The seeming irrationality of a well-tuned emotional system

168 点作者 ALee将近 7 年前

18 条评论

I like the "The marriage of sense and reason" section.There are so many "wrong-on-the-internet" folks who believe they're being rational, but in fact are merely cherry-picking whatever bits of reality (they use the word "facts") they understand, formulating their response only on that basis and ignoring everything else that isn't easy to observe, measure or reason about.Being rational or objective is a very tall order. We are never _actually_ prepared to do that in real-life scenarios. It is only remotely feasible in the most stripped-down, simplified set-ups.

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vinceguidry将近 7 年前

One thing I thought about recently is just how 'theory of mind' works. When you're trying to figure out someone else's motives, often times logic and reason just get in the way. Emotional processing uses the limbic system and is much 'faster' than cognitive thought. You definitely don't want to over-rely on knee-jerk emotional responses, but you don't want to completely throw out the hundreds of thousands of years of primate social evolution in a vain effort to be smarter.

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ThrustVectoring将近 7 年前

Game theory is extraordinarily helpful for understanding what's going on, IMHO.First off, not every capability is positive value to have. If you can irreversibly give someone a million dollars from your phone, people have a pretty big incentive to stick a gun in your face and make you do that. "It's physically impossible to do that" is an extremely useful negotiation stance; the winning strategy in a game of chicken is to make sure your opponent knows you threw the steering wheel out the car window.Your emotional system is a really powerful decision-making engine that is almost completely immune to reason. It's extraordinarily hard to use logical reasoning to convince someone to not be sad that their dog died. This is a feature, not a bug. Anger is a much more relevant emotion for this - someone with a hair trigger on their temper has figured out that wielding that implicit threat serves their interest.

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jacquesm将近 7 年前

This is an interesting article in the sense that it is impossible to comment on it without making the point of the article even stronger.

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xivzgrev将近 7 年前

"For example, this would suggest that if an event that makes you “angry” occurs multiple times in succession without actually harming you in a way that the feeling of “anger” predicted, and you don’t aggressively hold on to that label, by the tenth time you experience this event, your initial response would have slowly changed from the feeling of “anger” toward something more representative of the situation."I don't agree with this universally. Case in point: road rage. A person could get cut off 100x and still feel anger. That's because emotions arent just a predictive system about an event. They are also about related ideas. In this case perhaps our driver feels like people take advantage of him. As long as that belief is there he may get angry every time he is cut off.

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ridewinter将近 7 年前

When the author talks about not aggressively holding onto labels he is basically talking about meditation.In my experience, emotions generate discursive thought. Meditation is a process of dropping that discursive thought and feeling the emotions directly. This leads to clear insights on your world.

lmm将近 7 年前

Headline doesn't match the content; while the article is more nuanced, it still seems to put too much blind faith in our evolved emotional systems.> On the other hand, given that our emotional system—that gives us information points through a sense or a judgment—has been refined by the battery of evolution for much, much longer than the thinking mind, we know that it absorbs more of the nuances of reality before it comes to a conclusion.That doesn't follow at all; if anything the opposite is true, our emotional system is quicker to discard nuance (because in the ancestral environment it was more important to make an approximate decision quickly, whereas in the modern world the opposite is true).> In fact, Barrett’s model even suggests that cognition and emotion are not distinct at all. > the seeming irrationality of a well-tuned emotional system, within the right context, can fill in gaps that reason misses.It's not about irrationality being an advantage or "filling in gaps". It's about the speed of our emotional system making it useful despite the irrationality. It's well worth making the best possible use of the cognitive tools we have, including our emotional system, but that doesn't mean the flaws of those tools cease to be flaws.

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nsedlet将近 7 年前

The article makes the case that our "emotional systems" can be understood as an effective way of internalizing and responding to our experiences in a complex world.Maybe this is obvious but I think equally important is the emotional interplay between people, and the dynamics of that larger emotional system. Emotions are like a protocol that humans use to communicate their mental states to each other. If emotions were just about understanding the world, there would be no reason for humans to express them visibly & audibly.A little bit of occasional anger can effectively communicate that someone has crossed a line. Laughter is positive feedback. etc. etc.

Asgardr将近 7 年前

I thoroughly enjoyed reading Predictably Irrational. It's a book about experiments in behavioural economics and relevant anecdotes. I'd recommend it to anyone, it's easy to read and highly informative.

ponderatul将近 7 年前

Finally, someone is speaking about this.

SubiculumCode将近 7 年前

If one accepts that one is an emotional animal, and that over-suppression of emotional irrationality can lead to mental illness and non-adaptive stress responses, then the rational thing to do is to let yourself be irrational. Escape the local minima.

bloak将近 7 年前

Are we discussing "rationality" without having defined that term? I would guess that's probably an example of irrationality.As I see it, people mostly use "rationality" to refer to a set of theories, such as mathematics, which are useful tools that can help people make decisions in the real world. However, people still have to decide when and how to use those tools. Deciding which tools to use and how is another thing that theories, such as mathematics, might help people with, but, again, people have to decide when and how to use those tools in deciding which tools to use. To avoid an infinite regression, most decisions need to be made unconsciously: at some point people just do what feels right.If you've discovered some theory that seems really useful and not as well known as it deserves to be, tell us about it: that sounds interesting. If you've got some vague waffle about the usefulness of theory/rationality in general, then I'm not so interested because I don't even see any entertainment in that, let alone practical use.

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akvadrako将近 7 年前

This can't be true by definition. Being maximally rational means behaving optimally. If your behavior doesn't provide a good cost-benefit ratio, what it wan't rational to begin with.One big issue I see with people acting "rationally" is they don't take into account all factors, like the time it takes to analyse your options vs just going with your gut.

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carapace将近 7 年前

I'm well-grounded in science and the the rationalist worldview. Imagine my wonder and curiosity when I went for a Reiki "initiation" and I could feel the "energy"!I've worked with electricity, I understand that, if I feel something, a force is involved in the sense of Physics. I wasn't hallucinating, nor was there a Van de Graff generator concealed behind a screen. I'm more-or-less a Rational Materialist, so I immediately began to try to find the physics behind the "Chi" or "Ki" phenomenon. Fortunately, there was a well-stocked metaphysical library in my neighborhood at the time, (a physical library of books on all metaphysical subjects.) I began to spend hours a day there, poring over the books trying to find a rail on which to lodge my foot.I discovered that "Chi" has been discovered and re-discovered several times in the West by many people, beginning with Mesmer[1], and including a Baron Carl von Reichenbach (who called it "the Odic force")[2], one William Walker Atkinson (who called it "Vril")[3], he was contemporaneous with the founder of Reiki, Mikao Usui[4], and Wilhelm Reich (who called it "Orgone")[5].That's not a complete list. Some investigators were more scientific than others, to put it mildly. But it's fair to say that this phenomenon has been known to and investigated by Westerners continuously for about three centuries, yet it has somehow never fully broken into consensus reality despite having been granted the benefit of the Scientific Method in at least a few cases.I failed to find anyone who had developed any sort of mathematics or engineering around it. It's possible that it has something to do with EM. (I did find a lot of magic. There are more and stranger religions in our world than you can possibly imagine. I did discover that there is a sort of formula or algorithm in common to all prayer, magic, ritual, new age magical thinking wish-fulfillment, etc. Every single cult, religion, lodge, mystery school, etc. has the same basic structure to its magic regardless of the trappings or outer organization. But that's a tangent.)My point is, "chi energy" is real, and it is the medium of emotions. Whatever emotions are they happen in this "chi field." You have experienced this yourself your whole life: the ineffable part of experiencing an emotion, the part that isn't proprioceptive feedback from your muscles and glands, is your subjective experience of a phenomenon that has a real physical existence. Your emotions extend out from your body for a meter or two. (The literature speaks of the "Emotional Body", and "aura".[6])My meta-point is, we should do science to this. This is a body of knowledge clogged with nonsense and bullshit, and dogged by skepticism and apathy, "and yet it moves"[7]. I did experiments, other people felt it, it's real, whatever it is. (And in the case of Reiki it has the capacity to engender healing, which is pretty important and should also be scientifically investigated. But that's separate from the fact that we should investigate "Chi" in general.) If we want to understand emotions we have to study this "energy".[1] 1734 – 1815 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Mesmer#Animal_magnetism" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Mesmer#Animal_magnetism</a>[2] 1788 – 1869 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odic_force" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odic_force</a>[3] 1862 – 1932 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Walker_Atkinson" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Walker_Atkinson</a>[4] 1865 – 1926 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikao_Usui" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikao_Usui</a>[5] 1897 – 1957 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Reich" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Reich</a>[6] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aura_(paranormal)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aura_(paranormal)</a>[7] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_yet_it_moves" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_yet_it_moves</a>

tw1010将近 7 年前

Wouldn't "well-tuned" in this case mean "an emotional system which improves reasoning where logical thinking fails". And in that case isn't the title of the article a tautology?I think most would agree that a "good" emotional system can be an aid to reason. The reason many think we shouldn't trust emotions is because most systems are "bad" (as in, it acts counter to capacity to reason).

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king_nothing将近 7 年前

If someone wanted to connect with others and have a good time, rationality is the number one party buzzkill. I’d trade all rationality in perpetuity for being able to connect with people without even needing to think about it... social skills are far more vital to well-being than almost anything else besides industrious productivity. Worse, these skills are in abject crisis with infinite distractions, negative social polarization/crybullies/humorouslessness/long-tail civilization decline and a disposable, social-dilettance mentality that only allows for surface, fake relationships that go to die on Facebook. You also can’t have love with Vulcan analysis... it’s incompatible with mutual-affinity.

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Quarrelsome将近 7 年前

Can I suggest that the whole "Lean startup" process is an example of dangerous hyper-reason? You're A/Bing your test subjects, you're responding purely to data and a dogmatic following of the technique results in you never asking how your users/test subjects _feel_ but only how they behave. Thus we end up with software like Facebook that arguably makes a lot of people sad while being unable to stop using it.

ada1981将近 7 年前

The mind is meant to be a servant to the body, not the other way around.A life lived disconnected from the body results in depression, illness and ultimately, one devoid of humanity and instead enslaved to systems and institutions.Darth Vader represents the ultimate disconnection of mind from body.And, our collective and individual trauma makes it difficult to remain in our bodies.The trick is not to suppress or numb out the emotional information we receive.Rather, we are being called to feel it fully, heal our bodies and traumas, so that we can be in deep attunement with our body and life itself.

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