Do we control our emotions?

You might want to check out this blog that I discuss here
We don’t say everything is anything - Religion and Secularism - CFI Forums (centerforinquiry.org)

The blog author, Richard Carrier, is addressing a religious person who is making bad arguments for why science is wrong. They are similar to the arguments you make, in that you keep saying “you haven’t proven” when actually, science has a ton of evidence that leads to the conclusion that humans have feelings that can be described accurately. It’s not as simple as pointing to some “good feeling” that is on display in a museum, but that doesn’t disprove it.

Carrier writes long-form blogs, so skip to the last section if you want, " An Example of How Naturalists Actually Explain Consciousness"

We can now observe brain function and see what lights up when someone is lying and what lights up when they are recalling something, like a memory of something pleasant. If you then say that is “just programmed”, or “society told them to think that”, then you have made a crude description of how brains work but left out what it implies. You have not proven that brains can be easily manipulated or that there is some other “self” that exists separate from our body/brain/mind. So describing the feeling of “good” is validated in the same way we define anything, through the abstraction of language and all the tools we have for sharing our experience of being human.

If you argue against naturalism, please present a complete argument. The linked blog provides many points that you should address in making that argument. We are physical beings in a physical world, so our physical bodies with brains create physical sensations that are influenced by our physical surroundings. If you reduce that to, “our feelings are programmed by society”, you need to describe a lot more of the steps of how that happens, or it doesn’t mean much.

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