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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

Intrinsic, power-based

Intrinsic, activity-based

Intrinsic, existential

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

Ideal-dependent, self-based

Ideal-dependent, interpersonal-based

Ideal-dependent, other-based

The magnitude of emotions is determined by:

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

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