You humans?
The Perception of Hope and Threat, PHT.
But to predict their behavior, and thus control it, one must know their perception and control it (The Matrix).
Very simply put: fear=the apprehension of the unknown. It is an X element, untangible, uncontrollable, unmanagable. Once we can wrap our brains around it, fear looses it’s iron grip. Agreements between unknown forms of disagreement, would follow. Then it is the force to adhere to agremments which is needed by allparties to the agreement.
I think fear is rather the apprehension of a possible suffering. Pleasure is a forgetfulness of the prospect of that suffering.
"In innocence, we do not fear the dark
Light = darkness - fear" (XV)
Agree with both your definitions.
What is contentment?
I would put forward that humans do not fear the unknown.
Hope is a positive emotion and is also based on the unknown.
Humans fear or hope in dependence on what they anticipate when confronted with the unknown.
If they anticipate painful situations then they may develop fear.
If they anticipate pleasurable situations then they may develop hope.
Ultimately, it also depends on the level of control a person thinks they have over their own destiny.
Fear generally occurs when a painful situation is anticipated and where one has no ability to control or influence the outcome (for the better).
Yes but more generally, hope and and pleasure and pain are related with fear. Hope is a thought of something pleasurable to occur, and fear is a feeling, rather of the thought that it may not. It is painful to doubt if such pleasure will not occur, and that thought creates the pain of doubt.
So all these thoughts and feelings over the hope of doubt of pleasure to occur or not, are somewhat fearful. However, even if such doubt occurs, even then it is not con joined by a feeling of pain, because the absence of pleasure is not painful, in it’s self, pain ,because pleasure and pain are not inversely effected.
Pleasure and pain are not opposites, there are measures of both within each other, any situation creates a melange of both. There are no absolute pain or pleasure situations, only the element of one within the other.
The lack of control over the element of pain within pleasure, is fearful. And that control which is caused by the unknown affectance of control is the most fearful.
I do not distinguish between thoughts and feelings as they are both functions of the mind.
One creates and the other experiences - but still functions of the mind.
Agree, possibly a better choice of word as it gives greater depth and clarity to the concept.
Building on the agreement, Id propose it is the relative certainty of more pleasure than pain in the foreseeable future.
Evaluation of pain and pleasure does not go deep enough. What is the root of pain and pleasure? The root of all pain and suffering is death. The root of all pleasure is sex, reproduction, and the reaffirmation of life. Pain is dying. Pleasure is living. Contentment is balance between pain and pleasure, neither dying nor living, but merely being.
Hope is built on the known. Because what is first known, is whatever possible to imagine. If you can imagine something, then it is possible, and then it can be known to a varying degree. The knowability of an idea is its realness or apparent nature. Something easily reproduced to the senses is deemed realer than something difficultly reproduced. This is why people disbelieve in gods and deities. The more extreme credence owed to an item, the more people demand the thing be produced to the senses, to see, observe, feel, and know.
The ultimate unknown is death, to which all fear is rooted. Every organism, especially the conscious nature of human intellect, fears death precisely because it is the greatest unknown. What is life? What happens when humans die? What is consciousness? These are the necessary questions. People yearn for life after death, because they fear non existence, or losing consciousness forever. The average human necessarily correlates consciousness to life, even when such a connection is causally false. Is consciousness the epitome of life? Are there degrees of consciousness? How is consciousness different than intellect or imagination?
The imagination may exist as the necessary reaction to the idea of death, the idea of an organism to never be conscious again. You may slip into a coma, tonight, and never wake up. Or, perhaps, your consciousness is hijacked by a religious cult, brainwashed, or mechanically controlled by a slave inducing hat. You lose control of yourself. Your life is no longer your own. You lose control of your life. People make similar claims about drugs. A drug can control peoples lives via addiction. The possibility of losing consciousness, forever, leads to the primal and instinctive fear response. The most powerful fear of life, is something or somebody who threatens to either destroy you completely, or relieves you of your consciousness. To become a slave, is similar or the same as, losing consciousness.
People want to imagine a life beyond death, that, time is unlimited for humanity, when it may not be so. If time is limited, and consciousness is limited, then life is limited. The imagination defies this natural principle. The imagination exists immaterially. The imagination wants to look beyond the material, beyond your single lifetime. You imagine if you had—more time. You imagine if you had a longer consciousness. Your imagination is the stretching of your consciousness. An evolved, intelligent animal, a human, wants to experience more life than he or she is granted.
Imagination is the truest appreciation of the time humans have to live.
Imagination is the most powerful defiance against that instinctive and primal fear response.
Imagination is defiance against death.
Joy, and thus perceived hope, is the inner perception of progress or improvement concerning a perceived goal. Fear, and thus perceived threat, is the opposite.
Within this context,
Fear = perceived painful situations (physical and or psychological pain).
Anxiety = fruitless fear
How are threats perceived and determined?
Calculated through sensed suspicions and probabilities related to instinctive preferences (desire and discomfort).
And often combined with a misunderstanding of the nature of cause and effect (linking the wrong cause with an effect).
For example; I felt pain many time when X was present, thus, the cause of my pain is X. As a result, I develop fear of X.
Yes, humans misidentify causes of pain and harm, based on misinformation and errors of judgment.
Humans are even unable to diagnose the causes of simple illnesses.
Fear is beyond thought, it is a primordial connection to a bnefore, where ther was no language, onlky perhaps grunts and reactions of violence, , herding, feeding, and seeking the feeding pastu. Fear is the faint recollection of this epoch, when this went on?
This was the basis for the construction of hell, whereas, theoughts and ideas of the evolving improvement of these conditions began to be represented as heaven.