Along with thought and understanding, throw in emotion. Just a byproduct of the senses, emotion makes everything much more interesting. Our senses bring our “thinking things” information to think about and process and understand. That understanding is all equal. We do not like this equality, there’s simply too much information for it to all be equal and to require equal thought and time. Imagine you’re sitting at your desk and every time there is new information your secretary brings you a file filled with that information. You take it and set it on top of your desk. A moment later she brings in another file. You place it by the first. Then she brings you another and another. Very soon you have to request a bigger desk. Okay, that’s fine. You get a bigger desk. Your secretary brings you more files and then you have to get a bigger desk. There must be a better way!

Some of the information the secretary brings is used more often than others. Some of the information creates better results (you know this because the result of those results is more information). You decide to then place value on certain files. They get a rating, more useful files get higher ratings than less useful. You can then build filing cabinets and store information in there. As you get more and more information, your filing system gets more and more complex. The value system has sub-systems, cross-systems, multiple values for the same information. Emotion is our mind using a value system on everything we experience.

As I sit here, I see a glass frog sitting on a mantle. I don’t care much for the frog, it’s not my style, but it is pleasant to look at. For this other person, however, this glass frog holds greater value. When they look at it, a pleasant emotion arises. For some reason they applied a value to that glass frog. That value could be a part of a sub-system, a cross-system, or have multiple values attached to it. What matters is that value was high enough for them to purchase the frog and then was high enough to encourage them to place it on the mantle where it can be visible from that point in the room. However it was not high enough for them to put it in the center of the room, or to place a spotlight on it or to build a contraption that they can put on their head that would always suspend the frog in front of their eyes so they would always see it. It is a complex system. The values change, are cross-referenced (if this person sees a different glass frog somewhere, they are disposed to like it even though it is different), are shared, and sometimes are lost.

Emotions are the meanings of life. Without emotion we are just things that think, barely above computers (since computers can only gather and process information, but cannot understand it). Take thinking alone, add the external world and you have understanding, add value and emotions and you have meaning. Then add experience and memories and you have life.