Question!

[conuly]

I had come up with this post last night, and then after I forgot it my philosophy class reminded me of it.

How do you know what you're feeling? What does it feel like? Do you think your physical responses to emotions are like other people's? Bonus question: Do you think it's possible that what you see as green, other people see as red? Or some color you can't see? I used to think that.

Comments

[redlami.livejournal.com]

Sounds like some questions Hofstadter discussed in one of his books. Which I think I'd like to read again.

Anyway, I think "knowing" and "feeling" are different but interrelated and complementary ways of processing. "Knowing what I'm feeling" and "Feeling what I know" are internal feedback mechanisms that give me opportunities to make course corrections when I act based on one or the other.

I don't think my responses are exactly like anyone else's, but I think that, like language, they're close enough that I can learn to approximate an understanding of other people's emotional states. Of course I'm somewhat disabled in this sense as an aspie, but I still have some ability here. It's like I'll never enter the Tour de France, but I can ride a bike well enough to get to the store.

As for color... since two of my kids have red/green color blindness, I have to deal with this all the time. Like the time my wife made swiss chard, and my son pointed to the stems in disgust and asked what the orange stripes were. Again, color perception is relative but tends to be common enough that we have a shared palette, or vocabulary. But those who are further from the typical, like my kids, have a harder time of it and have to work harder to cognitively compensate for their disabilities. So for instance, my kids knows to read the labels on the crayons and use pink for skin because their skin is pink, not green.