Is it right because it feels good? Or does it feel good because it’s right?
Marc
Emotion is more than just assigning weights. Emotion is the embodiment of a goal. Viewed from the perspective of animals (humans) trying to survive in the wild, it provides some of the information that makes reason valuable.
It may have limited value in a fight with your spouse, but that’s only related to the modern world, not the world where the tools were developed.
If we eliminated emotion, how would we properly encode the rules related to basic survival?
I would disagree because it all depends on context.
Do you mean for an animal to survive in the wild reason should trump emotion? No.
Do you mean for survival in the modern world for humans? I would disagree again because I can think of exceptions. Do I save my child or my neighbors child? I save my child, purely due to emotion. etc. etc.
Re: Dio’s hostage situation:
Reason tells me that, should this man kill this woman, there will be a large criminal investigation, possibly leading to a trial, perhaps conviction. All of these things take time and money. If he were to not kill her, then the investigation, trial, and possible subsequent incarceration would take less time and money. Therefore, it is perfectly logical to ask the man to not kill the woman.
However, I would never say anything as one-sided as “reason always trumps emotion” or “emotion always trumps reason.” Take this scenario:
In a hospital, we have a man dying from heart failure who needs a transplant, a woman dying from liver failure needing a transplant, and a small boy needing a kidney. You walk in for some kind of routine test, and in the process, they find out that you are a match for all three people. The hospital then kills you, takes your organs, and puts them in the three people so they can live. After all, sacrificing one life for three is a good deal, you come out two ahead.
Clearly reason can be taken too far, just as emotion can.
Dio’s situation?
Anyway, you still need to ask yourself why you want to avoid spending time and money. Can you come up with an entirely reason-based argument?
My point is that you can’t, as others have said, reason alone can not give you motivation for doing anything, and thus it can’t give you a reason to decide one way or another.
Oh, and an aside…where did the idea that the hostage taker was a man, and the hostage was a woman come into this?
I’m not sure satisfying the urge to eat, drink, and mate can be classified as either reason or emotion. They’re a bit more primitive than that. Do animals work through emotions? I think not, and they manage this quite well.
Emotion can be an evolutionary answer to actions which may not correlate to our primitive desires. If it is advantageous to be mostly monogamous, love can keep us from chasing any person of the opposite sex. Love of our children re-enforces the need to nurture them. Even hate can re-enforce our need to challenge others.
Which goals does emotion embody by itself?
We could do it with reason - but as I said, we don’t have a choice, since emotion is engrained in us, and isn’t something we can choose to ignore.
Sure it can. Arguably the values here are given, and in fact, arguably, the necessity for food, water, and shelter aren’t “emotion” based at all. Thus, in a society where time allows one to do work earning money, and where money is necessary (more or less) to purchase food water and shelter, a course of action which frees up more of these resources is prudent to getting the basic necessities, which require no emotion to need.
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arguably “logic” dictates that one pursue the necessary items to keep one alive, and since “logic/reason” has been pitted against “emotion” then IMO it’s acceptable to frame it the way I did above (for the sake of the debate)
As it seems to which others have alluded, in general reason does not trump emotion, nor does emotion trump reason. For some situations one has greater values than the other, but it is unfair and IMO inhuman to treat one as more important. Instead–pardon the overly abstract imagery–I view the human experience as a large, multi-dimensional space in which reason and emotion are only two of the many orthogonal concepts used to map a particular vector.
To answer the question in one word: no. However, I do think we can get darn close in many circumstances. For instance, one writing a technical paper has a high degree of reason; but whenever a preference enters into the equation, there’s just the smallest hint of emotion present. Similarly, even in the most emotional situations, without reason to draw together and make sense of the emotional impulses, who knows what would happen.
In fact, I’m not sure these concepts can even be compared at all. In my mind, emotion isn’t a decision process, but merely an irrational, non-deterministic, gut reaction… whatever, kind input or response to a given situation. That is, I view it almost as a sixth sense, in as much as one can describe a situation by how it looks, sounds, and smells, one can also describe another dimension of the situation with feelings, intuition, whim. I think what makes it different from reason, is that a logical individual will interpret the emotion, assign some kind of weight to its importance, and make a decision accordingly.
I’m a bit confused by the juxtaposition of this question to these statements. What is “smarter”? Is one who is better able to reason necessarily smarter than one who cannot? For instance, one thing at which computers excel is reason; yet one would be hard-pressed to call a computer smarter than a human being of average reasoning ability. That said, especially in the light of QG’s cite, it is unfair to call either modern day liberals or conservatives smarter than the other precisely because of the polarizing effect of assigning too high of a weight to emotion when making what should be highly rational decisions. IMO, law is a completely rational exercise; thus, any weight assigned to emotion when discussing politics, other than a negligible one, seems a violation of the very premise.
In a word: yes. To qualify, it is infallible if, and only if, all inputs are evaluated with the appropriate weights, under all criteria with the appropriate weights, over all options. As humans, some of these inputs and criteria will necessarily be much closer to an emotional nature than a practical, rational, and reasoned one.
Who says sacrificing one life to save three is a good deal? Who says sacrificing one life to save a thousand is a good deal? I think this value judgment of a human life is based at some level on an emotionally driven decision in that a value has been assigned to a human life. From a rational perspective, I cannot imagine any way to assign a value to a human life, outside of one’s own, without at least SOME degree of emotional input. That is, it is only rational to decide saving three lives is better, provided that human lives are a good thing; but who decided that, and how? Three is clearly not always better than one; would you rather have one broken bone or three (ie, 3x > x, iff x>0).
Even if we grant an axiom tha human lives must necessarily have a positive value, must they all be weighted equally? Beyond that, what about individuals who cause a net destruction of life; does his value then become negative and wouldn’t that in turn invalidate the axiom that human lives must have a positive value? Assuming lives can have different and potentially negative values, what if those three people needing transplants were Hitler, Stalin, and Osama but the one who would be sacrificed was your favorite historical figure or, even yourself.
Probably an emotional impulse, or a merely a rational stereotype? 
I think Science likes to break down the way we think into these nice abstractions like “rational” and “emotional” when in reality, the process is much more complex and intertwined. Then we keep deluding ourselves that the abstractions are real processes.
Food and shelter can very well be emotion based. If you don’t want to live, then you have no reason to seek out food, shelter, or anything else. If you want to live, then that desire is based on emotion, and therefore your need for food/water/etc is based in emotion.
Or, if we accept that desires for food are not emotionally grounded, then it still doesn’t follow that the particular path of “obtaining food by working for money to buy it” is the one you want to take. You can also obtain food by getting convicted of a crime and sent to jail, or by living in homeless shelters, or even by looking for someone rich to marry.
While this is purely guessing on my part, I assume some animals have emotions (e.g. fear, love, etc.). I assume there is a continuum, but it would seem strange that humans are the only ones with emotions.
Maybe embodiment is the wrong term, possibly “vehicle to achieve” is a better phrase for the relationship between a goal and emotions. But the ones you listed were the type of examples I had in mind.
I think emotions allow for optimization of key survival behaviors in a way that reason would have a difficult time duplicating.
If we eliminated emotions and used reason alone, then we would have lost millions of years of accumulated information regarding survival. At decision time, an individual would not have accumulated enough experience within his/her lifetime to make up for all of that information.
On the contrary, the more logical choice would be to kill the boy. His organs could save the other two, and society wouldn’t have to invest any resources into raising and educating a child who has proven himself to be of poor health at an early age.
What about monogamy?
Logic: If everyone suddenly applied the notion of one-partner-for-life to their sex life, all STDs would die out in a single generation.
Emotion: The notion of one-partner-for-life is romantic.
So which side is it, emotional or logical?
Except not everyone wants all STDs to die out. Some people want to spread them, though I suspect that number is quite a bit lower than the people who want them to die out.
It should not. They should not be perceived as being in competition with each other. Emotions properly processed, mulled over, and “cooked” are the best cognitive input that exists. Emotions distrusted and ignored and stoppered up tend to spill out willy-nilly and to lead people to make very bad choices and engage in destructive behaviors. The latter patterns give emotions a bad name, but they aren’t the result of emotions, they are the result of not taking your own emotions seriously and caring to find out what the fuck they’re telling you.
If you could not feel, you could not reason, period. Rational thought is not something that occurs apart from emotions, it’s a superset of the cognitive processes that in their simpler form we know as emotions and sensations. The sensations are sensory input, aka DATA, and the emotions are cognitions, interpretations, the imputation of meanings (albeit not on a verbal-intellectual level yet). When we go the next step and encode those understandings in verbal terms, it enables us to treat complex thoughts as nouns and stick those nouns into a larger sentence as subject or object and thusly consider how some hugely complicated concept like “the way my need for freedom makes me unhappy about my spouse’s reaction to it as a consequence of feeling unloved or rejected” affects or is affected by some other equally complicated concept like “the extent to which my job gives me some feelings of independence even as it also makes me feel subordinated to my boss whom I do not like”. Still lots of feelings, and moreover feelings about feelings, going on in there, but now it’s housed in sprawling structures of intellectual interpretation. That’s what we do when we think.
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I’ll go along with that.
I can not imagine life without emotion or life without reason.
Would we be logic machines or impulse driven. We need both to survive. Of the two there is no “better.”
:::Nod:::
Hello Lekatt, it’s been a while.
Thanks, I will see how it goes.