Are we full of emotions or just full of chemicals?
That’s the question I ask myself every now and then. In my younger days when I fell in (and out of) love, I always thought about this because I found it hard sometimes to control my emotions. When I first heard about hormones it was in a biology lesson, and found that adrenalin controls one of our many emotions - fright - to be more exact that’s fear, and we react to it by either fighting or flighting (face up to it or run away).
More generally - what are emotions? Is it genuine feelings we have for someone/ something, which stemmed from our souls as philosophers and theologians would suggest, or simply our rection to stuff being pumped from our glands to our brains? By taking drugs we are, in a direct way, pumping our bodies with chemicals with affects our brains, causing us to do all kinds of weird things and feel extremely euphoric (or depressed, depends on what drugs you took).
As I got older, however, I believe more in biology and less in theology. I believe that all our emotions are induced by our glands pumping hormones into our brains, and that our so-called emotions are nothing more chemically-induced biological reactions. I never believed in souls, an intangible being that everybody has and will become, apart from their bodies. Feelings of love and hate can be explained by the fact that our five senses - sight, hear, smell, taste, touch - all stimulates us simultaneously in many direct and indirect ways, and when we react to a situation that our five senses had encountered, our glands pumps hormones (or other chemicals) all around our body, and our bodies react to it - emotions coming out via our five senses again. Depression, Estacity, anger, hysteria etc., we can basically experience it all, if we are to encounter situations which triggers them.
Having believed and accepted the notion that men are their own masters, it’s much easier for me to endorse scientific theories than to accept convoluted word games in order to prove the existence of God. If believers want to ask, I’m not denouncing the existence of God, in fact, my musing at this very moment has nothing to do with it (in my mentality there is no such being, so it never bothers me nor attracts my attention), I’m just thinking about how we humans actually come up with emotions.
Note however, that our emotions need not to be exclusive from our thought process, since hormones can be stimulated or prohibited by neurons and mental activity associated with the brain, our thinking can affect our emotions, and our emotions can affect our thinking. The two are interactive - either can cause the other to be/ prohibits the other.
How our brain interprets signals from our five senses and how it reacts to it is all part of our learning process from a very young age, some maybe even from instincts - sulk and laughter are pretty instinctive, but at the same time we also learn how to trigger these emotions via external means. Most of our emotions depicts how our brains react to certain situations - when someone we know die, we feel sad and cry; when we win money from lottery or the stock market, we feel extremely jubilent and confident; when we are scolded for things we do wrong we feel depressed and our self esteem drained. Without the learning process, one is simply deficient as to how to let their emotions show. (Having said that, we also learn how to withold, or prohibits our emotions in some circumstances)
We gain experiences, and we learn to react to it. When I first heard news of my mother’s death, my mind simply went blank - I have no idea how to react to such news. I searched drastically for reactions but found none except that of shock and horror. My relatives and mother’s friends were all crying as they told me the news, but I simply reacted like a log - still and calm. The feeling of sadness didn’t sink in until much later, when I actually saw my mother’s dead body lying on a metallic bed. Although I saw other people’s reaction, I simply didn’t learn from them, and only when I saw my mother with my own eyes did the feelings suddenly appears and rushed to my brain, along with the nostalgia. Although I had saw similar scenes like such, either from a third person perspective or on TV, I guess I just don’t learn until I experienced it first-person. Humans all have different ways of learning - visual, auditory, and kinesthetic, and how well we learn from each method is probably depicted by our exposure to it from a very young age, and our neural networks in our brains.
Unfortunately, the thinking process is a much more complicated process than mere secretion of hormones. To this very day scientists are still trying to find out what our brains exactly, and moreover, what can they really do; although we have some idea of how our brain memorises repetitive signals from our 5 senses, how exactly our brain uses those information remain pretty much a mystery to scientists, although we have some concepts and theories as to how we learn and think. All we know is that our thinking process is pretty much a macroscopic phenomenon, whilst how our brain functions, being microscopic, is much difficult to deduce empirically - we have to chop a brain up everytime we conduct such experiments.
p.s. I came up with this for a reason - since my new job starts in 2 days (actually in 28.5 hours’ time), I’m feeling the excitement and also the nerves running all over my body, I’m not really reasoning properly because of this, and hence I asked myself those questions once again…