Reply to Clark Goble Tuesday, May 21, 2002 2:02 PM

CG: ???

Nonsense.

Most emotions can be conveyed in writing just as they can audio or film.
How one does it varies, of course.  To suggest that we can only determine
emotion based upon facial movement is simply erroneous.  The mere fact I can
create a narrative *describing* the appearance of faces undermines your
argument.  Further in film we can convey emotion using music, setting, and
so forth.  Some have become clichéd and hackneyed - such as a grey rainy day
with mournful music to convey sadness.  However you should be able to watch
any movie and come up with dozens of examples of sign-systems used by the
director to convey various emotions independent of the acting in that scene.

DS:
I think you are confusing describing a feeling verbally and expressing
emotion.  I can say I am sad, but an emotion is an embodiment.  You are
repeating a cultural myth.  The examples you give of using music betrays
your not being aware of the brain pathways.  For example smelling evokes
feeling because the pathway is directly connected to the limbic system.  A
setting is not sad.  That is like saying white is the color of mourning.
That is a cultural habit.  Music is more directly tied into the limbic
system hence emotions.

The best evidence (though by no means all) supporting my claim are in brain
injuries cutting the path between the frontal lobe and the limbic system.
The person affected can no longer feel emotions but is well able to
articulate why they think something.

The physical channels of expression for emotions are facial, body 'language'
especially gesture, some aspects of how the voice is affected by feeling,
not directly tied to word meaning, example is a scream.  The words
themselves are not produced in the part of the brain that has anything to do
with emotions.  That is extremely important from an evolutionary
perspective.  Emotions tend to be very limited in capturing information.
The fine grained language system which comes about through sharing attention
with each other could not emerge if it was too directly connected to
emotions.

This whole lack in writing systems underlies rationalism.  The first writing
systems arose in cultures where people where mostly illiterate and they
would have easily understood the difficulty of conveying feelings with
writing.  In Europe during the expansion of printing processes learning
depended more and more upon written information.  The detachment of feeling
from writing systems became a theory of separation between emotion and
thinking, rationalism.  Others such as yourself observe that they can
describe feelings verbally.  I am not saying emotion is separated from
thinking, it is separated in expressive channels, I am saying that emotions
and thoughts are whole mentally.  I am saying different channels convey
different information.  The end result is that when one just knows one
channel then one is going to have little idea of what the other channel was
doing.  A movie with no sound is not going to give us much information about
accompanying verbal content.

That is why movies surmount scripts.  The scripts cannot convey emotion in
the same way that an actor on the screen can.  The difficulty with movies is
not their success with showing emotions, it is the technical problem of
using a movie in a language like way.  Movies really mostly focus upon joint
attention processes.

Embodiment language-like motion pictures would decisively alter that
cultural 'norm' about emotions and rationality.

The science is well established about emotions.  That doesn't matter in my
opinion concerning a widespread cultural normative thought about how words
work.  This lack in the tool makes it very difficult for people to
understand how to integrate their feelings in to brainwork.  Hence in my
view the philosophical distinction between filmosophy and twentieth century
philosophies.

Think about the real thing.  If you tell someone, 'I feel sad'.  You feel
sad inside.  The words are not sad.  The voice is sad.  The eyes cry.  The
mouth assumes a shape.  The word sad.  Does using the word sad mean that the
sentence I wrote is sad?  The emotion of sadness is not in the descriptive.
Thanks,
Doyle Saylor