How do certain chemicals alter the way we feel?
For example (correct me if I’m wrong), Dopamine creates the happy feeling. But how? And what about the other types of feelings?
In: Biology
I think the issue is that you are operating under a layer of abstraction that makes it difficult to understand the relationship to physical phenomenon.
You probably think that there is some nebulous, immaterial “you” that experiences emotions that are similarly intangible. You can’t have a bucket of happiness, right? This way of thinking of things is called “dualism” and if you want to hold onto it you are going to need to accept that not a lot of things will make sense, and it will be contradicted by evidence.
Instead the evidence points towards your concepts of self and emotion to be emergent properties, mental abstractions of what is really happening. And what is happening is the result of cellular action within the organ of the brain. Those interactions are enormously complex and there is still a lot which is not fully understood but evidently it creates our minds, our personality, our emotions, etc. Those cells are made of and governed by the physics by which everything else in reality operates, and much of their interaction fits into the category of chemical reactions.
The understanding I am getting at here is that **you are the chemicals.** Once you understand that you are a complex ongoing chemical reaction it makes perfect sense how introducing chemicals to the mix could alter your mental state.
You are a machine. Instead of cogs and gears and levers the human machine works with chemicals, electrical signals, and structural connections. Since our machinery works with chemicals, taking the right chemicals in the right amounts in the right way can impact that machine.
What we perceive as feelings are signals made by our neurons firing. Chemicals are how the neurons send signals to each other.
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