I think it’s complicated and some anxieties do just redirect themselves, while in other cases, the anxiety is pointing at something real and does go away when the circumstances change.
Suppose that right now as you were reading this, a man with a gun showed up and started making threatening gestures with the gun and angrily shouting at you in a language you didn’t understand. I expect that this would make you anxious. I also expect that it would be an incorrect prediction to say “well anxiety is a conserved quality, so if the situation would resolve itself, John would probably just feel equally anxious about something else”.
Nah, I don’t really get anxious in emergencies like that. I get very physically tense, but it doesn’t feel like anxiety; if anything it feels like mental clarity and focus and a drive to act. There’s a kind of relief to it, like a bunch of the usual day-to-day constraints just ceased to be binding and I can act more freely to resolve the problem. (I guess there might be momentary panic as well at first, but that’s also different from anxiety.)
Nonetheless, you have a fair point: certainly there are at least some situations in which a person’s circumstances are counterfactual to their anxiety in the way they feel to be counterfactual. I guess I would claim that those cases are a pretty small minority, for anxiety, at least in the first world. Definitely for that particular emotion, the prior should be very heavily against “the thing someone feels anxious about is counterfactual to their feeling”.
I think it’s complicated and some anxieties do just redirect themselves, while in other cases, the anxiety is pointing at something real and does go away when the circumstances change.
Suppose that right now as you were reading this, a man with a gun showed up and started making threatening gestures with the gun and angrily shouting at you in a language you didn’t understand. I expect that this would make you anxious. I also expect that it would be an incorrect prediction to say “well anxiety is a conserved quality, so if the situation would resolve itself, John would probably just feel equally anxious about something else”.
Nah, I don’t really get anxious in emergencies like that. I get very physically tense, but it doesn’t feel like anxiety; if anything it feels like mental clarity and focus and a drive to act. There’s a kind of relief to it, like a bunch of the usual day-to-day constraints just ceased to be binding and I can act more freely to resolve the problem. (I guess there might be momentary panic as well at first, but that’s also different from anxiety.)
Nonetheless, you have a fair point: certainly there are at least some situations in which a person’s circumstances are counterfactual to their anxiety in the way they feel to be counterfactual. I guess I would claim that those cases are a pretty small minority, for anxiety, at least in the first world. Definitely for that particular emotion, the prior should be very heavily against “the thing someone feels anxious about is counterfactual to their feeling”.