When it comes to decision-making, perception and so on, what are your beliefs about the role and merits of feelings/emotions vs reasoning?
Some common positions:
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Emotions tend to get in the way of reasoning - we should primarily rely on our logic and rationality to guide us. When feeling strongly about anything we should block it out and try to think purely in a rational way.
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Reasoning can distract us when the right answer is to empathize or trust our gut feelings; it’s easy to be misled by a convincing argument but gut feelings can see through that.
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Emotions and logic each play a role in observation and judgment. If both didn’t have a use, why would we have evolved to have them?
A lot of people probably don’t go all the way one way or the other. Even if you don’t have a particularly strong reason for why you feel one way or the other, feel free to express what you believe.
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Emotion is short-cut that has evolutionary strength. Overthinking things can be highly maladaptive. Consider seeing a tiger making a run for you and your group. Reasoning through (or, worse, discussing) your options is going to get everybody in your group killed because the process of reasoning is far slower than the reaction speed of emotion. Fear, on the other hand, will have everybody in the group scattering, running away screaming.
In the first case everybody (or almost everybody) in your group dies. This is maladaptive. In the second case one, maybe two die. This is far more adaptive behaviour.
Later there’s room for reasoning: figuring out ways to arm yourself against tigers, say, or building traps to capture/kill them, or finding better places to go where there are no tigers. But in the moment, reason kills.
Similar things go with concepts like lust and love. Sure you can think through and discuss all the reasons why it would be best to have procreative sex, but … ah … there’s plenty of “local optimization” trouble that makes it more practical not to procreate and let others do the procreation (until nobody is procreating and the species dies out). The emotion of lust comes to the rescue as your instincts override your reason and you make the beast with two backs, thus procreating. Which leads us to the advantage of love. In this case let’s address the parent/child love bond. Again, children are an inconvenience and any reasonable person, courtesy of the local optimization problem, will likely come to the conclusion that abandoning the child is the smart thing to do. But dammit, they’re so cute, D’aw!, and she’s got her mother’s eyes and her father’s hair and look! She just puked! Isn’t that cute!? (Parents are literally insane; partially by sleep deprivation, but mostly by emotion.)
Tiger example
True, but logic could also state that a group standing their ground and making loud noises would drive the tiger away. Quickly arming yourself, defence, deterrence, and group tactics are a logical response. A little pre-planning leads you to be able to curtail an emotional response later. Running and screaming as the emotional response would most likely lead to at least one person being injured (as tigers can outrun humans in short bursts) if not killed and eaten.
Kids example
Yes. As a parent, yes, you go a little insane. Logic led me to say that we could handle one (which isn’t a decision everyone gets to make). Emotion led me to actually be a Father. Kids absolutely play on and demolish both of those processes. Kids are chaos incarnate.
A little pre-planning leads you to be able to curtail an emotional response later.
I addressed that:
Later there’s room for reasoning: figuring out ways to arm yourself against tigers, say, or building traps to capture/kill them, or finding better places to go where there are no tigers. But in the moment, reason kills.
Heh. Sorta. I’m saying plan in advance (as in before the theoretical expedition), and it seems like you’re saying planning later (as in after the first failure).
I see what you mean though!
You can’t plan ahead for unforseen circumstances though. Picture people who’ve never seen a tiger before in my example. There’s no time to stop and jaw about the right response, only time to turn tail and run.
THEN you can talk about how to prevent that from happening in the future.
Emotions have a very valuable role in, well, survival.
On the lust thing, my take is that lust provides an initial attraction to want to be with someone and spend time with them, and then due to spending more time together you form closer bonds which may grow into love.
Similarly with the biological predisposition to find children adorable and want to protect them, that’s what makes things work initially, but later you likewise grow to love them on their own merits.
Love is also an emotional response, of course, just a different sort of one.
Well yes, I was using some specific examples to illustrate a point that emotion has adaptive qualities essential to survival, not trying to map out the utility, interrelationship, and impact (both adaptive and maladaptive) of every emotional reaction! 😀
I don’t believe there can be any sensible position which doesn’t consider both emotion and logic based on what’s appropriate in the circumstance. The trick is knowing how to weight one versus the other.
Suppose you are a woman who has been dating a new guy. He’s smart and kind, wealthy, and has amazing parents. Logic says he’d be a perfect husband, but you just don’t feel any spark or love at all. Should you marry him? No, probably not. It’s super important to trust your emotions here, because logic by itself isn’t going to make you happy.
Then suppose you are a 55 year old hiring manager at an IT firm. A candidate comes in for an interview. He’s a young black guy and your emotions immediately tell you (due to decades of ingrained prejudice) that he’s not a good fit. Should you save time and cut the interview short? No. You should override your feelings with logic, and recognise he has just as much potential as any other candidate.
Logic and emotion are super important, we just have to use them for the right things in the context of our modern world.
I am strongly in the logic camp, though both can be used to great effect if the person understands themselves and can apply logic to emotion in advance. Emotions override or preempt logic and prevent us from thinking rationally in many cases. It harms FAR more than it helps, and is essentially a knee-jerk reaction executed before we can think.
This is why many people are the way they are. They react to something, and THEN try to apply a logical process to the reaction as if there was one.
Why are people overweight in most cases? Logic or emotion?
When people try to manipulate others, are the lies generally emotionally manipulative, or logically manipulative?
Why do people stay in bad relationships? It could conceivably be either, but most often it’s emotional and / or a “better than nothing” response.
Why are people religious in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary? They’re raised to think that way and instead of using logic, they rely on emotion and the way it makes them feel.
Why do people not try to change things in their life that they’d very much like to? Because change is difficult, which is an emotional response. You have to apply logic and reason to cause change because emotion makes it hard to adjust routine.
I could go on and on, but I would posit that emotion (anger, covetousness, lust, pettiness, etc.) is responsible for more self-sabotage and destruction than any logic.
Empathy is a moral response, and morality is subjective. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be empathetic, it simply means that what it means to be empathetic at the very core is completely arbitrary.
This doesn’t mean they can’t overlap or be used effectively, but often they are at odds and faulty logic is used to justify the initial emotional response.
As an addendum, from my experience people are horrible at distinguishing between the two responses.
You have some perplexing examples there.
I can agree eating something based on a desire to eat it and neglecting the thought of not eating it leading to being overweight.
When people lie, they usually do it to avoid negative consequences they foresee. Are emotions capable of predicting the future? I would say no, logic is, and it’s typically logic that determines lying to be the best way to avoid it. There may be emotional acting at play, but not emotional thinking, unless your lie gets found out.
What makes a relationship bad? Typically experiencing bad emotions such as anger, frustration, pain, and stress. These emotions would presumably push someone to leave, but if they talk themself into staying that’s logic keeping them in that situation, poor logic as it may be.
There is no interesting conversation to be had regarding religion here.
How is something being hard an emotional response? Sorry, since it hasn’t happened yet, how is calculating that something will be hard emotional?
I don’t understand how understanding another person’s emotional state is a moral response or how subjectivity is arbitrary, or how either could indicate that emotions are wrong or not useful.
You mention faulty logic being used to justify initial emotional responses but if a person is acting on their initial response I would say they’re not applying logic in the first place, though I do agree that logic is fallible and no person is capable of perfect reasoning.
Ultimately, and based on your first paragraphs you may agree to some extent, emotions aren’t something to be controlled or repressed, they are something to be acknowledged and understood, and often in that understanding the best response can be found.
When you want to eat, is it a feeling of genuine hunger or boredom? If the former, you likely won’t get overweight if you eat, but if the latter what would be leading you to be bored and is there something that could make you less bored? If you just really like food because it makes you feel comfortable you could exercise frequently to enable that emotion in a healthy way.
When a person determines lying to be the best option to avoid trouble, and they feel guilty, would that negative feeling push them to act in a way to better avoid thinking they need to lie going forward? If they don’t feel guilt, would you say there is something emotionally wrong with them?
If a person is in a bad relationship, would negative feelings not be what tips them off that something is wrong and prompt them to understand why they feel that way, giving them the understanding to express what they need to end that feeling?
You’re correct. I typed it in a hurry and realized that some of my examples were poorly worded. I’ve now corrected them and added some detail.
I agree that they can work in tandem, but it relies on a well-developed sense of logic and allowing it to take the fore. Certainly emotion can be useful, but only if you apply a logical process to it instead of a simple justification.
