Checking back in, at last. I just discovered my last couple of posts never posted for some reason. I am terribly sorry for not checking this out earlier, and I will just quickly repost them all.
Let’s jump right in with the touchiest subject ever: emotions and rationality. In the red corner in this match we have Emotions! It’s really easy to say: “Oh, I’m rational, no emotions in my life.” But that definitely isn’t true. Even pop culture and fiction has no character (that I know of) who is totally emotionless. What about Spock, for example? He’s supposed to be an emotionless rock. But emotions aren’t only useful for conveying the way we feel or for motivating us, although those are really important factors. According to them, Spock IS emotionless.
But Spock is an officer, right? He makes decisions about his life and lives of others. He has a code of conduct and can decide in a split-second. THAT is the most important aspect of emotions: they help us make decisions. If you want to eat a piece of fruit, and you have a choice between an apple and an orange, which would you choose? Let’s say you choose the orange. You probably did that because you like it better than the apple. If you did it because it’s cheaper, then you did it because you like money. If you had no emotions towards neither money, oranges or apples, you would be stuck forever deciding, because then all options are equal, and there is no reason to choose either. Like in that philosophical problem with a donkey: he starves to death between two haystacks because they are completely the same and equally distanced from him.
Also, emotions keep us alive. Fear helps us escape from an unfightable danger, while anger helps us fight a lesser danger. If you met face to face with a King cobra (like I did this time), your emotions would help you see whether you would try to fight it or to escape its bite.
Now on to the blue corner. Here is the Reason! Reason only bows down to cold facts, and so is a perfect way of knowing in case you need to do anything precisely (by the way, ways of knowing are the ways or methods you use to reach certain conclusions). Reason is also a part of our consciousness about ourselves, and helps us distinguish between reality and illusion (though it can make a mistake every now and then).
Next post will be about the infamous Stanford prison experiment, so sit tight!
And don’t forget a towel! 😉