Nicker on 17/9/2013 at 01:28
Quote Posted by Pyrian
A person who lacks the ability to be awed would presumably also lack the ability to see something as basically good, and
that would be a fatal flaw.
"Hey guys. Put down your sharp rocks and get over here! Look at the totally awesome teeth and claws on that huge fury thing in the cave!"
Fatal flaws come in many flavours.
I think awe is just a byproduct of other cognitive functions. Like everything else, we have simply abstracted it, the way we have abstracted fears into phobias.
We can become awed or frightened by the idea of a thing, not just the thing itself, and that abstracted emotion becomes intensified and sort of distilled.
I think that these are artifacts of our semantic circuit functions and not separate or adaptive behaviours, just modified ones.
Queue on 17/9/2013 at 01:33
I've never felt what I'd consider 'awe' toward anything. Curious and interested, yes, but never awestruck.
faetal on 17/9/2013 at 09:00
Quote Posted by demagogue
Hmm, awe isn't an core emotion where you look to the limbic system & animals also share it, but an affect that comes out from language, culture, and personality... though some core emotions might be part of the complex, like cowering or frozen fear or total wimpering submission. But once semantics is involved, you bring in a whole social world that varies over time & place. That's not to say it's not still widely shared across civilizations and people too though, it probably is in various forms.
Have you got some references to support that? Because I'm pretty sure the intrinsic involvement of the parasympathetic nervous system (e.g. goosebumps) in feeling awe points to something very primal.
faetal on 17/9/2013 at 09:01
Quote Posted by Queue
I've never felt what I'd consider 'awe' toward anything. Curious and interested, yes, but never awestruck.
Maybe you haven't had the right stimulus. You've never seen something and thought "wow"?
Queue on 17/9/2013 at 12:17
Quote Posted by faetal
Maybe you haven't had the right stimulus. You've never seen something and thought "wow"?
What, like with a really a big cock?
Joking aside....
I think the closest I've felt to what a sense of awe would be like was devastation, complete devastation when I saw the MRI of the giant tumor in my son's head quickly killing him. I wanted to die. That's when I was 100% certain there was no God, because A) if God was testing me (as some fuck put it) why give an innocent child fucking brain cancer just to steer me back toward faith; and B) I was still alive.
... and then I felt an overwhelming immense sense of complete mental breakdown joy when a tired little Asian man came out and said to my wife and I, the operation was a success. And of course, that same fuck told me that God had intervened and guided Dr. Kim's hands....
Fuck me. They never give up--whatever gets the God-bothering psychos through the day, I guess.
But, I still wouldn't say I've ever been awed by anything. Holy shit moments, laugh myself into a stupor moments, breakdown into tears moments, immense love, immense hate, yes; but never a sensation upon encountering something that leaves me emotionally dumb and unable to comprehend or have thoughts about.
faetal on 17/9/2013 at 12:53
So nothing like staring at the grand canyon and thinking "fuck, this EXISTS"? No watching David Attenborough in a cave of giant crystals formed over millions of years? Stuff like that? No hearing that perfect piece of music capture a mood or feeling so perfectly you feel like your brain has melted into it? No loving someone so much, you're convinced that they might be perfect?
demagogue on 17/9/2013 at 13:05
Quote Posted by faetal
Have you got some references to support that? Because I'm pretty sure the intrinsic involvement of the parasympathetic nervous system (e.g. goosebumps) in feeling awe points to something very primal.
Many of the reflexive physiological reactions associated with the typical feeling people have when they typically use the term I'd agree are primal ... goosebumps, being still & hushed, all those things that we share in situations of fear even with our mammalian cousins. I wouldn't say they weren't. But that's different IMO than saying the term "awe" as we use it in daily speech refers *only* to the physiological reactions, or that the physiological reactions aren't colored by higher level concepts.
I think the term is much richer & deeper in meaning than those physiological and affective reactions alone, and that the reflexive reactions themselves are colored by higher level concepts. What someone describes as feeling awestruck in the presence of God is different than someone else being concerned about a nearby volcanic eruption; if you were only limited to talking about the physiology & limbic reactions, you couldn't articulate the difference between them and would be missing something about their meaning I think, in the sense the two different people would complain that you didn't understand what they meant by their use of the term "awe" without adding the cultural & worldview parts.
So while many of the emotions involved are definitely primal, they aren't everything involved in the concept. That was my point. I wasn't saying (or meaning to say) they were mutually exclusive, that the primal emotions weren't there at all; but just that there's primal affective aspects & cultural aspects involved in the concept, meshed together in complicated ways.
If you want a reference, then I think I'd direct you to where my basic position is coming from, which is cognitive linguistics in general, and more specifically the work of Radu Bogdan on the cognitive pipeline in the brain for concept creation in language. All concepts are an impossibly tangled mix of experience, emotion, and socio-cultural understandings, and for every concept you have to track it through that pipeline or you don't have the full concept (the term "awe" as people use it in daily speech), at best you have something else (a more limited concept you want to talk about that you happen to use the label "awe" to stand for).
Queue on 17/9/2013 at 13:08
Quote Posted by faetal
So nothing like staring at the grand canyon and thinking "fuck, this EXISTS"? No watching David Attenborough in a cave of giant crystals formed over millions of years? Stuff like that? No hearing that perfect piece of music capture a mood or feeling so perfectly you feel like your brain has melted into it? No loving someone so much, you're convinced that they might be perfect?
Nope. Neat and joyful, and glad for the experience.
And love is totally separate from awe, for attraction starts out mostly due to a chemical reaction and the idea of love is the feeling that comes afterward. The only true love, I believe, is that of a parent for a child--and even there I wonder if it's not nature's some sort of weird wiring to keep one from bashing their heads in with a rock.
Besides, love is mostly what you tell yourself to feel. You cannot love "things". I love books. Do I actually "love" the book?
And the Grand Canyon is just a big hole carved out by a bunch of water. Really amazing to see, but not awe inspiring because it
is just a big hole in the ground and we know what made it.
faetal on 17/9/2013 at 13:24
Love only exists because nature put it there - it's not necessary to think of it as being different from chemical attraction in its origin, it's just different hormones at different ratios. Maybe you're unusual then. I'd say that not feeling awe when faced with something which has great beauty, complexity, magnitude is exceptional behaviour. Nothing wrong with it - I'm just saying you're an exception. I'm sure being that even-tempered has many benefits.
Queue on 17/9/2013 at 13:30
I'm just pragmatic about most things. But I wouldn't say I'm exceptionally even-tempered because I do become very passionate over silly things. And I tend to look at new experiences with, I guess you could say, a childlike interest, but only to gain a perspective.
