Making Sense 1

 What ways are there of making sense of the world, and how can we measure their varying degrees of effectiveness?

We paddle through life on a river of emotions. These emotions can be attributed to any number of things, from loving dolphins to despising floor lamps. Let us call the objects of considered in our attention at any given moment, the present stimuli. It may be unfair to attribute all drives to the vague term of "emotion", but no categories are perfect - let us pursue this until absurdity arises.

Under this theory, things make a whole lot of sense: if we assume that an emotion can be attributed to any set of present stimuli (green, leafy foliage versus smiling faces of approval) with some being more salient to certain people than others (a botanist versus a comedian) this does not run counter to the milieu of individual tastes that crowd our melting pot. Now, what happens to emotions as time goes on? We know for a fact that they change, to varying degrees. A honking streetcar does not usually ruin anyone's mood for the rest of their life. If the honking causes an accident in which a love one perishes, though, then we have a different story entirely.

So then, emotional association depends on time, and the objects of consideration. What other variables alter the emotional association to a set of objects? Perhaps, the emotional association to a superset, a subset, or a concurrent emotional reaction to something that has happened recently. This is just as well, for we know that a timely honked horn, or a shrieking driver can drive us to billowing madness with enough persistence.

But, how are these associations formed in the first place? This is a subset of the nature vs nurture argument - surely some associations are innate (angry faces), some are purely modern constructs (panic at seeing math formulas), and some are in-between (a red stop sign).

Since emotional association depends on time, we can also conjecture the converse: our association formed with present stimuli is coloured by emotions elicited by past stimuli. This is an important point, because we are saying that our emotions can influence our behaviour in momentous ways, some of which have no bearing on present reality.

Are we able to control our emotions? Are we able to form a correct mapping of emotions to past stimuli, and think logically about our present stimuli?

This, I do not know.