Would I be incorrect to distinguish between emotion and passion (in the generic sense)? My definition of passion is an extreme and powerful emotion - often resulting in a reflexive response. I view emotion as an umbrella term for non-rational feelings that would normally influence or color responses to people or situations I encounter, while passions are more extreme feelings (positive or negative) that can trigger an anti-rational response, that is, a response with little to no thought behind it, substantially or entirely driven by the strong emotions alone. Or am I making a distinction without a difference - only a matter of degree?
Is my tendancy to immediately consider various sides of an argument, looking for flaws or weaknesses in the argument (even with my own thoughts) a monkey brain reaction or just the rational thought process kicking in quickly? I've always considered it a personality quirk - a natural argumentativeness.
I have found that the mental detachment you describe in watching your thoughts can be done similarly with regard to physical pain (viewing it as if it were happening to someone else and not me) can help control the pain, or at least my response to it.
Again you have given me much to think about and I thank you. Wishing you and yours the best.
No, you’re not incorrect to distinguish emotion and passion in the way that you’ve described. In fact, you’re aligning with a classical philosophical and psychological distinction. Thinkers like Aristotle, the Stoics, and later Descartes and Spinoza all treated “passions” as a subset of emotions, those that are especially consuming and capable of overriding reason, switching us from System 2 to System 1 cognition (I say cognition because I disagree with Kahneman that S1 is actually thinking). So your definition fits beautifully. In fact, I would argue that emotion, as opposed to passion, can almost be thought of as a kind of logic, or at the very least, a sort of fact-checking system. A gut check. As for whether rational thought is itself the monkey mind, and if perhaps everything we might group under "personality" is therefore also the same, that's a profound question. If we go to heaven, so to speak, or reach enlightenment, do we arrive without any aspects of our personality? There is a large degree of depersonalization that occurs on the path to meditative tranquility. The loved ones of Buddhist monks often notice this. A good friend of mine recently became a monk in Bhutan, an old country kid from the South, and I noticed a kind of quieting in him, if that's the right word for it. I do think a whole lot of what we consider the Self is actually monkey chatter. You feel this when you separate yourself. What remains, I like to refer to as the Watcher. This is both because you find yourself watching the stream of "your" thoughts and the carnival of reality itself from a silent, almost limitless kind of perspective, and because it invokes the Marvel character, who does much the same thing.
Would I be incorrect to distinguish between emotion and passion (in the generic sense)? My definition of passion is an extreme and powerful emotion - often resulting in a reflexive response. I view emotion as an umbrella term for non-rational feelings that would normally influence or color responses to people or situations I encounter, while passions are more extreme feelings (positive or negative) that can trigger an anti-rational response, that is, a response with little to no thought behind it, substantially or entirely driven by the strong emotions alone. Or am I making a distinction without a difference - only a matter of degree?
Is my tendancy to immediately consider various sides of an argument, looking for flaws or weaknesses in the argument (even with my own thoughts) a monkey brain reaction or just the rational thought process kicking in quickly? I've always considered it a personality quirk - a natural argumentativeness.
I have found that the mental detachment you describe in watching your thoughts can be done similarly with regard to physical pain (viewing it as if it were happening to someone else and not me) can help control the pain, or at least my response to it.
Again you have given me much to think about and I thank you. Wishing you and yours the best.
No, you’re not incorrect to distinguish emotion and passion in the way that you’ve described. In fact, you’re aligning with a classical philosophical and psychological distinction. Thinkers like Aristotle, the Stoics, and later Descartes and Spinoza all treated “passions” as a subset of emotions, those that are especially consuming and capable of overriding reason, switching us from System 2 to System 1 cognition (I say cognition because I disagree with Kahneman that S1 is actually thinking). So your definition fits beautifully. In fact, I would argue that emotion, as opposed to passion, can almost be thought of as a kind of logic, or at the very least, a sort of fact-checking system. A gut check. As for whether rational thought is itself the monkey mind, and if perhaps everything we might group under "personality" is therefore also the same, that's a profound question. If we go to heaven, so to speak, or reach enlightenment, do we arrive without any aspects of our personality? There is a large degree of depersonalization that occurs on the path to meditative tranquility. The loved ones of Buddhist monks often notice this. A good friend of mine recently became a monk in Bhutan, an old country kid from the South, and I noticed a kind of quieting in him, if that's the right word for it. I do think a whole lot of what we consider the Self is actually monkey chatter. You feel this when you separate yourself. What remains, I like to refer to as the Watcher. This is both because you find yourself watching the stream of "your" thoughts and the carnival of reality itself from a silent, almost limitless kind of perspective, and because it invokes the Marvel character, who does much the same thing.