Love
Love is a deep and complex emotion that encompasses affection, attachment, compassion, and a sense of connection. It can be romantic, familial, platonic, or even self-directed. Love often involves a profound sense of care and concern for another's well-being, a desire for closeness and intimacy, and a willingness to support and sacrifice for someone else's happiness. It can feel like warmth, joy, safety, and fulfillment but also vulnerability, longing, and sometimes pain. Love is not just a feeling but an active commitment and choice to nurture and grow the bond, making it a dynamic, evolving experience that can be both deeply personal and universally understood.
Anxiety
Anxiety often feels like a persistent sense of worry or fear that can range from mild unease to intense dread. Physically, it may manifest as a racing heart, tightness in the chest, shortness of breath, or a knot in the stomach. Mentally, it can feel like a constant state of vigilance or hyperawareness, where your thoughts are stuck in a loop of "what ifs" and worst-case scenarios. It's a feeling of being overwhelmed or out of control, where the mind and body are on high alert, often without a clear or immediate threat. It can also create a sense of isolation, as it might feel like others don't understand or share the same intensity of emotions.
Explaining Awareness to Artificial Intelligence
I often find myself describing emotions and sensations to others as if I were explaining them to an AI.
AI is a branch of computer science focused on creating machines and software that can perform tasks that typically require human intelligence. These tasks include learning from data, reasoning, problem-solving, understanding natural language, and perceiving sensory inputs. AI can range from simple algorithms that recommend movies or filter spam to complex systems that can drive cars or engage in sophisticated conversations. While AI can mimic certain aspects of human thinking, it lacks consciousness, emotions, and self-awareness; it operates based on the data and programming it's been given, making decisions through patterns and algorithms rather than intuition or personal experience.
Describing sensations and emotions to an AI involves breaking down complex, subjective experiences into more objective, measurable components.
Sensations:
Sensations refer to the physical experiences that come from our sensory organs (like eyes, ears, skin, nose, and tongue). To describe sensations to an AI, you might:
- Use Objective Descriptors: Instead of saying "It feels hot," describe it as "The temperature is around 40°C, and it causes a burning or stinging sensation on the skin."
- Relate to Known Data: For example, "The texture is smooth, like glass or polished metal," or "The sound is a high-pitched tone around 15 kHz."
- Quantify When Possible: Use measurable terms, like "a pressure of 50 Pascals," or "a brightness level equivalent to a 100-watt light bulb."
- Describe Effects: Explain the physiological responses, like "A cold sensation causes shivering and goosebumps."
Emotions:
Emotions are more complex as they involve both physical sensations and psychological states. To describe emotions to an AI:
- Break Down Components: Explain the physical (bodily) sensations and cognitive (mental) aspects. For example, "Fear involves an increased heart rate, sweating, and a sense of unease or impending danger."
- Contextual Information: Provide the context in which emotions arise. For example, "Happiness might be experienced when receiving good news, resulting in a release of dopamine in the brain."
- Behavioral Indicators: Describe observable behaviors associated with emotions, like "Sadness might involve crying, a slumped posture, and reduced eye contact."
- Relate to AI's Data: Use data points or scenarios the AI can relate to, like "Anger might involve rapid, shallow breathing, increased muscle tension, and facial expressions with furrowed brows and clenched teeth."
- Categorization Models: Use established psychological models, like the "Wheel of Emotions" by Robert Plutchik, which categorizes emotions into primary emotions (like joy, sadness, fear, anger) and secondary or complex emotions (like jealousy, disappointment, contentment).
Combining Sensations and Emotions:
Sensations and emotions often interact. For example, "Pain (sensation) can lead to frustration (emotion)," or "A gentle breeze (sensation) can produce a calming effect (emotion)." Describing this to an AI involves mapping these interactions to data points the AI can analyze.
By breaking down sensations and emotions into these components, we make them more understandable and actionable for AI systems, which rely on data and objective criteria to process information.
Anxiety feels like the blood is draining from our heads, creating tingling sensations and a tightening of delicate muscles. Our breath becomes shallow, constricting our airways and reducing our oxygen intake. Our heart rates quicken, amplifying the feeling of worry and alertness. As our hearts race, our minds loop a single message: "danger."
Anxiety distorts our perception of time, stretching moments into what feels like an eternity. It also alters how we perceive the world around us—colors may appear either duller or more vivid, shapes can seem warped, and familiar people may look strange or even threatening. Distances feel exaggerated, and our sense of time becomes skewed. We may ask ourselves, "Can we lower our heart rates?" One way is through controlled breathing.
All feelings are experienced in time and space and are accompanied by corresponding physical sensations. Emotions, especially intense ones like anxiety, are shifts in our perception of reality. The more challenging and frightening emotions are jarring, forcing our eyes wide open and causing our pupils to dilate, as if trying to capture every possible threat.
Philosophers and mystics have been contemplating the nature of consciousness for thousands of years, often feeling lost in trying to make sense of it. However, perhaps it's more practical to focus on understanding the workings of the mind and body and to strive for change, morality, and doing no harm.
Yoga can be seen as the practice of calming the mind. When viewed this way, it's less mysterious: yoga is the work we do to reduce and eliminate anxious feelings and negative thoughts.
Why should we master relaxation? Because of our human tendency to worry and experience mental suffering. We often incorrectly perceive the reality of our experiences. Our self-centered tendencies create both internal and external conflicts.
The mind has the potential for great discoveries and miraculous perceptions, but it is also prone to traps, strange thinking, biases, and fallacies. This is why we work on our minds daily—we recognize that these distorted ways of thinking are often driven by fear and a deep desire for constant comfort. Problematic thinking is amplified by our genetics, our unique chemistries, our family of origin, and the customs and beliefs of our society at any given point in history. Additionally, our behaviors outwardly reflect these internal dynamics, leading to a complex web of cause and effect in the world.