My impression is that the feeling really is something like “what would happen if,” in order so that you can answer that with
“something bad” and get out of the situation where it might happen. But because you are afraid of it happening, there is a slight tendency to misinterpret the feeling as something that might make it happen, i.e. as a desire for it, just as e.g. when you are scared in a dark room, and you hear a noise, you interpret that noise as meaning something scary.
This only makes sense once you realize that the subjective feeling of a desire does not in itself tell you what it is a desire for, but you learn that from experience. So for example there is nothing about the subjective feeling of hunger that tells you it is about food or eating, but you simply notice that when you are hungry, you are likely to eat. From this you conclude that hunger must be a desire to eat. Given this kind of separation between a desire and its object, there is nothing to prevent the kind of misinterpretation above: I stand at the edge of a cliff and feel a peculiar feeling. It would be really bad to fall, so it would be dreadful if that feeling were a desire to jump which might make me jump!
What’s worse is that it is theoretically possible for someone to say to himself, “I want to jump. So I’ll do it, to get what I want.” Of course this is not very likely to happen.
My impression is that the feeling really is something like “what would happen if,” in order so that you can answer that with “something bad” and get out of the situation where it might happen. But because you are afraid of it happening, there is a slight tendency to misinterpret the feeling as something that might make it happen, i.e. as a desire for it, just as e.g. when you are scared in a dark room, and you hear a noise, you interpret that noise as meaning something scary.
This only makes sense once you realize that the subjective feeling of a desire does not in itself tell you what it is a desire for, but you learn that from experience. So for example there is nothing about the subjective feeling of hunger that tells you it is about food or eating, but you simply notice that when you are hungry, you are likely to eat. From this you conclude that hunger must be a desire to eat. Given this kind of separation between a desire and its object, there is nothing to prevent the kind of misinterpretation above: I stand at the edge of a cliff and feel a peculiar feeling. It would be really bad to fall, so it would be dreadful if that feeling were a desire to jump which might make me jump!
What’s worse is that it is theoretically possible for someone to say to himself, “I want to jump. So I’ll do it, to get what I want.” Of course this is not very likely to happen.