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Protagonism

The prime emotions

One of my long-running passive quests is to create a model of all prime emotions. It's not done but here's what I'm at so far. Also note that I had to fudge the English language a bit, stretching and reusing some of the names, because English was not invented by philosophers.

(Note that the "future-minded" emotions like fear and excitement are actually reducible to these; they're just the partial-certainty forms: if you think there's a 50% chance that something upsetting will happen, you'll experience half the upset.)

Intrinsic, self-based

The joy of feeling that oneself is fortunate, or the sorrow of feeling that oneself is unfortunate. This is a feedback effect: being lucky or unlucky has an additional emotional effect on one's happiness. This is why, for example, one may feel very happy on finding a 1 dollar bill on the ground, even though the actual difference it'll make to one's life might be negligible.

The joy of sharing one's thoughts and interests with others, or the sorrow of not doing so.

Intrinsic, power-based

The joy of coming to understand something, or the frustration of finding out that one doesn't understand something as well as one thought.

The joy of becoming more skilled at something, or the frustration of seemingly becoming less skilled despite effort to improve.

Intrinsic, activity-based

The joy of exercising power, or the sorrow of having power and not having a chance to use it, or not having power over something that one should. The pleasure of running, climbing, customizing, punching bags; the powerful feeling of the weapons in Halo 1 and the way a lot of CCG cards appeal to an "awesome factor" that makes the card fun to play.

The joy of exercising skills and effort, or the boredom of not exercising them. This is the joy of hard games and the boredom of easy games.

Intrinsic, existential

The joy of novelty and change, or the sorrow of stagnation.

The joy of being involved in grand things, or the sorrow of not. This joy can manifest in getting to the climax of a good game or story, being on a large team and/or playing with stakes in a competition. It can also manifest in playing an important role in a real-world cause.

The notion of *progress* is a profound one because it combines these two: change, but within a context, which makes that context grander.

Intrinsic, analytic

The joy of experiencing good art, or the sorrow of experiencing bad art.

The joy of humor, or the disappointment of failed humor.

Ideal-dependent, self-based

The joy of feeling that oneself is a good person, or the sorrow of feeling that oneself is a bad person.

The joy of seeing that one's actions have had good results, or the sorrow of seeing they've had bad results.

Ideal-dependent, interpersonal-based

The joy of seeing someone else act how we admire, or the sorrow of seeing someone else act how we despise.

The joy of being seen by others how one wants to be, or the sorrow of being seen how one doesn't want to be.

Ideal-dependent, other-based

The joy of someone else's joy, or the sorrow of someone else's pain.

The joy of someone else's pain, or the sorrow of someone else's joy.

The magnitude of emotions is determined by:

the magnitude of the trigger

time since it happened

the causal distance from it (people are moved by, for example, the pain of others right in front of them, more than the pain of others across the world)

limitation: for emotions triggered by external events, there's either some sort of logarithmic scaling or it's outright capped after a certain point. Maybe both. Because seeing an entire planet get blown up wouldn't cause any kind of severe emotional trauma to most people.

I used to think they were also affected by the *probability* of the trigger. For example, you'd be happier about something good happening out of nowhere then if you already knew it would happen. But I think this is emergent: if you knew something was likely to happen beforehand, you felt the partial-certainty form of the emotion already, and the magnitude likely dropped off, so when the full event comes, it's only changing what you had already accepted as going to happen by half as much.

"Shadowing": you can experience a diminished form of an emotion through certain means other than its actual trigger. Works of art, in particular, whether stories, music, poetry, or other, contain bottled emotions that are experienced when the work of art is. That's why art is so powerful. It's actually what defines art.

It seems like you can also shadow to some extent by simply imagining the trigger. For example, I very often entertain imaginary conversations with real or hypothetical people where I explain what I'm thinking about and they mostly just listen and acknowledge. This is me shadowing companionship.

remaining mysteries

cuteness

nostalgia