I love the second quote, but I'm afraid the first one bothers me. A lot.
I used to be very emotion and instinct focused, for all that I was logically trained as far as academics went. I discovered the hard way that although emotions *can* be useful for below-the-conscious-level information and observations, they can also go haywire in a way that is very, very hard to debug, and when they do, you're fucked.
See, human beings are biological critters. There may or may not be some kind of non-biological mechanism (i.e. souls) involved, and I'm still working on figuring out what I think of that idea; but we are, undeniably, dependent on our biology. And when those neurotransmitters get out of whack, you get emotional junk input; depression, paranoia, mania, all sorts of things. For someone like me, who used my emotions as a tool for understanding the world around me, that can wreak total havoc on your ability to do tasks, communicate with others, or otherwise deal with the world. Worried that your friends hate you? No, that's not subtle evidence adding up; that's just fucked-up brain chemistry. Feel like getting out of bed would be a real mistake? Not internal diagnostics saying you need more sleep; just fucked-up brain chemistry.
Logic, unlike emotions, can be checked by other people. If you're making decisions *logically*, when you can't trust your brain, then you have some way of getting feedback and learning how to route around the bugs. If you're making decisions emotionally, you've got many fewer tools in your toolkit to let you fix the problem. Not to mention that many of the current 'fixes' involve artificially changing that chemistry, with associated emotional changes... and what does that mean if you're trusting your emotions to feed you truth?
I certainly wouldn't want to live in the all-logic all-the-time world that some people I know do; it would be boring and missing a whole lot of life. But don't knock logic. It probably saved my sanity, if not my life.
no subject
I love the second quote, but I'm afraid the first one bothers me. A lot.
I used to be very emotion and instinct focused, for all that I was logically trained as far as academics went. I discovered the hard way that although emotions *can* be useful for below-the-conscious-level information and observations, they can also go haywire in a way that is very, very hard to debug, and when they do, you're fucked.
See, human beings are biological critters. There may or may not be some kind of non-biological mechanism (i.e. souls) involved, and I'm still working on figuring out what I think of that idea; but we are, undeniably, dependent on our biology. And when those neurotransmitters get out of whack, you get emotional junk input; depression, paranoia, mania, all sorts of things. For someone like me, who used my emotions as a tool for understanding the world around me, that can wreak total havoc on your ability to do tasks, communicate with others, or otherwise deal with the world. Worried that your friends hate you? No, that's not subtle evidence adding up; that's just fucked-up brain chemistry. Feel like getting out of bed would be a real mistake? Not internal diagnostics saying you need more sleep; just fucked-up brain chemistry.
Logic, unlike emotions, can be checked by other people. If you're making decisions *logically*, when you can't trust your brain, then you have some way of getting feedback and learning how to route around the bugs. If you're making decisions emotionally, you've got many fewer tools in your toolkit to let you fix the problem. Not to mention that many of the current 'fixes' involve artificially changing that chemistry, with associated emotional changes... and what does that mean if you're trusting your emotions to feed you truth?
I certainly wouldn't want to live in the all-logic all-the-time world that some people I know do; it would be boring and missing a whole lot of life. But don't knock logic. It probably saved my sanity, if not my life.