83. Seven-ish Flavors of Curiosity From My Culture

(Epistemic status: Totally a dispatch from a version of Earth in a nearby Everett branch that diverged a few thousand years ago, tops. Totally.)

While thinking it over, I realized that not only does my culture and its [counterhistory] which I'm not from have a handful of emotions that this Earth's societies largely lack, but we also divide up basic emotions somewhat differently. In contrast to the classic four-way distinction of Happiness, Anger, Fear, and Sadness, my culture does it a little differently. I'll say more about this in a later post, but where this Earth mostly classes emotions by only valence (positive/pleasant vs negative/unpleasant) and arousal (high vs low energy), my culture recognizes a third major category of classification - temporality. There are thus several schools of thought as to how many major classes of emotion there are, but the least contentious is six, with a common classification having eight and some recognizing up to twelve, depending on temporal and valence classifications. "The human is a complicated time-binding animal", as the proverb goes.

The class of emotions which are future-oriented, relatively low-arousal, and varied in valence, we call Curiosity; we may distinguish it from future-oriented, relatively high-arousal, and varied-valence emotions, which we call Futurity or just Nerves. Within that category, we recognize seven major secondary emotions, as I describe below; we consider them every bit as importantly different from each other as you consider resentment different from rage.

1. [Checking-it-out], also called [poking-your-snout-in]. This is the one that most closely matches local conceptions of curiosity. The feeling you get when you spot an open door that's usually locked; the feeling you might get when contemplating infrastructure usually hidden from view; the impulse to look over someone's shoulder at the book they're reading or the website on their screen.

2. [Limerent-interest], or [falling-in-love-with-the-world]. This is the feeling you might get when starting to develop a new [special-interest]. You want to dive right into this new topic, to learn all you can about it as quickly as possible. You need to know more of it, and ideally as soon as possible. You want to shove your face in it and roll around in it and make it a part of you.

3. [Catching-the-scent] or [digging-up-treasure]. This one rightly belongs in a project's maturity, or towards the point where it begins to bear fruit. You're finally on to something, and you know it, and you need to know more about the way it works or might work so that you can do it better. There is the promise of some kind of gain there - a research result, or an optimized speedrun, or a major profit, or a successfully built [artifact].

4. [Morbid-fascination]. This one is a little weirder. There's something kind of awful - scary or violent or hazardous or disgusting or unfitting - and you can't quite stop yourself from wanting to find out more about it. Maybe you're doing it to try to avoid or defend against it, or maybe you have some kind of interest in it that you can't put a finger on. This one is closely associated with infohazards, and is thus something you're taught to look out for for safety purposes while still in primary school.

5. [Do-or-die]. This one only ever comes out in high-pressure situations - a calm sense that you need to know more about an imminent problem you're facing in order to have any chance of surviving it, or of seeing something through. Something you might feel as a plane begins to nosedive, or as you start rapidly drawing up plans for an evacuation.

6. [Workself-ingestion]. A drab, functional sort of emotion; the strong sense that you don't understand something well enough to serve a promised function within a larger system. You have documentation to read, or surveys to conduct, or mandatory training to do. You may not be especially happy about it or have any particular love for the topic, but it's the proper and expected thing to do to go learn more, and you do still want to know about it.

7. [Trailrunning]. Maybe closer to curiosity about your own past. You have a craving to refresh your memories of something that you once knew far better. You still have all the intuitions laid down, so it's more like loping along a trail than hacking your way through brush, more like strolling than exploring, but you've forgotten some of what you once knew and maybe even feel a little bit bad about that.

Hopefully it's clear that emotion is fractal and heavily culture-dependent. There are cultures that valorize displays of anger, and others that forbid it. There are cultures where grieving is exepcted to be done only in private, and others where it must be done publicly, and yet others where public displays of laughter and good cheer are expected. It should thus be no surprise that yet another human-comprehensible culture has a different classification for emotions, emphasizing some feelings and overly simplifying others.