“I feel alone” isn’t a statement of something being a failure. It’s just a statement about the current emotional state.
Perhaps this is a tangent to the discussion, but “I feel alone” is not a statement about an emotional state. It is a confused statement that on the surface appears to be about emotions (“I feel...”) but the thing that follows those first two words is not an emotion, but a claim about the world: “(I am) alone.”
“I feel sad” is a description of an emotional state. “I feel sad about...” or “I feel sad that..” are descriptions of emotional states, together with, but separate from, a statement of a belief about the world. “I feel alone” and similar phrases, such as the general pattern “I feel that...”, confuse feelings with beliefs.
Every statement of the form “I feel that...” is false, because what follows the “that” is a belief about the world, not a feeling. Acknowledging it as a belief makes it possible to consider “Is this belief true? Why do I believe it is true?” Miscalling it a feeling protects it from testing against reality: “How can you question my FEELINGS?”
This seems like a promising starting point to explore what’s going on, from my perspective.
the thing that follows those first two words is not an emotion, but a claim about the world: “(I am) alone.”
As it happens, I’m currently typing this comment in a room that I’m in by myself. But there’s a specific bodily / emotional sensation that I’m not feeling at present, which I was feeling the last time I said “I feel alone” to someone, despite being in a room with multiple people then.
It’s also the case that I can feel my chair pressing into my body, and the top of the desktop pressing into my leg where I’m awkwardly resting it, and some tension in my arms because they had to stretch to my distant keyboard. (Don’t worry, I’ve since moved closer to it.)
One thing that’s true of my experience (which I expect to be true of the experience of, like, somewhere around 80% of people?) is that I will sometimes get sensations that are connected to ‘beliefs’ as part of my sensorium. That is, they’re more like the haptic sensations corresponding to sitting than they are like my internal monologue or other things that I traditionally think of as “beliefs”. Sometimes this is an embodied sensation, like “it would be inappropriate for me to say something here” might manifest as a tightness of the throat, but sometimes it isn’t.
[Staying with the level of sensation helps build this mapping and keep things ‘accurate’; if I feel a tightness in the throat and I don’t know what belief about the world it corresponds to yet, it’s probably better for me to share the sensation than it is to share my guess of what I’m reacting to about the world.]
Speculation time: sometimes I think embodied emotions are straightforwardly phyisiological; like I get angry and feel it in my arms because my SNS is actually making my arms behave differently. Other times I think what’s happening is something like the proprioceptive sense, but for ‘important concepts’, like relationships / what other people are thinking / how particular fields of math or science work.
Like, imagine we’re drifting on rafts on a body of water; I could see us moving away from each other and call that out to you, and you could presumably also see the same thing. Or there could be the two of us having a conversation, and I could have a sensation that seems basically the same, except it’s metaphorical; “I’m feeling us moving apart” in the weird part of my world-model that’s using a spatial analogy for stances we’re taking towards each other or beliefs we have about each other or whatever. Sharing that seems potentially more useful here, because we might be tracking movement through different ‘metaphorical oceans’.
Acknowledging it as a belief makes it possible to consider “Is this belief true? Why do I believe it is true?” Miscalling it a feeling protects it from testing against reality: “How can you question my FEELINGS?”
One ‘fun game’ you can play with friends is to have person A turn away from person B, who then lightly touches the back of person A, with a randomly chosen number of fingers, and then person A has to guess how many fingers they’re being touched with. (Generally, people do ‘okay’ at this, which is much less well than they expect to be able to do.) Or you can do the cutaneous rabbit effect.
Much less fun to do a demonstration of, and so I recommend just reading about it, are edge cases of pain sensation, like when a man felt intense pain due a nail passing through his boot, despite it missing his foot.
That is, if you view feelings as sense data like any other, it makes sense to apply the same sorts of consistency checks that you would to normal sense data. Like, if you live in a world where your eyes can be fooled, and your feeling of how many points are touching your back can be imprecise, presumably you should have similar sorts of suspicion towards your feeling that your housemate isn’t doing their fair share of the chores.
According to me, the way you fix things like optical illusions is not by closing your eyes, but instead by developing a more precise model of how exactly your vision works.
In the NVC model “I feel alone” would be a “mental emotion” and I agree that there are many cases that distinction is useful.
In the Circling context in which I have been you wouldn’t correct a person into making that distinction but accept “I feel alone” as an authentic expression. The fact that Vaniver uses feel here suggests that the Circling Europe training also didn’t enforce that distinction strongly.
In radical honesty a person saying “I feel betrayed” would be asked to say “I’m angry at you, because X happened and I imagine it means you betrayed me”. The person is often asked to say it multiple times till they connect with the anger.
“I feel alone” and similar phrases, such as the general pattern “I feel that...”, confuse feelings with beliefs.
I think this is complicated by the fact that there is, in fact, a distinct qualia of feeling that (at least I get) when alone, and it’s sort of like “I believe I am alone, and am sad about that”, but it’s a different flavor of sadness than, like, sad that my friend died, or that I didn’t get a job I was excited about.”
(I think “I feel betrayed” similarly conveys a particular flavor of feeling, and I’m somewhat wary of tabooing it for people who are trying to figure out what they feel and what they want to do about it. But it also seems important that “there is a separate fact-of-the-matter of ‘did Bob betray Alice?’ and ‘is Alice experiencing something that has that-distinct-flavor-of-emotion that ‘betrayed’ connotes’?”, and that the conversation will probably go better for Alice is she is attending to this fact)
Is this not handled by the word ‘lonely’? ‘Alone’ and ‘lonely’ are different, after all. “I feel lonely” seems to be the usual way to convey what you’re describing.
It seems more grammatical to say “lonely,” but I notice the two words have different feels to me, and it could be the case that “alone” fits more than “lonely” does, tho the difference between them is subtle.
Indeed; “I feel alone” has different connotations than “I feel lonely”. Namely:
“I feel lonely” simply connotes “I have a certain mental/emotional state”.
“I feel alone” connotes “I feel lonely; also, I believe that I am alone (and that the latter is the cause of the former), but I don’t want to claim this outright—I prefer only to imply it, in a way that prevents anyone from asking whether that belief is true”.
I think I’ve felt distinct things that corresponded to:
“I feel less companionship than I did a moment ago”
“I feel the absence of companionship”
“I think I would be happier if I had more companionship.”
Now, which one of those is “I feel alone” and which one is “I feel lonely”? Probably not obvious, and maybe I’d even refer to them using the same short phrase each time. But it seems useful to try to feel and convey those sorts of distinctions using word choice, as well as more words.
Perhaps. I am skeptical that these feelings can be distinguished in the way you say; how would you, for instance, differentiate between “I feel the absence of companionship” from “I feel lonely, and I think this is due to absence of companionship”—in other words, what you conceptualize as an affective state, could also be conceptualized as the combination of an affective state with a cognitive one, yes? But this is speculative; I do not insist on it (only on the fact that the answers to questions like this are not at all clear).
More to the point, however, is that supposing that the distinctions you describe are as they say they are, it nonetheless seems like quite a poor idea to refer to them using the same word that we also use to refer to an entirely external fact. The confusions that such terminological conflation leads to are obvious (and described, in part, in this comment thread), and can lead us into all sorts of error.
how would you, for instance, differentiate between “I feel the absence of companionship” from “I feel lonely, and I think this is due to absence of companionship”
For me personally, the first one is like seeing the words “absence of companionship” in my mind’s eye, and the second one is like feeling a tugging at my navel, trying to label it with “absence of companionship”, and getting only partial resonance. Like, I’m not confident yet, and so it seems like there’s still more info there that I should search for; maybe it’s romantic companionship, maybe it’s having a regular D&D group again, maybe it’s something else.
in other words, what you conceptualize as an affective state, could also be conceptualized as the combination of an affective state with a cognitive one, yes?
Yes, altho I don’t think I’d categorize ‘states’ that way. (Like, all mental states are ‘cognitive’ in some sense, and the standard definition of ‘affective’ seems very broad; like, I see a cat on the street and I feel valence and motivational intensity.)
it nonetheless seems like quite a poor idea to refer to them using the same word that we also use to refer to an entirely external fact.
I mean, it sure is nice to use two syllables instead of more than a dozen! When typing you really don’t have a good option besides using more words to achieve more precision, but when physically embodied subtext can be quite rich. (Like, compare describing a ‘spiral staircase’ with text, or with your voice and hands.)
This is an excellent, and very underappreciated, point.
Just to provide some terminology—the relevant term/concept is propositional attitude (Wikipedia page, SEP page). The error that Richard describes is that of mistakenly believing that ‘feel’ may coherently be understood as a propositional attitude (and that “I feel that …” may coherently be understood as a propositional attitude report), that is somehow different from ‘believe’ (and reports of beliefs). But of course this isn’t the case.
Perhaps this is a tangent to the discussion, but “I feel alone” is not a statement about an emotional state. It is a confused statement that on the surface appears to be about emotions (“I feel...”) but the thing that follows those first two words is not an emotion, but a claim about the world: “(I am) alone.”
“I feel sad” is a description of an emotional state. “I feel sad about...” or “I feel sad that..” are descriptions of emotional states, together with, but separate from, a statement of a belief about the world. “I feel alone” and similar phrases, such as the general pattern “I feel that...”, confuse feelings with beliefs.
Every statement of the form “I feel that...” is false, because what follows the “that” is a belief about the world, not a feeling. Acknowledging it as a belief makes it possible to consider “Is this belief true? Why do I believe it is true?” Miscalling it a feeling protects it from testing against reality: “How can you question my FEELINGS?”
This seems like a promising starting point to explore what’s going on, from my perspective.
As it happens, I’m currently typing this comment in a room that I’m in by myself. But there’s a specific bodily / emotional sensation that I’m not feeling at present, which I was feeling the last time I said “I feel alone” to someone, despite being in a room with multiple people then.
It’s also the case that I can feel my chair pressing into my body, and the top of the desktop pressing into my leg where I’m awkwardly resting it, and some tension in my arms because they had to stretch to my distant keyboard. (Don’t worry, I’ve since moved closer to it.)
One thing that’s true of my experience (which I expect to be true of the experience of, like, somewhere around 80% of people?) is that I will sometimes get sensations that are connected to ‘beliefs’ as part of my sensorium. That is, they’re more like the haptic sensations corresponding to sitting than they are like my internal monologue or other things that I traditionally think of as “beliefs”. Sometimes this is an embodied sensation, like “it would be inappropriate for me to say something here” might manifest as a tightness of the throat, but sometimes it isn’t.
[Staying with the level of sensation helps build this mapping and keep things ‘accurate’; if I feel a tightness in the throat and I don’t know what belief about the world it corresponds to yet, it’s probably better for me to share the sensation than it is to share my guess of what I’m reacting to about the world.]
Speculation time: sometimes I think embodied emotions are straightforwardly phyisiological; like I get angry and feel it in my arms because my SNS is actually making my arms behave differently. Other times I think what’s happening is something like the proprioceptive sense, but for ‘important concepts’, like relationships / what other people are thinking / how particular fields of math or science work.
Like, imagine we’re drifting on rafts on a body of water; I could see us moving away from each other and call that out to you, and you could presumably also see the same thing. Or there could be the two of us having a conversation, and I could have a sensation that seems basically the same, except it’s metaphorical; “I’m feeling us moving apart” in the weird part of my world-model that’s using a spatial analogy for stances we’re taking towards each other or beliefs we have about each other or whatever. Sharing that seems potentially more useful here, because we might be tracking movement through different ‘metaphorical oceans’.
One ‘fun game’ you can play with friends is to have person A turn away from person B, who then lightly touches the back of person A, with a randomly chosen number of fingers, and then person A has to guess how many fingers they’re being touched with. (Generally, people do ‘okay’ at this, which is much less well than they expect to be able to do.) Or you can do the cutaneous rabbit effect.
Much less fun to do a demonstration of, and so I recommend just reading about it, are edge cases of pain sensation, like when a man felt intense pain due a nail passing through his boot, despite it missing his foot.
That is, if you view feelings as sense data like any other, it makes sense to apply the same sorts of consistency checks that you would to normal sense data. Like, if you live in a world where your eyes can be fooled, and your feeling of how many points are touching your back can be imprecise, presumably you should have similar sorts of suspicion towards your feeling that your housemate isn’t doing their fair share of the chores.
According to me, the way you fix things like optical illusions is not by closing your eyes, but instead by developing a more precise model of how exactly your vision works.
In the NVC model “I feel alone” would be a “mental emotion” and I agree that there are many cases that distinction is useful.
In the Circling context in which I have been you wouldn’t correct a person into making that distinction but accept “I feel alone” as an authentic expression. The fact that Vaniver uses feel here suggests that the Circling Europe training also didn’t enforce that distinction strongly.
In radical honesty a person saying “I feel betrayed” would be asked to say “I’m angry at you, because X happened and I imagine it means you betrayed me”. The person is often asked to say it multiple times till they connect with the anger.
I think this is complicated by the fact that there is, in fact, a distinct qualia of feeling that (at least I get) when alone, and it’s sort of like “I believe I am alone, and am sad about that”, but it’s a different flavor of sadness than, like, sad that my friend died, or that I didn’t get a job I was excited about.”
(I think “I feel betrayed” similarly conveys a particular flavor of feeling, and I’m somewhat wary of tabooing it for people who are trying to figure out what they feel and what they want to do about it. But it also seems important that “there is a separate fact-of-the-matter of ‘did Bob betray Alice?’ and ‘is Alice experiencing something that has that-distinct-flavor-of-emotion that ‘betrayed’ connotes’?”, and that the conversation will probably go better for Alice is she is attending to this fact)
Is this not handled by the word ‘lonely’? ‘Alone’ and ‘lonely’ are different, after all. “I feel lonely” seems to be the usual way to convey what you’re describing.
It seems more grammatical to say “lonely,” but I notice the two words have different feels to me, and it could be the case that “alone” fits more than “lonely” does, tho the difference between them is subtle.
Indeed; “I feel alone” has different connotations than “I feel lonely”. Namely:
“I feel lonely” simply connotes “I have a certain mental/emotional state”.
“I feel alone” connotes “I feel lonely; also, I believe that I am alone (and that the latter is the cause of the former), but I don’t want to claim this outright—I prefer only to imply it, in a way that prevents anyone from asking whether that belief is true”.
I think I’ve felt distinct things that corresponded to:
“I feel less companionship than I did a moment ago”
“I feel the absence of companionship”
“I think I would be happier if I had more companionship.”
Now, which one of those is “I feel alone” and which one is “I feel lonely”? Probably not obvious, and maybe I’d even refer to them using the same short phrase each time. But it seems useful to try to feel and convey those sorts of distinctions using word choice, as well as more words.
Perhaps. I am skeptical that these feelings can be distinguished in the way you say; how would you, for instance, differentiate between “I feel the absence of companionship” from “I feel lonely, and I think this is due to absence of companionship”—in other words, what you conceptualize as an affective state, could also be conceptualized as the combination of an affective state with a cognitive one, yes? But this is speculative; I do not insist on it (only on the fact that the answers to questions like this are not at all clear).
More to the point, however, is that supposing that the distinctions you describe are as they say they are, it nonetheless seems like quite a poor idea to refer to them using the same word that we also use to refer to an entirely external fact. The confusions that such terminological conflation leads to are obvious (and described, in part, in this comment thread), and can lead us into all sorts of error.
For me personally, the first one is like seeing the words “absence of companionship” in my mind’s eye, and the second one is like feeling a tugging at my navel, trying to label it with “absence of companionship”, and getting only partial resonance. Like, I’m not confident yet, and so it seems like there’s still more info there that I should search for; maybe it’s romantic companionship, maybe it’s having a regular D&D group again, maybe it’s something else.
Yes, altho I don’t think I’d categorize ‘states’ that way. (Like, all mental states are ‘cognitive’ in some sense, and the standard definition of ‘affective’ seems very broad; like, I see a cat on the street and I feel valence and motivational intensity.)
I mean, it sure is nice to use two syllables instead of more than a dozen! When typing you really don’t have a good option besides using more words to achieve more precision, but when physically embodied subtext can be quite rich. (Like, compare describing a ‘spiral staircase’ with text, or with your voice and hands.)
This is an excellent, and very underappreciated, point.
Just to provide some terminology—the relevant term/concept is propositional attitude (Wikipedia page, SEP page). The error that Richard describes is that of mistakenly believing that ‘feel’ may coherently be understood as a propositional attitude (and that “I feel that …” may coherently be understood as a propositional attitude report), that is somehow different from ‘believe’ (and reports of beliefs). But of course this isn’t the case.