5.16 Commentary on descartes’ discourse on method and meditations  (Page 2/6)

Another question entirely is - are the emotions which are based off of your opinions even real, since they are based off of opinions? For instance, when you judge how cool or interesting something is, that judgment is going to influence how much enjoyment you get from that thing, since your enjoyment of it comes from both how cool it actually is, and how cool you think it is. For instance, if you think that a person is not interesting, you are going to not be as interested in them and therefore not feel good things from them like you would from a person you are interested in. The questions are, how much does your opinion of them differ from the truth, and how much does your opinion of them influence how you feel about them? Those questions can be applied to anything in life. If you think something is interesting, you are going to be more interested in it. It is almost as if your opinions trigger and direct your emotions. If you think something is more valuable then you might be better able to recognize value that is actually there.

How much does your perception of what is going on impact how what you feel is going on? Your perception is going to determine what it is that you feel, that is, your conscious and unconscious perception of what is going on is. If you have a strong false conscious perception of what is going on you are going to feel differently, or think different things from the reality. Your unconscious mind, however, probably isn’t going to have a false perception of what is going on by itself since your unconscious mind is your natural mind and many other factors could be being influenced there that trigger real emotions which you don’t have conscious control over. For instance, a situation may be very complicated, so your conscious perception can only be so complicated because you can only have so advanced a perception of the situation that you are aware of, so thankfully you can only alter reality so much. The rest of how you feel is going to be determined by lots of complicated unconscious factors, or every factor that is a factor, technically so because that is all going to be processed at least unconsciously. That is also why learning from the source is going to be better than someone’s interpretation of it, because the source is going to be much more complicated than a simple verbal explanation. So the statement, “nothing is real, only your perception of it is” is not true because your perception is going to be limited by how much you are capable of consciously perceiving.

That previous quote from Descartes also explains another passage he used:

For it seemed to me that I might meet with much more truth in the reasonings that each man makes on the matters that specially concern him, and the issue of which would very soon punish him if he made a wrong judgment, than in the case of those made by a man of letters in his study touching speculations that lead to no result, and that bring about no other consequences to himself excepting that he will be all the more vain the more they are removed from common sense, since in this case proves to him to have employed so much more ingenuity and skill trying to make them seem probable. (pg 10 the European philosophers)