"Good morning!"
A good beginning bodes well, also this greeting, short and common, since its first notes indicates what will probably follow.
We are all more than trained to constantly use emotional decoding, to grasp as quickly as possible the intentions of others, and know as soon as possible how to orient ourselves, how to arrange with respect to what probably will follow.
We all feel emotions, we all use emotions, we use our emotional abilities, with greater or lesser success, as we use our many other abilities.
What we do with our emotions is partly the result of inheritance transmitted to each of us through DNA, in part it is the result of a very long "training", training that begins at our birth, if not before, when we still float in the amniotic liquid.
Can we treat the emotions as we treated the thought? See them as declinations of the interaction between an Emotional System and its environment of reference? If so, what is the reference environment of the emotional system, and what are the relationships between the emotions integrated by and in the Emotional System?
A quick search allows to "discover" that we have, in any language, several dozens of names that indicate, each, a specific emotional condition, a specific emotion: scholars have identified a small number of fundamental emotions, distinguishing them from the others, which are considered minor variants or combinations of the primary emotions, a sort of emotional colours theory.
Joy, Fear, Love, Disgust, Shame, Anger and Surprise are generally recognized as primary emotions, so to speak fundamental: for us systemics is not difficult to accept that emotions are simply the reflex, sophisticated and evolved, of the functioning of our nociceptive and proficeptive systems.
Degrees of pain and degrees of pleasure integrated in the neurograms that control the interaction with the environment of our sensorial systems, placing the organism to the basic actions of removal from the threatening environment configurations, and approaching the environment configurations which support our survival.
That's it.
And that's a lot.
The competitive advantage assured by our focus on the life-saving action in thousandths of a second is formidable, the possibility of literally cloning the actions of others, of arranging ourselves to group actions, allowed by our Mirror Neurons (sensational discovery of the Neurosciences, 2005) is a further, extraordinary, enhancement inherited from our species.
Up to empathy, a key "ingredient" for the good governance of interaction with our peers, again allowed and supported by neural mirroring, for the ability to offer and receive help for otherwise impossible tasks, including learning.
That is, to generate new and better, more effective, neural codes, neurograms.
Some stable configurations of relationship between emotions are recognizable, which allows us to accept, among the systems of which we are made, also the Emotional System: for example, the plexus of emotions called into play in the primary interaction Mother-Child, in the mating interaction, in the food behavior, in the interaction with the group we belong, including the hierarchy [1].
To experience emotions, to use these special neurograms, it does not seem that we need a virtual environment, indispensable to thought systems: the environment of reference of the Emotional System seems to consist of the continuous flow of neural systems processes related to the functioning of the sensorial system, integrated with the processes related to the nociceptive and proficeptive systems.
Impossible to separate narration from emotion, impossible to ignore the contribution of the Emotional System to any human narration, to the thought, to the forming of the Other, to the control of the interaction with the real environment and with the Others.
Our response to "Good Morning" also depends, much, from the contribution of the Emotional Systems of those who narrates and those who greet the narration: in our common and daily experience depends on how the Narrator says it, if in a certain way then good things may follow, if in another way trouble may be in sight.
On the Other’s side, of those who receive the narration, much depends on who is for the Other the Narrator, if friend or foe: again, if the other is friend or foe, primarily, in hundredths of a second, it is the Emotional System to indicate it clearly.
***
Now we have in play all our systems, and we can count on some knowledge about their contribution to our control of interaction with our environments: motorial, sensorial, proficeptive, nociceptive, emotional, operational thought, symbolic thought, egoic.
Each of them has a reference environment, we recognize our continuous and assiduous frequentation, simultaneous, with the real environment and with the virtual environment, and the prevailing effects related to the conditions in which the two environments are similar, if not equal and coincident, or dissimilar.
Too complicated? It's probably even more complex than that, but we can't give up on the path: the next step is to put two systemic units into play, the Narrator and the Other, and focus on some of the conditions that allow the Other to welcoming the narration of the Narrator.
[1] Here the discourse becomes very delicate and complex, deserves a space that we do not have, but I indicate it now as one of the nodes that we will deal with later.