Old 12-21-2007, 05:37 PM   #41
devonin
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Default Re: Depression.

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So a normal person may appreciate good feelings more than my hypothetical happy man, but the positive stimuli evokes the same response.
My whole point is that I disagree with this assertion of yours. You'll notice in my diagram that if you count it out, the first example, the happy stimulus is 20 -'s happier than the worst thing they have experienced, and in the second, the happy stimulus is 6 -'s happier than the worst thing they have experienced.

You seem to be claiming that in both cases (20 -s' better, and 6 -'s better) the person will react the same way, and I simply don't see how that makes any kind of sense.
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Old 12-21-2007, 06:23 PM   #42
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Default Re: Depression.

Well for me to be saying that I would have to be asserting that the relation to the worst experience possible is meaningless. I would have to be asserting that happiness is a measurable quantity, the meaning of which is described entirely by that measurement, not by that measurements relation to another measurement.

However, I imagine, as most things are, it is a combination our two ideas.

Regardless, we may have to agree to disagree. We're not getting anywhere.
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Old 12-21-2007, 09:20 PM   #43
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Default Re: Depression.

Well, Devonin was right when he said: "Every qualitative judgment about everything is done in relation to other things". However, saying that you need "sadness" in order to have "happiness" is only looking at it from one perspective. It boils down to the semantics of the concepts being argued here (a common CT theme it seems).

Mood/emotion in itself is an improperly defined concept. Self report of feelings is most certainly subjective and qualitative, but you could look it from a quantitative perspective by looking at activity in the pleasure centers in the brain (e.g. nucleus accumbens). This is not subjective. You could most certainly experience only happiness (x level of activity) without ever having to reflect on sadness (however unlikely this might be). This seems to be what Chaz is getting at.

So sadness is not really a requirement, though you still have to define a base rate for happiness in order to give it a definition, which means that the concept is still relative, leading back to Devonin. If I were to define emotion using a neurological scale I think I'd ditch the dichotomy all together and just define your emotion as feeling x amount of happiness.
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Old 12-22-2007, 02:18 PM   #44
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Default Re: Depression.

Gender can be defined quantitatively by looking at Somatostatin expressing neurons in the BSTc. Would the correlate to defining sadness as the absence of happiness be defining femininity as the absence of masculinity?
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