Questioning Human Emotion in the Car

This is the train of thought I dabbled in (because we all know I am not conditioned to really think, just pretend to think - half-think if you will) on the way home from work today:

Today I was trying to figure out what feelings were. Why do we find it so important to feel, to have "real" emotions; why do these feelings make us human? Why do we place so much importance on how they make us different to other animals?

Not that I got any answers.

But to explain myself, consider this. If you went through life without much emotion - just the monotonous no feeling mode – wouldn’t you go crazy? Or at least think something was wrong with you in comparison to all the ‘normal’ people? We place a lot of our sense of normalcy on the ability to feel, the chemical changes in our brain. When those go wrong, we're labelled sociopaths, or psychologically unstable. An inability to empathise or experience emotion is deemed undesirable by society, by psychology.

But why? Why is "feeling" so important?

Each question leads to another.

Emotions are a focal point to every person. They almost dictate you to a certain extent. Why are feelings such an essential part to our being and humanity?

See what I mean?

Then I got Doolittle involved in my thoughts. She said that “Emotions may be an inconvenience, but no one can go through life without them. They are what we know, write about, read about, and feel on a daily basis. We have no choice. Someone who feels nothing is just an impossible idea.”

So I said: “people who are considered psychologically unwell are like that. People like psychopaths, serial killers, etc… they don't even need to be dangerous, they just don't feel the way we do.”

Doolittle: what do you mean? Of course they FEEL. I’d say they feel more than average amount of feeling. They do feel... It might not be the same, but the root of what they do comes down to simple feelings which are universal. Serial killers, people who are deemed psychologically unwell... I think they feel as much if not more than we do. They might do things which we would never be capable of, but the cause/reason for it is all about feelings/emotions. There is no way we can separate what we feel and what we do and how we are.

Then there are people who try to separate the two as much as possible. It’s like a scale. You and I belong on a kind of "emotionally restrained and protective" part of the spectrum. Then other people who can easily act on what they feel, people who you can see as being a certain way because of how they feel about things... they belong to another part of the spectrum.

Eureka: And at the end of the day, we are all dictated to varying extents by our emotions. Again, why is that the way we're wired? For example, why do we need to phrase our sentences with respect to the feelings of those we are speaking to? Isn’t that a form of limitation on expression?

Doolittle: It is. We are trained not to hurt people.

Eureka: Doesn't that pose as a form of violation of that fundamental right? 

Doolittle: In a way… There are just unspoken, unseen lines in the sand sort of thing. Limitations which we can’t change.

Eureka: So, once again, we are limiting ourselves because of emotion. We are dictated by it. Why do we need emotion?

Doolittle: We don’t need it. It’s a part of us/part of everything. It’s a thing we have zero control over. 

Eureka: Our hands are a part of us. Our noses  are a part of us. Blinking is a part of us. We do not obsess over there. They do not have a significant say in our lives. So why do we place feelings  on such a pedestal? When I have dry eyes, for example, or a broken finger, I do not lock myself in a roomand mourn my very existence. But when my feelings are hurt I’d rather lock myself up than face the world. They have a stronger influence than the rest of me. The human is conditioned to place their emotions on a higher level than their physical selves. And their perception of their physical self is  influenced by their emotions. 

Then we got sidetracked by the entry on Wikipedia for "Emotion," and how we liked to look everything up in reference books because we needed to know everything. Which lead to the importance of bibliographies, how tired we'd become of the same old Cairo night scene, Nabakov, and the first sex scenes we'd seen on television as children. 

Yes, we have a very eclectic shared stream of thought. Makes for more interesting conversations. 

But back to my original half-baked thought. What do you think about feelings? Are they as important as we make them seem to be?