Emotion and Reason
Quite often, I have mystified students. It's almost as if they have embraced mysticism rather than rationality as far as thinking about themselves is concerned. One thing which triggers this state is when they have to think about emotion.
"What's emotion?"
"Err... it's feelings, right?"
"OK, it's feelings. So how come we think of emotion as a way of knowing?"
"It helps you know how you feel!"
"OK, so your feelings teach you how you feel?"
And so on.
The point is a really simple one. An emotion is a physiological response to a situation, that is linked to a change in psychological perspective. It distills a situation down to a complex but concentrated social package, based initially on 'feelings' (but also on the input of your senses) and tells you whether something is 'good', 'bad', or any one of maybe five or six other basic categories. Sometimes it does this very quickly for something that the reasoning mind cannot cope with easily, simply because the situation is too complex.
At this point, students often ask, "What about love? It's only a physiological response?!"
Well, not only that, but the emotion one calls 'love' certainly does not exist without a physiological response that is linked to a change in psychological perspective. If X says he loves Y and you hook him up to a machine that measures these responses, he will certainly show certain kinds of physiological changes when he's asked to think about Y. If he doesn't show any of the known likely changes, then he doesn't love Y in any sense, simple as that.
But is it possible to love someone purely rationally, without messy emotions getting in the way?
No, actually. Even loving some thing requires emotion. If a person truly loves money, then the sight of a $50k cheque made out to bearer will trigger a bunch of physiological responses linked to a change in psychological perspective. With loving someone, it engages the social parts of the brain even more.
Some say that it's emotion, the social response package, that has made the human brain the size it is; we spend a lot more time feeling than using logic. We make snap judgements about how we feel about people (and things, and situations) almost all the time, and it's so much a part of us that we don't consciously think about it. In short, our feelings are actually the brain making sense of our physiological responses (the 'gut feel', the 'sinking feeling', the uneasiness which you can't pinpoint, the chill down your spine, the crawling of the skin, the hair standing on end, the blush of the cheek, and many more).
We aren't creatures of pure reason. We can't be. The brain is too heavily involved in emotion for any of our thoughts not to have any feelings associated with them at all. An honest person will admit it; only the worst kind of pseudo-scientific thinker will assert otherwise.
"What's emotion?"
"Err... it's feelings, right?"
"OK, it's feelings. So how come we think of emotion as a way of knowing?"
"It helps you know how you feel!"
"OK, so your feelings teach you how you feel?"
And so on.
The point is a really simple one. An emotion is a physiological response to a situation, that is linked to a change in psychological perspective. It distills a situation down to a complex but concentrated social package, based initially on 'feelings' (but also on the input of your senses) and tells you whether something is 'good', 'bad', or any one of maybe five or six other basic categories. Sometimes it does this very quickly for something that the reasoning mind cannot cope with easily, simply because the situation is too complex.
At this point, students often ask, "What about love? It's only a physiological response?!"
Well, not only that, but the emotion one calls 'love' certainly does not exist without a physiological response that is linked to a change in psychological perspective. If X says he loves Y and you hook him up to a machine that measures these responses, he will certainly show certain kinds of physiological changes when he's asked to think about Y. If he doesn't show any of the known likely changes, then he doesn't love Y in any sense, simple as that.
But is it possible to love someone purely rationally, without messy emotions getting in the way?
No, actually. Even loving some thing requires emotion. If a person truly loves money, then the sight of a $50k cheque made out to bearer will trigger a bunch of physiological responses linked to a change in psychological perspective. With loving someone, it engages the social parts of the brain even more.
Some say that it's emotion, the social response package, that has made the human brain the size it is; we spend a lot more time feeling than using logic. We make snap judgements about how we feel about people (and things, and situations) almost all the time, and it's so much a part of us that we don't consciously think about it. In short, our feelings are actually the brain making sense of our physiological responses (the 'gut feel', the 'sinking feeling', the uneasiness which you can't pinpoint, the chill down your spine, the crawling of the skin, the hair standing on end, the blush of the cheek, and many more).
We aren't creatures of pure reason. We can't be. The brain is too heavily involved in emotion for any of our thoughts not to have any feelings associated with them at all. An honest person will admit it; only the worst kind of pseudo-scientific thinker will assert otherwise.
etched with acid at 8:20:00 am
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