Good is an actual quality like water that we need to "drink"

Since need is contingent to species characteristics you just contradicted your "actual quality" moment...

I still have to disagree with you. I think there is an absolute good and bad that is hidden from humanity and I am trying to uncover it. It would be no different than how I am digging for a hidden treasure that many people don't realize is there. I am like a metal detector and I am beeping loudly. I acknowledge the factors you have presented which is your own personal basis for a conviction of good and bad being subjective. But I still don't think any of these factors disprove my theory/worldview. Lastly, I think this absolute good and bad would be a scientific definition of good and bad. Would we even call it that or would it instead have a different description such as an emotional definition of good and bad? I am trying to discover this new good and bad that I think is real and other people and scientists can join me in this search for truth.

I went to visit the zoo. The place where bats are located is dark, you can barely see them, and I, as a positive person asked the zoo worker... why not adding lights and put some flowers in that area?

Not everybody works well with positive attitude. Of course the common understanding is that being positive is good for your health, it might improve your work, it would do this and that.

However, some people like loneliness, and they are not depressed but they like loneliness. People who like suffering, people who live their lives with no other hope but let the day pass by. They can be taught to be positive and look for a better future and wider horizon in their lives, but they just want to be themselves.

Years ago, with the family we used to run the streets helping homeless people. After buying food to one of them, he asked us if we can taking him to "his house". That was something new for us, this homeless actually had a house to live in. We took him to the place he showed us as his house.

We traveled about 20 miles. At one point he told us to make a right turn in a big avenue but it was the wrong turn. We spent more than one hour looking for the correct street. He told us that he remembered that the street was two blocks after a 7 eleven. So, we stop at the 7 eleven we were using as the signal, and asked the attendant if there was another 7 eleven in that avenue.

Effectively, it was another 7 eleven five blocks away in the same avenue. We found the street. After knocking the door, the owner asked him what he was doing over there, why he came back home.

After a brief explanation, we understood that this man used to live over there, in his brother in law house, with his sister, nephews and his ill father, but he left several times his job and family in order to live as a homeless in the streets.

He just liked living that way. He left jobs and a good and comfortable house as shelter in order to live in the streets and be exposed to be hit by gang members who steal their money, liquor or cigarettes.

I don't say that what this man was doing was "bad" and neither "good", but surely was his choice for living.

I do feel different than him, but I can't argue with him if he is happy the way he is, even when it contradicts everything I think is better for him or for anyone.

The quality of good is not necessarily opposite to the quality of bad but to me they can also be complementary. In many cases, being bad is also a quality, like being aggressive which is better for war when defending the country.

Here an interesting dialogue of a suicidal guy who wants to leave the room to take his life away, and a religious person who saved his life and now is listening the other's reasons which are against his beliefs. The man suffering of depression at one moment lies or is confused, because he says that he was like that "all his life", but later claims suffering, age, etc. as motives for not living in this world anymore.

For him, it was a kind of positive being a suicidal person with the wish of ending with everything in darkness, complete darkness, no trails of life at all.

There is nothing subjective in what I said, I am not Fresco. My point is that there are certain relational Universals. I am neither an Idealist nor a classical empiricist. In between...

This is a true story.

I know a person who has been always a cordial dude with good manners and always showing patience and good intentions.

He is a father of two children, which were born from two women in his life. Having his life with the second woman, he changed into a person without patience, screaming sometimes when something was not in agreement with him, a bad behavior in front of others, thinking negatively about others, being angry for nothing, etc.

One day, in his annual medical check up, the doctor found that he had an infection in the liver. After treatment, he became the quiet and nice person he was before.



Good health won't guarantee to have positive emotions, but it might work to fix some cases of negative emotions and negative attitude in an individual.

You seem to relate your insight to artists when artists are the most weird thinking individuals who live in a world of imaginations which bring great entertainment for the rest.

What about your insight directed to hard working people, the ones who really build up families, societies, nations?

Maybe up the meds?

Here is my new and best explanation:

To begin, I would like to say that I am a hedonist. Hedonism is a philosophy which states that pleasure gives our lives good value and pain gives our lives bad value. The goal is to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. So, hedonism is all about pursuing positive emotions and avoiding negative ones since it is all about being happy and enjoying our lives that gives our lives good value. But there is the idea of non hedonistic based values which are values independent of those advocated by hedonism. I think hedonism is true while non hedonism is false. These arguments I present in this packet are entirely my own personal and unique arguments based upon my own personal experience of having struggled 10 whole years with ongoing misery due to emotional trauma and obsessive thinking. It was an ongoing battle and I have finally broken free of that cycle.

Now, I am here to share to you what I have learned from this horrible experience. I am firmly convinced, based upon my own personal, profound, and powerful experience, that it can only be the emotional value judgments that can give our lives real value. That is, it can only be our emotions that can make things, moments, and situations of real good or bad value to us depending upon which emotion we feel. Since positive emotions are always emotional value judgments of good value, then they are the only things that can make things in our lives perceived as good. Since negative emotions are always emotional value judgments of bad value, then they are the only things that can make things in our lives perceived as bad. It is, therefore, only through our emotional states that we can perceive good and bad. Our emotions would have to be like glasses that we need to wear in order to see the value in our lives.

If you felt a negative emotion (an emotional bad value judgment) and you used a rational good value judgment, then this just creates a big mess here since you have two value judgments going on at once. It's no different than if a sighted person was seeing colors, smelling a certain scent, and hearing a certain noise who, at the same time, had the thought of those colors, that scent, and that noise. To say that the thought itself is a rational form of a heard noise, a smell, and perceived colors would be nonsense and it would just create one big mess here.

That is why we would say that the thoughts alone can only be the idea of sounds, smell, visuals, values, emotions, water, food, pain, love, hate, misery, etc., but that they do not give our lives any real version of those things. Since positive emotions are the only things that can put us into a state of mind where everything is joyful, beautiful, happy, good, and worth living for, then the only way to live and be an artist is through positive emotions. Having negative emotions in your life or no emotions at all is simply no way to live or be an artist regardless of your contributions to the world and what types of artwork you create. Your life would either be bad, horrible, **** (negative emotion) or just completely blank and nothing at all (no emotion).

Since I don't think rational value judgments themselves can be any real emotions and since emotions themselves are value judgments, then I don't think the rational value judgments can be any real value judgments either. They are only being claimed to be real emotions and real value judgments when they really aren't. You can do all the things in life that would imply that you were hungry or thirsty even if you weren't hungry and thirsty just as how all the factors that would imply good and bad value independent of positive and negative emotions can be evidenced in this world. But, again, that does not mean that you are hungry or thirsty or that you have real good and bad value judged/perceived in your life independent of your positive and negative emotions. After all, there are many people who believe in false ideas all the time such as Thor the God of Thunder. These people have lived their lives as though Thor was real. But Thor was actually not real.

Continuing on here. Aren't things that sound absurd often true? Just because my worldview sounds absurd does not mean that it is false since there are so many things that are absurd in this life that are true. It is just the absurdity of life rule. There are certain things in this world such as people dying from deadly viruses and, even though this is an absurd thing, it is real. So, life isn't perfect and it seems to me that many people are expecting a certain value system to be the real value system which is why you see my value system being dismissed as nonsense and false. But life doesn't always meet our expectations and we don't always get what we want in life. My value system might certainly be one that doesn't work well for humanity, but, then again, there are many absurd things in this life that just don't work out for us, but said things are true. Instead, humanity tends to delude themselves of such things because they simply do not like them and wish to have things their way.

I am going to say this last thing here before I finally conclude this description. I am going to point out a quote by a skeptic/neuroscientist who supports the idea of our emotions being value judgments:



Therefore, since our positive emotions are always emotional value judgments of good value and our negative emotions always being emotional value judgments of bad value, since emotions themselves are actual qualities (things that exist such as water, food, electricity, etc.), then positive emotions would have to be a quality of good and negative emotions would have to be a quality of bad. This means that the only way to live the most beautiful, good, and worthwhile life would be if you were in the most profound, intense state of euphoria of your life and the only worst life you can live would be if you were in the most profoundly horrible negative emotional state of your life. Unfortunately, moments of euphoria are very brief and fleeting which means that your life can only be the greatest for you in brief, fleeting moments.

To conclude this description, I guess you could consider me someone like a sociopath who does not understand empathy since he never had any. Of course, I am not a sociopath and this is just an analogy for saying that I simply do not understand how one can live a life that is truly good, beautiful, and worth living for independent of positive emotions. As a matter of fact, I never recall a single given moment in my life where I perceived real value independent of my emotions. If there was a given moment, then I do not recall. Neither have my rational based values been any real emotional state in my life either. You could fully educate a sociopath on empathy, but the sociopath would still not understand it since he never had it.

Likewise, you could also fully educate me on values, morals, and ethics and how our rational value judgments can be emotional states, but I would never understand that either since this is something that has never been known to me from personal experience. The only way my worldview could change to a new sense of values would, therefore, be if I had a whole new personal experience that could replace all the good values, joy, beauty, misery, badness, etc. that my positive and negative emotions have offered me. Remember, this has to be a real version of those things in my life and not just a matter of empty words. I would pay very close attention to my inner universe. If there is a real form of those things there, then my life would have a real version of those things. If not, then they would not be anything real, they would just be empty words, and there would also still be no real emotion there either.

As a matter of fact, I think skeptics and neuroscientists have even said that we can't have empathy without emotions, but that we can have emotions without empathy. I think I have heard them also say that our rational value judgments themselves are not any real emotional state and that the only real emotions are the biochemical emotions defined in my lexicon. Since you cannot have empathy without emotions, then I don't think you can have any real value and worth in your life either without emotions. Since emotions are the biochemical induced states, then it would have to follow that, not only can you have no empathy without these biochemical emotions, but you also cannot have any real value in your life either. This would have to, therefore, mean that rational value judgments themselves are not any real value judgments and neither are they real emotions.

Well you reply reminds of of the politicians favourite word economical growth ad eternum...but you see pleasure cannot be without contrasting pain. If you don't come from a low and live on a plain field of pleasure you cannot perceive it. Offering a Ferrari to the ferrari factory owner gives him no pleasure...you have better odds with a mini coupé...

Here's a suggestion. Try replacing the word 'I' with the word 'It' in your (=its) posts. Several philosophies suggest that 'self' is transient and lacks unity. It may result in a completely different and therapeutic perspective.

Hard to believe Cam, but I mostly agree with your point of view.