Feelings (part 2)

My response:

Hm, this is a very interesting question and there are a lot of layers and complications to it because your question sort of gets to the meta issues of who we are and what does it mean to be a sentient being and have a sense of self.

Have you never taken mood altering or mind altering substances before? Never had fluctuations in hormones or felt the flood of adrenaline? Sometimes I have found myself suddenly "feeling" something and acting on it and later trying to justify why I felt that way (he made me angry, or that thing made me sad). When I started to become more self-aware and less self-deceptive, though, I started actually asking myself -- did he really make me mad? What about that thing is so sad? I started realizing that sometimes although I felt I was having an actual emotional response to something, it was more of an emotional hallucination. i talk about it here and here.

I realized that for the most part, what I really was sensing was some change in my brain chemistry -- more adrenaline, less seratonin, more dopamine, exhaustion, whatever it was -- and my mind was trying to make sense of these "feelings" by imbuing them with meaning, the same way that during a dream it may interpret the bang of a door from the outside world as a gunshot in the dream itself. After that realization, I started questioning every emotion I had and going through an additional mental process apart from the feeling process in which I tried to analyze whether it was an actual feeling, or just an emotional hallucination. If I concluded that it was an emotional hallucination, i.e. that there was no reason that I should feel particularly happy or sad, angry or grateful, then I would just ride it out and/or try to ignore it the same way that you might ignore a visual hallucination of a dragon just inside your peripheral vision.

Do you think that you are just messing with your brain chemistry and your brain is interpreting the new sensations as being certain "emotions"?

My other question is about how you remember being normal and having normal emotions before a certain time in your life. Might you be self-deceived about that or remembering incorrectly? Memory is such a fickle thing, and the way we remember things is frequently not the way they actually happened. particularly, our memory of things will be colored by our vision of reality and the truth about yourself. In the same way that the brain interprets certain stimulus in a dream in a way that it "makes sense," might you have been interpreting contemporary childhood events in a limited childish way that assumed that you were normal, had normal feelings, that your beliefs and feelings were objectively warranted by the situations you found yourself in, etc.. or is possible that your earlier memories are all colored by a distorted view of the world, the same way that someone suffering from paranoid delusions might interpret any small thing as "people out to get him"?

Best,
m.e.