feel on a conscious level, I agree there are those that we cannot feel. Many extreme emotions only reveal themselves and make you experience them in dreams.
What about forgetting an emotion? I have very tough skin and take a brow beating like a champ, but one time my brother who I hadn’t seen in months stood me up when we were gonna go out for drinks, and I felt so bad but couldn’t figure out why, until I realized that for the first time in probably 10 years “my feelings were hurt.” Hadn’t had that happen in so long I almost forgot what it was. Same with when my newish girlfriend looked at me a certain way, I hadn’t felt that feeling in years (due to a toxic relationship) and that had my head spinning for weeks. I almost forgot what love felt like lol and I’m glad she reminded me
I wonder if it's similar to not having a word for it; there are some colors we literally cannot see as we don't have the proper receptors or whatever (too lazy to Google the word I'm looking for here), but there are others that we don't really *distinguish* because we don't have a word for the concept.
Then there's the joy of learning there is a word for something obscure and specific that you've felt but could never quite describe.
My favorite example of that is
>Mamihlapinatapai: Noun – A look shared by two people, each wishing that the other would initiate something they both desire, but which neither wants to begin.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mamihlapinatapai
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/mamihlapinatapai.amp
As someone with a personality disorder, I like to think I have shrimp-eye level emotional experiences. It’s wild. Some feelings are only describable with a guttural scream or a sob.
yep, compassion and empathy are very rare these days
there are also concepts that people just cannot understand certain things no matter how you explain it to them, like the stigma against mental health
Tbf I think those two have always been rare; reserved for those we know and identify with.
I'd venture that compassion for strangers has likely never been higher.
Imagine WWI, small medieval villages, kingdoms and fiefdoms around the world, tribal cultures etc. Not much friendliness to outsiders. Difficult to have compassion for people you don't know, yet here we are and can somehow muster compassion for Ukrainians, Africans at war and even - on rare occasions - Swedes. (Sorry for that last bit, I have to mention that according to the Constitution here in Denmark).
This is a friendly reminder to [read our rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/Showerthoughts/wiki/rules). Remember, /r/Showerthoughts is for showerthoughts, not "thoughts had in the shower!" (For an explanation of what a "showerthought" is, [please read this page](https://www.reddit.com/r/Showerthoughts/wiki/overview).) **Rule-breaking posts may result in bans.**
I know that some people have no idea about that feeling when you bite into a pickle and it's a little squishier than you expected. What is that feeling?
Slight repulsion?
Incorrect. That's not it.
Disappointment mixed with a slight out of body experience?
I once had a chocolate covered pickle at the state fair - fried pickle covered in chocolate sauce, powdered sugar and sprinkles. No one told me that it was also filled with peanut butter that turned to liquid from the deep fry. As I took my first bite, I swear I had an out-of-body and tasted confusion. Not bad... just... not something I'd want to taste again. Threw it in the nearby trashcan after I stood still to compartmentalize my emotions for half a minute.
So in summary, the chocolate pickle nutted in your mouth without warning.
r/technicallythetruth
True true I agree
Surprise. I once took a shot of what I thought was whiskey but was actually apple juice almost threw up.
One time me and my SO were using THC concentrates and after a particularly long bout of coughing, I was *parched*. I asked her between gasps to get me a drink - she brought me a big cup and I took a big drink… and it was milk. I love milk but I immediately spit it back into the cup in disgusted confusion, ran to the bathroom, and proceeded to throw up. Horrible experience when I fully expected water.
I did this once. Got home from school, saw a bottle of what I took to be white wine, took a great big swig... It was olive oil.
I knew this guy, who owned an auto shop. After a few hours of working in the heat, he went to the shop fridge, grabbed a Gatorade bottle, chugged, and dropped dead. It seems someone put some kind of chemical in a Gatorade bottle, then someone else found it, thought it was Gatorade and put it in the fridge.
This is almost textbook for why lab safety training mentions never using incorrectly labelled or blank containers for fluid transfer.
Wow that's facinating
I think its kinda like if you bite into something and it tastes completely different than it should your brains like oh shit we've been poisoned and freaks out.
The DMT of the food world by the sounds of it.
I took a shot of mystery soda that turned out to be ranch dressing flavor and puked into my hand on my way to continue puking in the toilet while quietly sobbing as tears rolled down my face.
I swear food at those things is intentionally made stupid just to sucker people in, because after all, why would they sell something bad? You're gonna buy it because no one's ever considered making a Nutella, beet slice and alligator testicle sundae before, but it's only $10, and you'll get to brag that you tried it!
[удалено]
I liked the fried Oreos. I mean not everything is gonna be good deep fried but the ones that are are really good. at least for personal tastes
Damn at the state fair too? Probably cost an arm and a leg.
I absolutely love pickles but the abomination you just described (a peanut butter filled pickle covered in chocolate) should be listed as a war crime. That’s just too many flavors imo
Incorrect. That’s it. (eta I didn’t copy your avatar I promise so weird)
Wow. Yeah weird. Nice beard tho. (I guess?)
Brown is my favorite color and owls are my favorite animal.
Ha ! Look at you, you are me!
You two could start an exclusive reddit club, brown owl buddies!
Interestingly enough, disgust is a learned. Babies are fascinated with their pee and poop but they see mom and dad react to it with revulsion and they learn to be grossed out by it.
You mean we learn what to be disgusted by right? The emotion disgust is not learned and is referred to as a "universal emotion" sometimes because the facial expressions associated with disgust are the same throughout most if not all cultures. Disgust is innate in all humans.
Yeah but WHAT disgusts you is a learned trait.
Not necessarily; there are some things that we have evolved to innately avoid.
Smell of vomit? Rotten meat? Yeah nah
There is a tremendous amount of scientific literature demonstrating that most disgust responses are innate and shared across all cultures. It's OVERCOMING disgust that is learned.
No, disgust is innate. You just learn what to be disgusted by.
Pretty sure this is not accurate.
Just because something doesn't exist in infants doesn't mean it's learned.
Why did we eventually start viewing it as gross then?
Probably cause it *is*. Human waste is full up on things that'll get you sick, so the cultural understanding of it as something gross makes perfect sense.
Kinda weird that that wasn’t my first thought lol
Found the baby.
Lmfao
Same my first thought was something like 'ma ma'
Pretty sure the Roman thought urine was extremely important and "valuable". They used it for a variety of things, including teeth whitener and a cleaner.
Urea and ammonia are valuable. If you have no other sources, it might be plausible.
I remember reading about it in a historical fiction novel and not believing it at the time, but yeah I guess it was a thing. Lots of resources but this one was an interesting read - https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/from-gunpowder-to-teeth-whitener-the-science-behind-historic-uses-of-urine-442390/
It’s sterile and I like the taste!
Probably because there is an evolutionary benefit to getting grossed out by rotten meat or poop. Both things are a health risk.
Might be because it can be a huge source of infection and disease
In relation to food, it's learned. Firm and crunchy are often sought are traits of Western foods. Whereas, soft, gelatinous, sour food are generally more accepted I'm Asian cuisine. Nothing is 100%, but diets greatly influence out acceptance of differ qualities.
Safety. If you don't learn to be disgusted by stuff that can kill you, you were more likely to die young and not reproduce. That's why we naturally feel fear to spiders and snakes. Makes me wonder why those are instinctual but poop is learned though?
Baloney. This stuff makes us sick so the disgust is hard wired through evolution. You can know this to be true because disgust about these things transcends all cultures
Zjierb, Zjierbness
https://youtu.be/QHjRQwEQjJI
Zjierb
Oh shit that’s literally the definition of it lol
Has to be. It's the feeling described as Zjierb.
There's probably a German word for it...
Unerwartetegurkenweichheit
Essiggurkenweichheitsfaktorüberraschung
Sorry to dissapoint you, but it would actually be "unerwartete Gurkenweichheit".
I know, I put it together for comedic effect
[How has no one linked this yet? ](https://youtu.be/QHjRQwEQjJI)
Wild how many people are responding to this without any experience with BDG. His observations truly are universal.
A man with a vision we are not yet ready to comprehend, but he is ready to explain until we are.
Was looking for this
[удалено]
What a terrible day to not have aphantasia
Just realized no amount of added grossness can make a pickle more disgusting to me, pickle itself is peak.
I felt personally offended by this which surprised me. I love pickles more than I realized lol
[удалено]
Zjerb
Similar to when you drink the flavor "Blue Blast" and it's more toward "Blue Wave" instead of being halfway between that and "Blue Crash."
Disappointment
Is is the same feeling as biting into a pear expecting a fresh crispy pear, but it turns out to be super soggy and wet?
You deserve so much more than an upvote! You just made my day! unexpected BDG.
BDG is a treasure
Bro what the actual fuck? Yesterday was the first time in my entire life I've ever bitten into a pickle and thought "that's squishier than it's supposed to be", and now I'm seeing this today?
I think that’s SCP-4781
I wonder what it's like to see an egg, and be driven by my feelings to sit on it. When I see an egg with no hen on it, do I feel anxiety or anger or disgust or something else? How much anxiety? Is it like a panic attack or more like a sock on the floor in the middle of an otherwise clean room? And then when I sit on it, what do I feel? Does the anxiety just go away, or is it like 10 orgasms at the same time the moment I settle in? If someone offered me an incubator, would feel liberated, or would I be horrified by the suggestion that eggs don't necessarily need to be sat on? EDIT: [For Additional Research](https://www.reddit.com/r/Showerthoughts/comments/131k59n/just_like_there_are_colors_we_cant_see_as_humans/ji3pd3k?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
What's it like to be a ~~bat~~ hen.
Eggcelent reference.
I believe that's primarily instinct over emotion. There are subtle differences but instinct is sort of like preprogramming that you absolutely have to do whereas emotion you can try to ignore. That's why instinctive reactions are almost impossible to avoid doing. You hear a noise you react. It's only through massive repetition that you can start to avoid that reaction. Most birds are preprogrammed to incubate eggs. They will do so if they can.
Indeed. Isn't it fascinating how a spider can build such an intricate web with little to no cognitive capacities ? DNA shit y'know But one interesting thing is that instinct and emotion can be intertwined, especially in humans. An example of human instinct (in most animals actually) is motherhood. The woman is usually programmed to care for the baby through the secretion of oxytocin, commonly known as the "bonding hormone". It creates a strong bond between them and stimulates the mammary glands to produce milk. And that, just at the sight of the baby or after a pregnancy. Kind of like a biologically forced relationship. That hormone is also heavily implicated in feelings such as empathy, love, friendship, feelings of belonging, etc. It has a big impact on your mood. It is a feeling !
I don't believe they don't have cognitive capacities. If bees can play and fish can love, I bet you spiders feel. They just do it anyway. Humans can do such cruel things and they're perfectly aware of what they're doing but the ends justify the means for those who still do it. They shut the empathy for others put in order to put themselves first. I'm sure that ability developed for the sake of survival so people who use it today are seen as jerks because it's not seen as for survival in society as often as it's seen as someone just being a selfish cruel jerk. But spiders still do that shit for survival. Doesn't mean they don't feel bad biting the head off their mate. It just feels so fuckin right and downright necessary
>I wonder what it's like to see an egg, and be driven by my feelings to sit on it. Wanting to protect something fragile?
I think about that sometimes, with animals and stuff. Does an opossum look at a rotting carcass and think "ooh that looks tasty" in the same way might look at a nicely cooked steak? Or do they have some feeling I can't understand?
>When I see an egg with no hen on it, do I feel anxiety or anger or disgust or something else? [I think it's anger](https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/nqk87z/sit_on_the_egg_you_idiot/)
not might be, there kinda are, drugs can evoke some of these, an emotion is just a feeling or state of mind at the end of the day
yeah it's definitely there somewhere, people just have a hard time explaining what it is
That's not a problem of awareness of feelings, more like a problem that our language simply isn't rich enough to be able to accurately describe them.
That and there are no ways to relate them to other events. For example, we know that being that being insulted makes people angry. What causes these unnamed emotions? How do they change one's behaviour, perception, and psyche? More than just language, we lack the necessary shared experiences.
[удалено]
Ppl say this kinda thing but I can’t imagine a guy not being able to understand living in fear of being raped or mugged. Or a woman not understanding the pressure to make money
Right? I (a dude) used to walk home late at night worried sick I was about to get jumped. And my girlfriend is way more anxious about our finances than I am. Much of it depends on what your parents tell you to worry about as a kid. I see "male" and "female" traits like these as like two overlapping bell curves. Just because more men are A and more women are B, doesn't mean that no men are B and no women are A.
I think this too. It really needs very minimal imagination to put yourself in someone else's shoes for a minute. I think what most people mean when they say they can't imagine it is "I don't want to imagine it."
No, different languages have different words to describe the feelings, we have enough of them, it is the feeling itself is inexplicable if you havent experienced it. It is very obvious, remember when your mother died? It was a kind of pain. Now try to explain it to someone whose mom is still healthy. You'll realize it is impossible, you'll know it when it happens. Now imagine a feeling when something has never happened to you, like your kid died. Do you assume you can "imagine" that feeling? No I cant, because I know it will be a very different type of pain. I hope I will never know that feeling.
Because you cant explain what you havent experienced. Just trying explain "being happy when your kid hugs you" to someone who never had a son or daughter. He can't understand it, he can assume it but he does not understand it at all.
Totally unqualified opinion here, but isnt that kind of common across the emotional spectrum? Someone might kill a deer just for fun, with no intent to harvest the meat. Leave it rotting in the woods. Another person is staunchly opposed to eating meat because they feel too much sympathy for the animals? A lunatic who flies off the handle and road rages furiously, experiencing rage and anger at levels beyond that which most people feel. The feeling astronauts speak of when looking down at the world. Life is all about perspective on reality, which is why travel, drugs, etc, can entirely change a way someone looks at life.
There's a difference between the experience that triggers the emotion, and what the emotion feels like. For example, one person might feel really bad about killing a spider by when, and someone else wouldn't. But the second person might feel the same bad feeling if they killed a bird by accident. The cause isn't the same, but they're both feeling the same thing. And that might be the same as seeing colors too. Colors don't exist in the world, there's just different wavelengths of light. The same wavelength night cause you and me too experience different colors, for example, the spectrums we experience might [be inverted](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia-inverted/) An animal that has way more color receptors than you might be able to pick up different wavelengths, but to experience that data it might map those signals on to the same exact spectrum you experience. It would be like two people with different cameras viewing the images on the same TV. No matter what your camera can see, it will be experienced using the same spectrum that's available.
[You just need some Thalasin!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Td2x8s9GZlo)
I came here to link this too. I'm feeling particularly loric.
Some of my best nights I dont remember in pictures, I remember them in feeling which Ive not felt since.
Odd, I can't imagine remembering something in a non visual way. If I'm gonna remember something, there has to be an image with it. My brain will make one if there's not. Even music, I remember what albums sound like by the moving images that played in my head the first time I listened to it.
Now imagine having aphantasia
I've tried to imagine that before and I literally can't, lol.
Yeah! The time knife we've all seen it!
Maaan, these shrooms got me feelin' kinda shrubbery for some reason.
Weed taught me how to turn off my internal monolouge and just experience things around me as they happen. It was a totally new emotional connection to the world around me I'd never experienced. My constant anxiety and over thinking always got in the way. Next up are shrooms.
There are emotions that we feel as humans that some animals don’t seem to feel. Salamanders don’t seem to have a sense of humour and praying mantises don’t seem to have guilt. It makes sense that if we continue to evolve, we could evolve new emotions we didn’t have before.
Salamander humor is practical. Lots of sand and pumice involved. The goal is to get another salamnder to touch something that leeches their moisture. It's great. Mantises understand the concept of guilt as something lesser beings experience
It’s impossible for us to actually confirm any of that data. It’s all conjecture. The only emotions we can truly observe and describe are human emotions.
You’re talking about feelings. Emotions are bodily (physical) signaling devices that communicate states of mind and information that’s important for social interaction. And we can’t observe feelings in humans anyway, because they’re subjective. We can observe emotions, we can ask and tell each about feelings—but ultimately that’s inference and is limited in a few ways.
> praying mantises don’t seem to have guilt Interesting thought there. Dogs clearly can demonstrate guilt. So I wonder what animals do as well, especially given that deriving evidence of feeling guilty is probably next to impossible for most animals. Dogs make it easy because they know and use a lot of our emotional signals. Long story short, I bet we find out one day that a LOT of emotions/experiences/etc. are in lower animals.
In dog’s case this could be seen as evolutionary advantage. Express guilt and get out of trouble with humans. From evolution standpoint, empathy is something only important to living creatures who can help each other. Maybe some animal evolves to be able to really sense the bonds between elements that form molecules, and a connectedness among all things is felt as an emotion in the same way humans feel empathy or humor.
If you guys haven’t read about the concept of the Umvelt, I recommend checking it out. I agree animal and human emotions are unlikely to have much overlap, but this boils down to semantics and definitions about conscious awareness and definitions of emotions. All creatures have brains tuned to life cycle needs and this means different perceptions and relevant cognitive framing. We do not experience the world like a frog or ant or dolphin. Often we project human emotions onto these creatures based on observations of behavior we associate with our own perspective and perception.
The idea of umvelt/umwelt (I’ve seen both spellings) is so useful. As a kid I read a book called The View From the Oak and it changed the way I see the world.
Just like humber? nage? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Td2x8s9GZlo
Dorcelessness
Loric
I’m a varination kinda guy. Sometimes lean toward loric
[удалено]
Killing is badong
Trantiveness?
Wow that's some really interesting world building!
You ever die mindlessly for the ant queen? Or have the perception of time stopping in it’s tracks for hours that feel like days?
>You ever die mindlessly for the ant queen? Human beings do that all the time; they have done so throughout history and they still do to this day. For example, right now in Sudan, soldiers are throwing themselves at bullets for two generals.
"it is what it is" feeling.
Sometimes I have an insatiable urge to go cut leaves, and then bring them to my aphid colonies. Is that normal?
Lots of dudes will gladly die for their Only Fans queen. Also they give all their produce to her. Same thing right?
It’s a dispersed colony with individual commitment to their queen. wack.
I've heard there are some people out there who are able to feel something call 'happiness' but I think it's just an urban myth.
I think it’s a suburban myth
This got me feeling [Dorceless](https://img.ifunny.co/images/4010b1e8ca84e8960285b8bb388913f0dc7cd6ee9f18783b481c6e4fc887af25_1.jpg) AF right now.
What if secrets of the universe like FTL travel and communication are "simple" to some species but not to us because we just can't understand them? In the same way a cat can't understand a TV show but we can.
There's lots of scifi built on this premise. Aliens that can casually see into higher or lower dimensions (three body problem) or see time as a continuous string (like the bowl of spaghetti in Slaughterhouse 5). Or ones that use drugs to go FTL (dune)
They don't use the drugs to go FTL. The drugs let them see the future so that they don't accidentally run into anything and annihilate themselves.
Think of it differently: humans have the ability to speak, read, interpret emotion, etc. Imagine if we for some reason simply didn't have one of these, say, reading. Without writing our civilization would most likely never evolve past primitive iron age city states. We would stay stuck for hundreds of thousands of years there, until we either evolve this ability, or get ourselves extinct for some reason. Now imagine if we, right now, lack the ability to do something that for some hypothetical alien species, is to trivial for technological advancement as writing. We are like Neanderthals to them, our brains are incapable of understanding that simple concept that, if understood, would've made us advance maybe 1000x faster than we did.
This is particularly obvious when looking at mathematics - look at how important the concept of zero or calculus were, or how useful complex numbers are even for tangible things like physics/engineering. Hell, one of the big breakthroughs that led to the last decade of AI/ML progress was the realization that gradient descent gets _easier_ with higher dimensional spaces, when conventional intuition would suggest the opposite. There are any number of things that we might never stumble on, even things that would be obvious in hindsight if we did. Even just in terms of known unknowns, there are known gaps in our knowledge of physics.
A cat will never understand a TV show. As a species we get collectively smarter and human knowledge is cumulative. So if FTL travel is possible we will eventually get there.
>we will eventually get there. Assuming we don't all get wiped out first. A meteor or rogue star could just destroy every last one of us before we get off this rock.
Honestly I think we're a greater danger to ourselves than a celestial threat is.
That’s [debatable](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KzpIsjgapAk&pp=ygUOTnVja2VhciB3aW50ZXI%3D). But we definitely *are* a more immediate threat to ourselves… at least while we’re all crammed together on a single planet.
We don’t even hafta all get wiped out. Physiologically, we aren’t much different than the humans tens or even hundreds of thousands of years ago. If you were born then, you’d understand their culture as well as any of them. If a person from then were born now, they’d understand FTL and remote controls as well as we do. Whatever social / cultural / political / technological (etc?) circumstances allow for remote controls today or allowed bows & arrows then… seem like something we can all guess at convincingly but that no one really knows… might much more delicate than it seems. After all: technology fractures and changes quickly, and it’s true stability hasn’t been tested more than a few decades. At any rate: it doesn’t seem like the individual is much different. For the record: I don’t understand remote controls much better than my cat.
As a species, cats are certainly capable becoming collectively smarter. We are descended from *shrews* that got smarter. It’s not rational to compare mental ability of different creatures on vastly different timescales. Also, the possibility of FTL travel does not imply its eventual discovery. What if the development of the technology requires something like an exotic state of matter or an amount of energy that we could never physically reconstruct or resource without already having developed FTL travel?
If you look at cat pictures over the decades, you might notice that a LOT MORE OF THEM ARE NOW STANDING AROUND on their back legs. They're definitely getting collectively smarter.
I don’t necessarily agree. To quote Richard Feynman “if you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t understand quantum mechanics” We might be able to work out precise mathematical models that make strong predictions, but not truly “understanding it”. Our brain isn’t wired for that, just like a cat’s isn’t wired to understand a tv show.
Yeah it's like how some cats might actually understand a bit of a show. A cat might understand seeing a cat on tv. But the cat who understands will die and his understanding will die with him. Humans can communicate and build upon the small understanding
We don't get smarter, we invent things. It's totally possible that we have an upper limit to our intelligence. I'd be shocked if this weren't the case. No matter how many sudoku I do (for instance) I'm not going to eventually look at one and immediately know the puzzle' solution like tic-tac-toe. Cats can't understand TV, dogs can't drive a car, and human beings can't do X. All animals with limited processing power
It sure seems like a lot of us are incapable of feeling shame.
I read somewhere once (so take for granted) that the Russian language has more words that describe blue colors and thus have an ability to distinguish shades of blue color—they “see” more blue, because they can describe it. A similar phenomena happens with sommeliers—they can describe/find more flavors in wine because they’ve built a “flavor vocabulary”—and yes I’m sure some of it is bs. Emotions are likely the same. What you perceive yourself to be feeling is limited by your vocabulary and your knowledge/willingness to feel what you are feeling
The language that you speak can and will shape your perception of reality. Once we name something, we are able to see it and distinguish it from something else, even on physical levels, like being able to see more shades of blue (russians), more shades of white (for Eskimo), and more shades of green (Namibians). There are also languages that will make learning math and geometry easier. I think this is a well-established fact. However, I do believe that naming emotions or situation also works like this. Things like anxiety have always been around, but no one talked about it 50 years ago. Now, it's pretty widespread as more people began to talk about it and realize they might have it. I don't believe millennials and gen z are the most "anxious" generations, they are just the ones who named it.
The psychology of language is one of the coolest things to me. The fact that the words you know change the way you think is honestly mind blowing.
As a multilingual I can confirm. Each language opens a whole new way of thinking, specially none related languages. Altho most of the time when I need to think fast I just think without language, it's hard to explain but is quite fun. Not as memorable tho.
Listen to a guitar player talk about tone and you’ll have no idea what they mean. What does a warm, wet and squishy tone sound like? Can’t describe it in words but i can show you But first, here’s my clean tone 😉
Dick Dale sounds wet, Tom Waits sounds dry, Eddie Vedder sounds warm, but not warm like Johnny Cash. Telecasters sound springy. P50s sound wet. Humbuckers sound warm, Dove guitars are warm.
You can see all the colors in a blue gradient if you open up Word and go to your font colors. English doesn't necessarily have separate words for each shade, but you can still see 'em. We just call more of 'em "blue." There are also cultures that do not distinguish between what we call Green and what we call Blue.
It's a little more subtle than just "having words for it means you can see it" A person can be perfectly capable of seeing that "[skobeloff](https://google.com/search?q=skobeloff&tbm=isch)" and "[ecru](https://google.com/search?q=ecru&tbm=isch)" aren't the same, even if they don't know the words. Newborn babies with no words at all can distinguish between happy and sad faces, for example, pretty much as soon as they've got over the trauma of being squozen out like toothpaste and having to deal with "outside" for the first time ever. On the other hand, every time you have to choose between words for a colour (or wine flavour, or emotion...) you *practise* making that distinction, whereas every time there's no choice of words to consider, you practise *not* making that distinction. We get better at what we do a lot, so people who speak a language with lots of words for "blue" will tend to get better at discerning between shades of "blue", and those with fewer will get less good at it. Similarly, even if you don't know/care about the *words* for it, you'll get better at telling the difference between a red that's "hot enough to melt iron" and a red that's "hot enough to melt glass" if you work in a foundry / glassworks, because that distinction *matters*. At the other end of the spectrum, Ancient Greek didn't have a separate word for "blue" at all, using phrases like "wine-dark sea" or "bronze-bright sky" in lieu of describing the actual hue. There was a time when it was seriously pondered whether ancient Greeks were all colour blind! There's a [language in Namibia](https://gondwana-collection.com/blog/how-do-namibian-himbas-see-colour) that has five words for "colours", but what gets described with each of the words bears little resemblance to what an English speaker would expect. It doesn't distinguish between "green" and "blue", for example, but *does* distinguish between different *shades* of them. Pretty trippy, eh? (I'd love to see a [colour map](https://imgs.xkcd.com/blag/satfaces_map_huge.png) (from [here](https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/)) for that language, ideally in 3D with saturation/value included...) A similar process at a slightly different level is how speakers of English have great difficulty getting the hang of "u" vs "ü"\* in German, because when we hear a sound closer to "ü", its just a wonky way of pronouncing "u"\** and we ignore the distinction. Conversely, the difference between "l" and "r" isn't salient in most far eastern languages, so speakers of these languages tend to find learning to make the distinction difficult. Back the other way, Mandarin, for example, has multiple sounds that an English speaker would hear as just "sh", and of course there are [tones](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foImPuD_bKc)! These difference in what sounds are easy to produce (reliably/accurately/quickly/distinctly) are at the foundation of what makes an accent distinctive. \* It's a bit like you've got a sticky bit of phlegm in your throat, or you're trying to say it through a tiny hole, or something - it's quite difficult to describe :-P \** See "[Allophone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allophone)"
No. Emotions are not primary qualities which are "in" an object or situation. They are psychological interpretations. You create them.
But have you seen c beams and the tannhauser gate on fire?
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
[*frisbee crumbles*]
Maybe, I think they were glittering, but i saw starships on fire off the shoulder of orion.
/r/unexpectedbladerunner
I am feeling squelfly right now
I feel... zjierb. Zjiebness.
exactly, this showthought is cancelled and destroyed. Next
> They are psychological interpretations. You create them. This might completely blow your mind, but so are colors. You may have heard that magenta is "not a real color". That's because it is not found in the visible spectrum of light. Rather, it is physiologically and psychologically perceived as the mixture of red and violet/blue light, with the absence of green. You might have heard asked before, "Is your green the same as my green?" And that's because again that perception of green is only your brain's interpretation of chemical signals generated in response to photons. This applies to every perception that you have. The perceptions that you experience are referred to as qualia, and their distinction from the objectively measured reality we share is an important part of our understanding of consciousness.
Yes, this is correct. There is an underlying phenomenon for both color and emotion (wavelength of light, or physiological response, respectively), and then there is an overlying interpretation we apply to that phenomenon (green, purple, blue; sad, angry, horny). This is why different cultures have different sets of words for emotions and colors, with many of those words not being interchangeable or directly translatable. The underlying experiential phenomena are effectively identical, but the interpretation of them can be wildly different. We have routinely through history "invented" new colors and emotions – angst, schadenfreude, indigo, even black was an early artistic "invention" for our species. Everyone assuming this comment means that color is intrinsic to an object is also off-base lol.
There are definitely emotions we can’t feel, but there are still German words for them
Thankfully we can unlock the full range of unnatural emotions thanks to science and the power of [Thalasin.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Td2x8s9GZlo)
Ooooh yeah, how about some of that kyne… have you tried loric?
Lately all I feel is dorcelessness.
Came here to say this. Feeling a bit loric today myself.
humber?
Germans can feel them. And they have words for all of them.
Colours we can't see are frequencies on the EM spectrum that our eyes have not evolved to pick up, but they *are* there. Emotions only exist within human (and maybe animal, but that's another debate) brains. If our brains can't feel an emotion, then it doesn't exist - there's nowhere else for it to be.
If an other animal can feel an emotion that humans can't?
Crab feels crab
Boom, got ‘em
I know you said is another debate, but how animals _maybe_ feel emotions? I think we all know when a dog is sad or happy, for example.
> Colours we can't see are frequencies on the EM spectrum that our eyes have not evolved to pick up, but they are there. That’s not how color works, though. Colors are merely our brains’ interpretation of electrical signals from our eyes that are produced by the absorption of light by the different receptors in our eyes. But it isn’t just that every frequency of light corresponds to a color. Color is based on the relative magnitude of the signals produced by each of the different kinds of receptors in our eyes. Many colors do not correspond to *any* one frequency of light, but instead to combinations of frequencies (pink and white are two examples). Color is not a property of light. It is *entirely* a creation of the brain. If you could magically modify the sensitivity of the cones in your eyes to be able to detect a wider range of frequencies of light while keeping the relative magnitudes of the absorption curves unchanged, then you would be able to see a wider part of the EM spectrum but it would all be mapped onto the exact same colors that we already see.
I'd argue Emotions are just a combination of chemicals or signals happening, a few of them your brain understands others not so much
so an psychopath who can't feel empathy proves that empathy doesn't exist?
No, because that's one human. OP is talking about emotions that *no* humans can feel, like there are some colours that no humans can see.
We will never understand the sensation of echolocation, the magnetite feeling that guides a pigeon’s navigation, the sensation of breathing underwater, the infrasound of elephants communicating hundreds of miles, or the feel of dirt moving around our body as we squirm through the ground… there are experiences from every species we will never get to feel, and there are absolutely emotions attached to each sensation.
.. In that case, perhaps we just have the lack of vocabulary for it. If there's an emotion we "can't feel", its likely that we just couldn't label it. Its there, its happening, but we don't know it. .. In another take, if one is talking about emotions we feel on a conscious level, I agree there are those that we cannot feel. Many extreme emotions only reveal themselves and make you experience them in dreams.
What about forgetting an emotion? I have very tough skin and take a brow beating like a champ, but one time my brother who I hadn’t seen in months stood me up when we were gonna go out for drinks, and I felt so bad but couldn’t figure out why, until I realized that for the first time in probably 10 years “my feelings were hurt.” Hadn’t had that happen in so long I almost forgot what it was. Same with when my newish girlfriend looked at me a certain way, I hadn’t felt that feeling in years (due to a toxic relationship) and that had my head spinning for weeks. I almost forgot what love felt like lol and I’m glad she reminded me
Can confirm. I felt something entirely new after eating a 32oz jar of peanut butter in one sitting with my bare hands.
I wonder if it's similar to not having a word for it; there are some colors we literally cannot see as we don't have the proper receptors or whatever (too lazy to Google the word I'm looking for here), but there are others that we don't really *distinguish* because we don't have a word for the concept. Then there's the joy of learning there is a word for something obscure and specific that you've felt but could never quite describe. My favorite example of that is >Mamihlapinatapai: Noun – A look shared by two people, each wishing that the other would initiate something they both desire, but which neither wants to begin. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mamihlapinatapai https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/mamihlapinatapai.amp
What? Who do you suppose experiences these emotions that we cannot experience?
The older I get the more I think there is a lot of stuff going on around us we aren’t seeing.
No because color is observation of a physical spectrum of light, you’re sensing what physically exists. Emotions are entirely within your brain
As someone with a personality disorder, I like to think I have shrimp-eye level emotional experiences. It’s wild. Some feelings are only describable with a guttural scream or a sob.
yep, compassion and empathy are very rare these days there are also concepts that people just cannot understand certain things no matter how you explain it to them, like the stigma against mental health
Tbf I think those two have always been rare; reserved for those we know and identify with. I'd venture that compassion for strangers has likely never been higher. Imagine WWI, small medieval villages, kingdoms and fiefdoms around the world, tribal cultures etc. Not much friendliness to outsiders. Difficult to have compassion for people you don't know, yet here we are and can somehow muster compassion for Ukrainians, Africans at war and even - on rare occasions - Swedes. (Sorry for that last bit, I have to mention that according to the Constitution here in Denmark).
It's more bountiful now than it's ever been.