Store32

Emotion is held up as the source of what is good and valuable in human culture. Poetry, music, narrative, all these serve human emotion. Without this service, life is perceived to become devoid of meaning. 

Brutalist architecture made of gray slabs of concrete, purposefully designed to minimize the human that stands inside of it is said to be emotionless but just that description is laden with emotion. It is central to any human perception of the world. So what is this thing that dominates our thinking even when we say it is absent? Should it be the pinnacle of human expression? If not, then what even could be?

Emotions are central to human action because they are guideposts that the mind rapidly generates. An impression is created that says if a situation requires quick action or careful observation, whether the outcome will help us or harm us. This North South East West is core to making quick decisions. 

More specifically, when we say that something makes us feel an emotion, what we actually perceive is a crossroad off high or low energy, and a sensation of pleasant or unpleasant. The rest is interpreted. Sadness has a low energy unpleasant base, while anger is high energy and unpleasant. Joy is high energy and pleasant while a feeling of contentment is low energy and pleasant. There’s obvious overlap in unpleasant emotions and the difference comes down to how the brain interprets these signals to fit the situation.

Without emotions, humans are required to carefully weigh innumerable details logically. The problem is, that many of these details don’t have a value scale that can be evaluated through rigorous structures like math. There is no true or false dichotomy to evaluate them against. Yet their aggregate is judged as good or bad. Without emotion, there is no structure to judge against.

At the same time, emotions are flawed. They don’t always get the direction right. Sometimes they’re stuck in one direction or another. 

For instance, the food you eat should ideally be optimized for health, and yet it isn’t. Your emotions say you want sugar and fat when nutrition says you need more fiber and antioxidants. Ideally, you should invest instead of going into debt, yet credit is a juggernaut of finance. Your mental energy should be spent productively producing resources for the future, yet we build virtual cities in video games trying to produce in game resources on a computer that can’t feed us. Boring and predictable should be favorable to excitement, yet this is seen as the death knell of a romantic relationship. Perhaps most of all, someone with abundance, like a malignant dragon, still seeks to hoard more to sleep on top of.

Stuck values that no longer serve our ability to prosper. Should this be the pinnacle of human culture? Why is this what makes us write poetry and sing songs? When a dystopia is described in crushing detail, it is bad because it ignores or forces emotion. Everything in our being rejects a fully functional society because of its effect on emotion. A society could have eliminated war, crime and interpersonal violence, but if emotion is curtailed or channeled, it is evil.

This rapid pattern recognition system that can easily misinterpret a black feline walking by as an omen of foreboding doom is also telling you that it is the most important thing in your life. The mental system that misidentified your crazy ex as being the ideal emotional partner, insists that it is the crucial factor in survival and thriving.

Why does a song feel important? Because it triggers a feeling, an emotional preference. In essence, human culture is being hijacked by a fast interpretation algorithm to generate more for itself. Every song, poem and narrative is there to give your emotional recognition guidepost system something to do because its idle and telling you that its bored. Boredom, a guidepost that it generates. It’s telling you to spend time, calories and neurons that could have gone into actual survival on memorizing songs and experiencing feelings that weren’t yours to begin with.

Is this system of emotions worthless? No, as stated, there are real efficiencies to be gained from these guideposts. A song may train your emotional system to recognize a pattern that it never had the chance to experience. A poem may teach you a new way to interpret a situation. There are real benefits to all of this rumination.

Where we fail is when we trust this quick impression system as core to who we are. It is there to push us in a direction with a somewhat good pattern identification structure. This pattern of circumstances has been good for us in the past. It has also been dangerous. These guideposts are valuable to start you moving in the right direction, but they aren’t where you should stop thinking.

Your emotions make you unrelentingly hungry. Often they make you hungry for what you don’t actually need or can even use. They are the source of all human greed. They are the source of cruelty. Your emotions reject good functional solutions to problems because they don’t “Feel” right. These are not the pinnacle of human culture. They are a useful structure that has run amok in our society, proclaiming to be the most important thing a person can attain to. A guidance mechanism that keeps pointing back to itself as the thing that should be fed with more input before all the other parts of your brain.

It’s also what motivated me to write this. Without an emotion pointing to the feeling that something was wrong, at a base level, it does not benefit me to spend time and resources on it. By considering the details of that feeling and attempting to work out the pattern that was being recognized, the structure it identified is clarified.

In general, it does not seem like people understand the process that a pattern of circumstances presents itself as an emotion generates motivation. Even more vital, that the emotion is not an irrefutable truth, it is an interpretation of partial information meant to point the more methodical parts of cognition in an appropriate direction. It is not infallible. In fact, the more we implicitly trust our emotions, the more we train them improperly.

When we act on an emotion we are telling the pattern recognition that it was right. When we do this, our brain strengthens that pattern. If the emotion guided us successfully to a good outcome, it should be strengthened. However if the emotion lead to a bad outcome, it is vital that it is not rewarded or it will continue to lead to bad outcomes.

It seems to be that this happens at the hand off point. The emotion is triggered, and then our cognition must then interpret what to do. When we start to act in accord with the emotion, that is the trigger for the initiating pattern to be strengthened. It is told “good job, you recognized the proper stance to take” and is fed more resources.

Do you see the danger? This situation requires a rejection of emotion that does not fit the situation. It requires a rejection when an emotion will bring a bad result. So how do you know when that romantic attraction is leading you to your next ex, or to a bad investment? The truth is, you can’t always. However you cognition should be telling you that you’ve been attracted to the wrong personality traits before. They seem exciting, but they lead to conflict. It should tell you that this investment says it will produce outstanding returns but you’ve seen those promises before and they were fantasies. 

Your pattern recognition isn’t taking account of what you’ve learned. It is going off of the last time it saw the pattern and you said, “Good job.” The last time you saw excitement in a partner and you chose to pursue you said, “Good job.” The last time the numbers looked so good and you had to invest for fear of missing out you said, “Good job.” Your emotional pattern recognition system doesn’t know about what you learned in the meantime. It just knows it did a good job last time, it sees the same pattern and then offers the same guidepost. It’s up to your cognition to evaluate its input this time and accept or refute it.

Now layer on the feeling that your emotions are your core. Now it seems improper to refute an emotion. In this view, your emotions are who you are. The guideposts are all there is. Rejection of the guidepost is a rejection of you. 

With this lens, emotions are never told that they’re wrong. It takes a life shattering situation to shake up the cognition into fighting against feeling. If you know that person that keeps making the same mistake again and again, ask yourself if its their emotions that lead them back to the same point each time. Now look at your life. What emotion is leading you back to the same point? What guidepost needs to be rejected? What does your cognition need to fight?

She smiled at me and held out a tray of cookies. Her white hair was exactly like I remember. I started to reach out for the tray, but stopped.

“My grandmother died when I was twenty five.”

“I know dear. Have a cookie.”

“How are you here?”

“I live here.”

“But you’re dead.”

“No dear, your grandmother is dead.”

“Why do you look like my grandmother?”

She smiled. “Have a cookie.”

“What happened to Kevin?”

She frowned. “Who?”

I pointed upstairs. “The boy that died.”

“Yes, I remember, he was once a nice boy. He fed my kitty and I gave him cookies. He was sad and later he was angry. Very angry.”

“How did he die?”

“He was angry. I am tired. Have a cookie so I can rest.”

I took a cookie off the sheet. It was warm and sweet. For a moment I felt like I was five years old again.

When I finished, I found myself standing next to my cruiser. I had no memory of climbing out of the house. Looking back at the house, I could no longer smell the scent of baking. As I approached the house again, the only thing I could smell was cat piss. A big fuzzy tomcat stood guard outside the rotten outside door. As I approached, the tom growled and hissed. I was not supposed to enter.

I tried to walk past but the tom latched onto my leg and I had to kick it off me. More cats lined up and blocked my path, each one hissing and growling. With a little bit of intimidation, they scattered.

The smell of cat piss burned my nose as I walked into the back hall. I suddenly knew why Ron had struggled for breath while looking for me. Coughing, I made my way to the kitchen, which I found in a similar state to the rest of the crumbling house.

I turned and went up the stairs. Cats were now following me and getting in my way, hissing and spitting.

At the top of the stairs, the twelve year old Kevin stood in my way. “Why?” he said.

“I need to know what happened.”

“I told you.”

“You said that he got angry. That doesn’t explain what happened.”

Something moved in my peripheral vision. It looked like someone was sneaking up to attack me. I instinctively flinched, but when I opened my eyes again, no one was there and Kevin was now gone.

I entered the cat food room, the tuna can I had brought was partially eaten, but there was no cat around.

My eyes were watering from the smell of cat piss. As I blinked away the tears, something moved in the back corner of the room. Shadows flickered up the walls and across the ceiling. I drew my pistol and pointed it at the motion.

I blinked hard to clear my vision again. For a moment, I was pointing my gun at my own chest but then it was pointed at the shadows that still moved in the back corner.

“He was angry.” I said.

There was no answer.

I put my pistol back in its holster. “And you used his anger against him.”

The shadows shrank and a white and black short hair stepped out of them and lay on the ground breathing heavily.

“You’re the cat lady.” I walked up and scratched its head. It was exhausted. “And this is the only way you could show me what happened.”

After that, the cats cleared out of the old cat house. The white and black short hair knew it couldn’t stay after it had been discovered.

We humans always fantasized that we would be the ones that developed abilities like telepathy and mind control. Would this cat’s special talents be passed down to her children or will this anomaly end with her? She knows to stay hidden. She’ll no doubt pass that inclination on to her children. We won’t know if they’re around, and even if we found them, they might be able to trick us into forgetting they exist.

“Tell me more about this woman?”

“She bakes cookies for you if you feed her cat.”

I tried to comprehend what he was saying. “So if you feed these cats she gives you cookies?”

“Not these cats, just her cat.”

“Which one is her cat?”

Kevin looked confused again. “I don’t know.”

“How do you know which one to feed then?”

“I’ll show you.”

The sweet smell hit me again. This time I could figure out the scent, it was the smell of baking cookies. Something wasn’t right. Kevin moved up the rickety stairs and quickly rounded a corner. I followed after him, being careful to not fall through the steps.

The air was dusty. I could see the tiny motes of light drifting through the air. I made it to the top of the stairs.

“Watch out for that hole.” Kevin pointed to a hole in the floor where the boards had rotten. There was graffiti on the walls but there was something odd about it. Most of it was incomplete. At the end of the hall, green spray paint said “Mart.” That’s it, “Mart.” Kevin walked up to one of the doorways.

The room was littered with open tuna cans and cat food tins. In the middle was a young man lay on the ground. I rushed over to him, kicking cans away as I moved through the room. The floor crunched under my weight in a few places. I felt for a pulse but he was already cold, possibly dead for some time. The murder weapon, a carving knife was still in him but he had been stabbed four times.

When I pulled up, I was tense and agitated but I realized that I lost my sense of urgency when I arrived. Now it returned. “Dispatch, this is Evans. Confirmed, one deceased male approximate age twelve to fourteen years old.”

“Understood. Your backup is almost there.”

I would have to secure the site for the detectives to investigate. When I turned around, Kevin was gone and Ron was standing in the doorway.

“Dude, are you okay?”

“Ron, I didn’t hear you coming up.”

“I don’t know how, I’ve been shouting to you for ten minutes. I thought you were dead. God, how can you stand the smell of the cat piss?” Ron held his sleeve over his nose, he put his pistol back into his holster.

“Did you see that kid leave?”

Ron looked around. “No, I didn’t see a kid.”

“How did he get past you? It’s okay, I got his address.” I stood up, being careful on the dry rotted floorboards.

“Are you okay? You weren’t answering your radio.” Ron said.

“I just talked to the dispatcher.”

“That was fifteen minutes ago. You called in, I arrived and started radioing you and shouting.” Ron said.

I tried to tell if he was just messing with me but he seemed more interested in covering his nose. All I smelled was the sweet scent of cookies baking. Was I okay? Was there some kind of gas leak? “Maybe we should wait outside?”

Ron and I stepped back outside and waited. The detectives and paramedics arrived and recovered the body. They were able to identify the victim. The name they got back was Kevin Jacob, age fourteen. Ron remembered busting him for vandalism a year ago. He described an out of shape kid that seemed smart but was moving in the wrong direction. The fourteen year old was taller and leaner than the Kevin he remembered.

I went to the address, 544, that I had been given. I should have known the number. It was the address of the drug house I helped shut down. How could I have not recognized that address?

A few days came and went. The investigation was ongoing, but the coroner said the wounds appeared self inflicted.

I drove by the cat house and tried to ignore the strange experience I had. The most bizarre thing was that I could smell cookies each time I drove by, even with my windows up.

By the third day, I couldn’t let it go. I held the can of tuna in my hand as I looked at the cat house. I could smell the cookies. The whole house smelled like my grandmother’s kitchen.

I walked up the rickety stairs and around the hole in the floor. The pull tab on the tuna can peeled the can open, placing it on the floor of the old bedroom.

The sound of an elderly voice, humming a tune filtered up from the kitchen below.

“The cookies are done, come and have some.” The voice was familiar.

I made my way down the stairs. My foot went through the third step.

“Be careful dear.” came my grandmother’s voice.

The kitchen wasn’t like the rest of the crumbling house. It was old, but clean, just like my grandmother’s kitchen.

“Thank you for feeding my kitty. I can’t get up the stairs anymore.” my grandmother said.

I had seen the house, plenty of times in my on my patrols. The neighborhood is not the best. It’s in a poor rural town. It was called the cat house. Even though there were plenty of places that cats could go, and even though cats aren’t supposed to like each other, dozens of cats would go in and out of this house.

There are three abandoned houses on that block and I was involved in shutting down a drug house that sprung up in one of them, so I knew the area. I never expected a murder in the neighborhood.

The call came in from a scared kid. There wasn’t much to go on at the moment. He hung up after saying there was a body that looked like it was stabbed to death, and we should get over there. I was the closest patrol car.

There was plenty of drug activity. I spent most of my days making traffic stops and busting minor crimes. In ten years, I had never heard of a murder. I kicked on my lights and stomped on the gas.

Outside the house, a kid was slipping out the back. He saw me and started to run, but he was out of shape. I stopped and stepped out of my patrol car. “Stop!”

He was the kind of kid that knew he was way in over his head. He was still carrying his school backpack and it was full of books. I didn’t even have to chase him. He turned and faced me. The look on his face just said “I am in so much trouble.” He was probably a honor student or something.

I waved him toward me and he complied. “Are you the one that called?”

He nodded, but didn’t say anything more. Slowly he trudged up to me. His overloaded backpack shifted back and forth, forcing him to swagger back and fourth as he made his way to me.

I turned off my lights to not draw more attention from the neighborhood. “What’s going on?”

“I’m going to get in trouble if I don’t get home soon.” He said.

“Where do you live?”

He pointed down the street.

“What house? What’s your address?”

“544.”

“What’s your name?”

“Kevin Jacob.”

“I’ll explain it to your folks. I need you to show me what you found.”

He rolled his eyes, took a deep breath and turned towards the house. He started to trudge in his signature swagger towards it, and I followed.

“How old are you?”

“Twelve”

The kid walked like his life was over. “I just need to know what you know and you won’t be in trouble.”

“I know that police are allowed to lie.”

“Hey kid, as long as you didn’t do anything wrong, you’re not in trouble.”

He just said, “Trespassing.”

“Don’t worry about that. I’m not going to charge you, just don’t do it again.”

He looked back at me, this kid had some major trust issues. We reached the back of the house and he shoved open the door. It wasn’t much of a door anymore, it was rotten and had been kicked in years ago. There were five or six cats lounging in the long grass. Something seemed off, the cats weren’t spooked, but beyond that, they were all watching us intently. Kevin noticed me looking at them.

“They’re on guard.”

“What do you mean?”

“Something has them worried.”

Their eyes stayed glued to us. Do cats get worried about a dead body?

Kevin pushed through the door and ducked under a collapsed beam. I had a harder time. He carried the weight of his backpack, but I was carrying the weight of ten years of riding around in a patrol car.

We went through a porch door with a hole kicked through it. The smell of cat piss hit me hard and made me gag a little, but the smell quickly disappeared and was replaced by the faint sweet smell. I didn’t know what to make of it.

The house was old, probably built a hundred years ago. Plaster and wallpaper peeled off the walls leaving just the wooden lath. Three cats watched us enter and scattered. Kevin entered into a the narrow hallway and immediately turned to the left and started up a steep set of stairs.

“Be careful, the steps are rotten, only step on the edge of the stairs.”

“Is there another way up?”

Kevin thought about it for a moment, like he was trying to remember. “You don’t want to go that way.”

“What way?”

He seemed confused. “She’s angry, you’d have to go through the kitchen.”

“Who’s angry? There’s someone here?”

Kevin stopped and looked around like he was listening. “I don’t hear her. She might not show up.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know her name. My friends just call her the cat lady.