Can we choose our emotions, or do they happen to us?

By Geoffrey Moore

Author – The Infinite Staircase: What the Universe Tells Us About Life, Ethics, and Mortality

This is the latest in a series of replies to a long-ago post entitled “Twenty philosophical questions that are hard to wrap your head around.”? Here is the blurb for this one:

There are times when we may feel like our moods are beyond our control. It's important to remember that moods aren’t something that simply occurs randomly. We have the power to influence and alter them. Being able to select the mood for a given situation is a skill associated with emotional intelligence. Choosing terms of our mood can greatly assist us in managing any circumstance we find ourselves in.

I think this blurb is seriously off base, so let me just state at the outset that we cannot choose our emotions because they do, in fact, happen to us, but we can choose how we respond to them.? That said, there is a whole lot more to discuss here.

Mood is core to our everyday experience.? We are never not in a mood, although sometimes we may not be aware of the mood we are in.? In addition, it is clear that mood extends beyond humans to manifest in the behavior of higher-order animals and birds. ?So, what is mood?? What does it serve?? Why did natural selection select for it? Where does it come from?? Or, to leverage the framework of The Infinite Staircase, on what stair does it emerge?

Mood emerges on the stair of desire.? This is a biological domain governed by homeostasis, a perpetually self-adjusting mix of chemical signals that keeps all living beings on track to keep on living.? The dynamics of this mix are just barely understandable within the confines of a single cell, tracing an interlocking series of arcs of input-process-output.? For laymen like myself, the interlocks become impossibly complicated when we uplevel our view to incorporate the operation of tissues in which cells are signaling other cells, and they become mindboggling beyond belief when we uplevel to organs using hormones to signal other organs, all in support of maintaining homeostasis at the level of the organism.? All organisms, including ourselves, are like surfers riding these waves of constantly changing biochemical undercurrents.

Consciousness emerges from out of this mix.? Driven by desire, its function is to learn and master behaviors that restore us to homeostatic balance, even though we may never understand how exactly that works.? The balance we seek is dynamic because both our internal and external environments are constantly changing.? In the early stages of its emergence, consciousness is still purely biochemical.? We are all mood—just spend some time with any newborn if you want to witness this in action.?

Over time, values emerge out of consciousness.? We assign positive valences to outcomes that fulfill our desires and negative ones to ones that thwart them, and we remember both.? Maternal love is the crucible within which these early advances are achieved.? It sets the mood for positive wellbeing.? Subsequent advances are developed through parental discipline, using both positive and negative valences to guide us toward increasingly more stable and sustainable strategies for living.? Sadly, dysfunctional parenting can have the opposite effect, leading to deep-seated and potentially lifelong challenges which can never be completely erased, only increasingly better coped with.

So, now we get to the point made in the blurb.? As we mature, we do gain the ability to influence and alter our moods, and this is an important part of growing up.? But it is important to understand that the primary flow is from the bottom up—emotions are the wave.? The secondary flow is corrective from the top down—our conscious self as the surfer.? Surfers do not create waves.? Our conscious self does not create emotions.? ?

In the framework of the staircase, our conscious self is organized around character narratives we construct about who we are, where we’ve been, and what we stand for.? We expose these language-enabled narratives to analytics to pressure-test their coherence and credibility because they are fundamental equipment for living, our way of being ourselves on a consistent, meaningful basis.? And ultimately, we come up with a theory about ourselves, what we might call our identity, something we continually revise as we go along.

Imposing emotional control upon ourselves is part of this process.? We are acting out an inherited compulsion to seek homeostasis, doing so primarily through the mechanism of language, that is, by talking to ourselves.? A lot of self-help literature is organized around tips for talking ourselves through challenging situations.? Whole moral schemes consist of language-based rules for how to analyze our behavior and intervene to control it.? This is a top-down approach seeking to impose discipline on a bottoms-up phenomenon.

When we analyze morality, especially in conversations with others, we worry a lot about whether any given scheme is right or wrong, but there is a bigger issue at stake.? Operationally, consulting any scheme before acting entails a dysfunctional amount of overhead to bring to bear in the moment, especially in the moments of greatest need.? As any athlete will tell you, you cannot perform and analyze at the same time.? So, how can we adhere to whatever morality we have committed to and still play the game of life successfully in real-time?

Sticking with an athletic mindset, our goal is to become as coordinated as we can be across all the stairs that make up our own infinite staircase—mens sana in corpore sano.? What is most disappointing about Western philosophy, as influenced both by Plato and the Christian tradition, is how it set the upper parts of our staircase—our mens—at odds with the lower ones—our corpore.? This is the opposite of coordination, and while there are certainly times when such opposition may be warranted, it discourages us from experiencing our moods in a more open and constructive way.?

This is where mindfulness, as well as all other related forms of nonverbal engagement, can make such a positive contribution to our wellbeing.? These practices help integrate the self, grounding it in positive experiences of homeostasis, equipping us to deal with situations that jolt us out of our comfort zone.? They give us the stability to impose controls in the moment, as well as moments of tranquility later on when we recollect and try to come to terms with whatever shook us up.?

This should remind us that we are, at root, biochemically engineered beings.? We are our moods.? We don’t choose them.? They happen to us.? We need to honor the foundational role of the middle of our infinite staircase even as we spend most of our waking hours on the stairs above it.

That’s what I think.? What do you think?

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