Philosopher Descartes was the first to propose that a person's mind and body can be completely separated. He did this mainly to solve the religious and scientific problems of the time. The issue of religion is the disbelief of people with scientific minds. Descartes firmly believes that his philosophy is comparable to mathematical proofs, and those who need to prove the immortality of the soul and other religious ideas will see his works. He never proved the immortality of the soul, only that if the mind (and therefore the soul) is separated from the destructible body, then it can be indestructible. This satisfies the basic Middle Ages dogma about the soul. The doctrine is derived from Plato, not the Bible. He preaches the resurrection, not the immortal soul, so it's not clear what problem he solves.
Scientific reason tackles the misguided science that medieval philosophers learned from Aristotle. The science of the time believed that all things behaved as they happened because they somehow “wanted”. They were acting according to their nature. Descartes wanted to show that physical things like rocks and even animals could behave as they did without minds, following mathematical rules rather than some internal volition. To do this, he had to show that mind and body were separate.
Although Newton developed his science of bodies in motion only 50 years later, Wilhelm Wundt and William James would take another 200 years to create the field of psychology and finally study the entity that Descartes separated forever from the body. It would only take another 50 years for the mind to be dismissed as irrelevant to science.
In 20th century summary, previous behaviorists took up psychology, and the study of the mind became the study of behavior. The mind has become an artifact, a silent observer of stimuli and responses. Neurological determinism was at its peak.
Lost in this transition was the study of an essential feature of mind but not behavior: feeling. Feeling is distinct from emotion, which is simply the neurological and physical response to a specific situation. Even insects have emotions. While emotion is the vibrating string, feeling is the note: awareness of emotion. Thus, feeling is closely linked to the existence of consciousness.
While emotions themselves are objective physical responses, feelings are subjective. Each person feels their emotions differently and reacts to those feelings differently. They are what make us unique from each other.
Even now, psychology is not so much concerned with the feeling itself as with the causes of the feeling. Like Barrett, et al. describe in their article “The Experience of Emotion”, science has done a disservice to the understanding of emotional life:
While convenient, this scientific approach misses an important aspect of reality: how people feel something when they experience emotions. Describing how emotional experiences are caused is not a substitute for describing what is felt, and indeed, an adequate description of what people feel is necessary for scientists to know what to explain in the first place.
It confuses the mind when you consider that feeling is central to our experience of consciousness. It's like you've created an entire music theory around vibrations and string plucks, blowing into tubes and hitting things and never considering whether to worry about the notes being played.
A materialistic understanding of feeling does just that. He assumes that the neurobiological and physical causes of emotions are the emotional sum total emotionally. For them, it's just about causes and effects. Any non-physical aspect of the feelings is irrelevant or a mirage.
The most extreme are the behavioral models of emotion. These theories are completely indifferent to lived experience. They describe psychology as a mere physical stimulus that generates a physical reaction. Emotional states are mere configurations of neural circuitry combined with reactions in the body.
Others define emotions more functionally: physical motives (like someone cutting your way in traffic) will produce behavioral reactions (swearing, yelling, angry horns). But it doesn't matter what happens between the ears. Physical and mental problems empowered all bodies.
Philosopher John Searle pioneered Biological Naturalism (BN) as a counterattack against materialistic psychology and dualism. BN believes that mind is an emergency attribute of the brain, but it cannot be reduced to any specific physical reason. In GN, feeling is as important as cause and effect. In particular, the experience of feeling cannot be reduced to the cause. While you can say that the mental state is the result of the discharge of neural circuits and the flow of involved areas of the brain, you cannot point to neurobiologicals and say "this is the feeling". You can see the functional MRI and brain activity of people who are sad, but you cannot see the feeling itself. The experience of felt life is a phenomenon in its own right.
That's why the feeling can only be experienced in the first person. The experiential experience of feeling is a component that cannot necessarily be reduced to a third-person perspective, even though the skills evidence can be applied in terms of facial features or other cues. The only way to understand what a feeling is like is to ask.
Psychologist Daniel Wegner coined insults at both groups of consciousness researchers. Materialists are "robo-geeks" as they believe that a complete description of consciousness is possible with a complete description of the brain and its inputs and outputs. The best-known example is Harvard philosopher Daniel Dennett, who argued that consciousness is an illusion. Wegner refers to them as Searle, the "bad scientists" because they maintain that such a description is insufficient (and therefore they are scientists because they consider consciousness in some way beyond neurobiology). science because conscious consciousness as something beyond neurobiology).
However, scientists are not ruins if they can understand the experience of feeling by scientific means.
Traditional experimental psychology probably has a better chance of understanding consciousness and feeling than debates, thought experiments and counter-thinking experiments by philosophers, or even experiments by neurobiologists.
Although science cannot answer why we experience consciousness, it has made some progress in explaining where it identified itself in it. Feelings are linked to perceptions and thoughts to create a conscious experience. This creates the feeling of a feeling being about something or feeling for something within the conscious mind. Consider that you may have a feeling of fear, but you don't have the feeling that that feeling is feeling for something. It would be disconnected. In a healthy brain, this never happens. Perception creates feeling. It could be the flash of an image that connects to a memory, for example. I look forward to it. I associate the time with an important appointment. I see I'm late. I feel like I've just seen a predator - even though that predator is my poor sense of time. It could be the flash of an image that connects to a memory, for example. I look forward to it. I associate the time with an important appointment. I see I'm late. I feel like I've just seen a predator - even though that predator is my own bad sense of time.
While awareness ignites the feeling, understanding what that feeling is about is an intrapersonal skill. In simple cases like being late, I recognize that my fear is related to being late. In other cases, I may not understand why my awareness sparked the feeling. I can even deliberately hide this knowledge, project it onto something else, etc. I may be afraid but not be able to explain why, because my thoughts about these feelings are confused by other feelings, such as guilt or shame.
People can also suppress their emotional experience, putting it in the background. The tendency to do this can also be cultural. Japanese people, for example, are much less likely to define emotional experiences than Americans.
Whereas biological naturalism is based on a rational approach to phenomena, an idealistic approach turns it upside down. In an idealistic philosophy like that of Kant or Schopenhauer, awareness of feeling is central, while physical aspects are secondary. In other words, neurobiology is just a way for our consciousness to make sense of itself, but as the essential causes of the way are, they are forever inaccessible.
If so, feeling is not simply a phenomenon that interests us. It's the only thing we really experience beyond direct perception. Perhaps if idealistic philosophy were more common in science, scientists would pay more attention to the study of feelings.