Emotions are the currency of consciousness. We get “paid” for our experience with emotional phenomena that can be pleasant or painful. Outside of physical pain or pleasure, emotional experience is the only measure of satisfaction accessible to human beings. This is an obvious fact of human experience.

I define a mood as a persistent emotional state that operates in the background.

Absorption is that state of activity where consciousness is disregarded or forgotten.

Emotion operates in an inverse relation to absorption. The greater the degree of absorption, the less one is affected by emotion or mood.

A high degree of absorption often has the beneficial effect of arousing a positive emotional state, though this state occurs only after self-consciousness has resumed (and absorption has faded away).

New York Times has a regular philosophy column… The Stone. But the best part of this article is the link to the John Cleese video.

Explanations of neural phenomena are not themselves explanations of psychological phenomena. Some expect the neural level to replace the psychological level. This expectation is as naive as expecting a single cure for cancer. Science is almost never so simple. See John Cleese’s apt spoof of such reductionism.

via A Real Science of Mind – NYTimes.com.