Voice of Time;
You have produced a well-considered post with valid points, which deserves an equally sincere answer. But if we are to continue this discussion of emotion, we should probably start a new thread as we are bound to go off topic. Although I can respect your position below, I can not agree with your conclusions.
The Voice of Time wrote:If I tell a person I care for them, I want them to know more than that I happen to have feelings or emotions about them. I want them to know I try to make their life a better one. A strikingly different kind of meaning.
The above quote was your conclusion in your post, but I moved it to the top to make my point, as it reflects your thinking throughout your post. It is true that there are two distinctly different meanings for the word "care". A nurse, who cares for her patients, requires no emotional attachment to those patients such as she would have with her family. In fact, emotional entanglements are discouraged in the nurse-patient relationship.
Nonetheless, both types of caring evolve from feeling and emotion. With her family, the caring stems from love and a need to protect and nurture. With her patients, the caring stems from a desire to do good, to be morally correct, and to satisfy her pride and feeling of self-worth in a job well done. Morality, pride, and self-worth are all rooted deeply in emotion.
Consider that a chair does not care if you sit in it, or use it for kindling. It does not sweetly hold your backside because it cares about you. Only life can care, because only life can feel and have emotion.
The Voice of Time wrote: You also seem to have failed in understanding the point that you will never be able to know if a person truly cares by looking at their emotions, as their emotions might lead to the most vicious of actions.
You seem to have created a false dichotomy regarding feelings. Do you see caring as good and emotion as bad? Because I have seen people who want to punch somebody's lights out, and can assure you that they "cared" very much about whether or not they would get to.
There is a reason why people say that love and hate are two sides of the same coin. One can not hate unless they loved first. It is not possible.
The Voice of Time wrote:For instance, somebody who "cares" for their child might kill their child if the child is in danger of facing pain, even without asking the child. This because you've defined "care" as bound in emotions, just because the person "thinks" that they have feelings of care they automatically reason that they care.
No. You have it backward. My main area of study is consciousness, and emotion is part of our consciousness, so I study it. I have been all over four or five forums and was surprised to learn that almost no one is talking about emotion, but what is worse is that they do not understand emotion. People seem to think that emotion is a by-product of thought and the brain, when the reverse is more likely true. Emotion is more real than thought ever thought to be, as thought is dependent upon emotion. Emotion is not dependent upon thought to exist.
Consider e-motion: Emotion is the movement, the action, the happening that causes everything else, and I suspect that feeling and emotion actually are consciousness -- thought is the by-product.
The Voice of Time wrote:The list of similar less extreme cases could be made really long (the example in fact is taken from Der Untergang (the dramatization of the last days of Hitler and those around him) where a mother feed her children cyanide capsules believing they're better dead than captured alive by the Russians... in the video the children try to resist, though who knows how far they managed to brain-wash their children in that bunker).
Here you are again confusing the issue and blaming emotion for actions produced by thought. It is true that emotion, fear, is what precipitated this action, but it was thought that chose the path. It would be better to question why they thought that killing the children was the only viable solution. Consider that these particular people were instrumental in the murder of millions of Jews, many of them children, so they were inured to the idea of this type of action.
Then add a little 'old wisdom' to your considerations:
"The liar never believes anyone;
The thief locks his doors;
The murder fears for his life."
We tend to believe that other people think like we do. Psychology calls this 'projecting' as we will project our drives, ambitions, values, morals, etc., on the people around us, and assume that they will act in the same way that we would. It is easy to see, considering the above, how the people in that bunker came to their conclusions.
Back to the topic at hand. Projecting is also a problem when disciplining a child and can corrupt the discipline. For example: I knew a man, who was a younger son, and always felt that his older sibling bullied him, until one day he grew taller than his older sibling.
This man grew up and had two sons. Whenever the boys got into some altercation, their father would be hard on the older son (the bully) and more lenient with the younger son (the victim). Then the father would tell (the bully) that he should be careful because the younger son might just grow bigger and beat his ass one day. The father was clearly projecting his own emotions on his sons, but he couldn't see it.
I knew the family well, and can assure you that both boys were reasonably good, but they were boys. (chuckle) The older son was in reality very protective of his brother, sometimes even taking the younger son's punishment, and not a bully at all; but the younger son was a bit of a snot. Would they have turned out this way regardless, or was it because of Dad's bias?
When the older son grows up and marries, if he has two sons, will he also project his emotions? If he does, he may be too lenient on an older son, thinking him a protector, when in fact he is abetting a bully. It could happen.
The Voice of Time wrote:Emotions are neither pure nor good but by accident, they are nothing but chaos until you tame them with reason and let reason dominate.
One can not tame something that they do not know exists. It is important to understand emotion and to understand the self, especially when disciplining. Discipline of any kind needs to be matched to the deed and the child, not to misunderstood emotion from the parent.
Gee