Let us now have a spot of chat about the ever-elusive nature of feelings. Feelings are to Materialist, what holy water is to vampires. It seems to be the weapon of choice for anyone who holds a metaphysical world view. My favorite ones have always been: “how do you love”; “how do you feel”; “so, are we just animals”. I would like to put the record straight; “We, and the animals can Kopple!”, as I shall now explain…
The thing most displeasing about feelings is that they are effectively an irrational disposition i.e fear… Fear of the bogeyman, spiders or dying of the Corona Virus are essentially irrational. However irrational such fear seems vital to mobilizing the body or a population into action, be it a herd of 1.5 million wildebeest or a planet of 7.5 billion people. This plays out in the natural world at all levels of life, irrational fear of predators is highly favored. It’s not without a sense of irony that it can be said; that fear has some foundation in reality: Fear is a perfectly reasonable assumption to make.
But to be honest, I’m not very fond of this example, it’s so dark! And, I’ve never been asked; “how do you feel fear”, or “do you feel hate”! Love, happiness, peace, and joy those are the feelings our tiny materialist mind just can’t comprehend. But the things we associate these feelings to are our children, our spouse, our communities and the things we value like security, companionship, health, and recognition… I imagine that the aforementioned herds might feel a similar sense of security in their numbers, a sense no less important to our continuity as to theirs. Recognition of feelings are endemic to all forms of complex life, and deeply rooted in our genealogy along with things like empathy.
Someone once said that feelings help us navigate a world unseen. The map is not the territory, and perhaps that is why they help us, we can form a more robust map of our territory. Materialism makes provision for feelings like love, happiness, and joy. These are crucial indicators to things we deem as favorable to our continued existence. So, yes world… We can love, quite fiercely it seems, some of us have even been known to laugh out loud. We can miss people and even enjoy something as lame as a walk on the beach or a road to nowhere.
The range for what is; and is not material is much wider than we can ever hope to comprehend. As such I’ve long since moved on beyond the question of whether or not we nerds can love or care deeply for things not of the self. But alas, those kinds of engagements, I feel warrant a fire and a race to the bottom of a bottle of Jack Daniels. And so my official position must and always will be…