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Awesomelyglorious
Destroyer of worlds, reaver of souls
Joined: Dec 18, 2005
Posts: 6145
Location: United States
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 Posted: Tue May 20, 2008 12:38 am Post subject: |
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| IpsoRandomo wrote: | I mostly agree that rationality is important. But here are some points to consider:
*My senior year English teacher pointed out that there is a conflict between thinking and acting.
The more time you spend planning your actions, the less time you have to act. |
Well, both take time. It isn't so much a conflict, but just one of the billions of trade-offs that people make all of the time and that some economists concern themselves with somewhat.
| Quote: | | *You can't question everything, though you should question your broader assumptions (e.g., Imagine a little kid who asks why the sky's blue, then asks a million other questions) |
Why not? I question your assertion.... ad infinitum.
| Quote: | | *Objectivity isn't necessarily a good thing. I've harped on this point before, but some unrealistic optimism and false beliefs are necessary to be happy (I learned this in psychology). |
Well, good and bad are not objective categories anyway, so by labeling objectivity as not always good, you reject objectivity. The more interesting thing is how much objectivity is not a possibility.
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*Morality is neither rational nor irrational. In fact, morality is purely emotional as far as I can tell. I cannot coherently imagine what it would mean for something to matter unless it was emotional. In fact, I'd go so far as to say feeling is mattering. |
Morality is nonrational. Feeling is not mattering. I had a PhD psychologist once tell me that all motivational research showed our emotions to guide our motivations.
| Quote: | | *We rely on our emotions to make even "rational" decisions. For example, people with brain damage who cannot feel emotion have extreme difficulty making even mundane decisions. Instead, they spend so much time planning their actions that they never act. They also become overwhelmed with details. |
Oh, right, yeah... I should have read your post first. But yes, absolutely true and I backed this up with a link too!
| Quote: | | *Smart people tend to be better at self-deception. It's not always clear where the error lies in their thinking, especially if you're less intelligent. |
Certainly true, Arnold Kling writes about this here: http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=010407A basically dumb people use one strategy to avoid truth and smart people use another. |
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Orwell
Outer Party Member
Joined: Aug 09, 2007
Age: 19
Posts: 4454
Location: Room 101
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| Posted: Tue May 20, 2008 12:49 am Post subject: |
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The most amusing part of that article are the rationalizations of those who say that the fact that we allow morons to make our political decisions isn't a problem. Rather affirms the opening comments about avoiding truth through selective understanding and interpretation of the facts (which I also am currently engaging in).
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Awesomelyglorious
Destroyer of worlds, reaver of souls
Joined: Dec 18, 2005
Posts: 6145
Location: United States
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| Posted: Tue May 20, 2008 12:52 am Post subject: |
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| Fnord wrote: |
* My post-graduate philosophy professor pointed out that action - or the lack of it - reveals intent. |
Well, all choices reveal intent.
| Quote: | | * Nearly everyone could benefit from a healthy fantasy life, but it is effective thought and action that advances society, and not dreams alone. |
What should we call advancement? Why? Is advancement good? If it is then prove it so. If advancement cannot be proven absolutely good then why should we have to care about it.
| Quote: | | * There is only one cause of unhappiness: the false beliefs you have in your head, beliefs so widespread, so commonly held, that it never occurs to you to question them. |
Why are false beliefs a cause of unhappiness? What then causes happiness? Couldn't unhappiness have biochemical causes as opposed to purely phenomenal causes.
| Quote: | | * Liberty cannot be established without morality, and morality cannot be established without reason. |
What does it mean to establish morality? What about individualist anarchists in the tradition of Max Stirner, who has explicitly rejected morality as shown in a previous quote? How is morality actually related to reason if morality ultimately refers to facts it does not have due to Hume's Is-Ought problem.
| Quote: | | * Brain-damaged people who fail to make decisions, do so not because they lack emotional awareness, but because their brains are damaged. |
You do realize that you are arbitrarily dismissing good psychological research, and even doing this while ignoring the rationale for why emotions are necessary, thus denying reason to support reason.
| Quote: | | I'm sure we cold trade needlepoint homilies until this server's buffers are full, but until man began to use reason to overcome his primitive emotional urges, mankind was condemned to live in caes and be afraid of the unknown. |
No, man began to use reason to seek the desires his emotional urges came up with. Desiring sex, companionship, and social success did not arise ex nihilo, but rather came from somewhere. The issue is not homilies but rather debating points.
| Quote: | | Civilization is based on reason, and advances solely through its application. |
Well, I suppose you'd have to say so. Civilization is usually defined as requiring reason based structures, so the statement is basically tautological. |
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Orwell
Outer Party Member
Joined: Aug 09, 2007
Age: 19
Posts: 4454
Location: Room 101
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| Posted: Tue May 20, 2008 12:57 am Post subject: |
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| Awesomelyglorious wrote: | | Quote: | | * Nearly everyone could benefit from a healthy fantasy life, but it is effective thought and action that advances society, and not dreams alone. |
What should we call advancement? Why? Is advancement good? If it is then prove it so. If advancement cannot be proven absolutely good then why should we have to care about it. |
By that reasoning, you shouldn't care about anything, as "good" is a subjective term and you can't prove anything to be absolutely good. I can hold something like "less people dying or suffering" as tautologically good, but there is no real means of expressing my sense of good or bad to anyone else. Which is why we should at least go the universally accepted notions of good, adn advancement would generally be considered to fall under that.
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Cyberman
Cyber Leader
Joined: Apr 25, 2008
Posts: 1348
Location: Cyber Control
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| Posted: Tue May 20, 2008 4:03 pm Post subject: |
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| tailfins1959 wrote: | | How dare you! Don't you care about THE CHILDREN?!?!? Are you against taxing carbon to generate a tax infrastructure exceeding the income tax in complexity? Well, you scumbag you're against clean air and water and a healthy environment, aren't you? |
Why should I care? This is a FREE ENTERPRISE system, you communist hippie! I have the RIGHT to make money from destroying the world! So keep your godless-commie-pinko hands outta my business, or I'll come for you with my assault rifle! |
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D1nk0
Phoenix
Joined: Dec 12, 2007
Age: 29
Posts: 1589
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| Posted: Wed May 21, 2008 3:11 pm Post subject: |
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I STRONLY disagree with the assertion that emotions are always irrational and that they are totally uncesessary 
There are times when a persons emotional reactions are Very Rational. For example, when people are mean to you and treat you unfairly based on something that you have no control over, and/or when somebody takes advantage of you it is TOTALLY RATIONAL to feel angry! Considering how completely helpless and defenseless human babies are if women(including their mothers)didnt love them and feel protective towards them they surely wouldnt survive. |
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Lavos
Snowy Owl
Joined: Apr 12, 2008
Posts: 145
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| Posted: Wed May 21, 2008 3:31 pm Post subject: |
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No, you've got it all wrong,
EMOS are ruining civilization. |
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Odin
Supreme Genius
Joined: Oct 13, 2006
Age: 22
Posts: 1885
Location: Moorhead, Minnesota, USA
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| Posted: Wed May 21, 2008 9:24 pm Post subject: |
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I totally agree with the OP. IMO a large part of the blame for our society's rampant emotionalism is the Baby Boom Generation. The left-wing Boomers embraced New Age BS and attacked Reason and Science as "fascistic oppression and tool of Capitalist domination" while right-wing Boomers embraced Fundamentalist Christianity and attacked Reason and Science as "Godless Atheism." The Boomers embraced a destructive "Moral Outrage" form of politics. Instead of reasoned debate and compromise we have angry rants by Culture War ideologues damning each other to Hell with self-righteous fury, political theatrics, and Congressional gridlock.
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A350XWB
Raven
Joined: Dec 06, 2007
Posts: 124
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| Posted: Wed May 21, 2008 9:27 pm Post subject: |
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If only we could make use of love for rational reasons... 
I always said that if I cannot make use of a relationship for anything other than emotional reasons, I'm better off terminating it.
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merr
Phoenix
Joined: Oct 23, 2007
Posts: 683
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| Posted: Mon May 26, 2008 5:05 pm Post subject: |
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| Odin wrote: | | I totally agree with the OP. IMO a large part of the blame for our society's rampant emotionalism is the Baby Boom Generation. The left-wing Boomers embraced New Age BS and attacked Reason and Science as "fascistic oppression and tool of Capitalist domination" while right-wing Boomers embraced Fundamentalist Christianity and attacked Reason and Science as "Godless Atheism." The Boomers embraced a destructive "Moral Outrage" form of politics. Instead of reasoned debate and compromise we have angry rants by Culture War ideologues damning each other to Hell with self-righteous fury, political theatrics, and Congressional gridlock. |
Fundamentalist christianity isnt a new thing. 200 years ago you may as well forget about mentioning a lack of belief in god in public. Culturally athieism is relatively a new phenomenon that you can thank the OTHER half of the baby boom generation for putting forth. I dont necessarily think society is degressing into an emotional civilization; as far as I've read about, it's been that way more often than not. |
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D1nk0
Phoenix
Joined: Dec 12, 2007
Age: 29
Posts: 1589
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| Posted: Tue May 27, 2008 11:42 am Post subject: |
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| Lavos wrote: | No, you've got it all wrong,
EMOS are ruining civilization. |
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Sargon
Sea Gull
Joined: Aug 28, 2007
Posts: 248
Location: Fairfax, VA
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| Posted: Tue May 27, 2008 10:14 pm Post subject: |
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| Emotion is not the problem in so much as letting your emotions influence your decision is. If you are concerned about outcomes, then logic and rationality should always win vs. emotion (whatever course of action has the highest chance of success given probabilities is considered to be the logical one). Emotion can be factored into logic so to speak (i.e. pursing "love" will make me X times happier at Y cost). Also, sometimes the logical choice is to be emotional (such as in fights, sometimes releasing the "primal rage" works rather effectively). These days those who favor logic are often compared to straw Vulcans unfortunately. |
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mouapp
Phoenix
Joined: Mar 21, 2007
Age: 18
Posts: 678
Location: probably not WP
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| Posted: Wed May 28, 2008 12:26 am Post subject: |
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civilization is the rational organization of individual irrational people
logic just makes you feel better about a decision, because you feel its logical, you feel you should do it
to the OP watch a different news show, they all do that emotional crap to make the story more dramatic but some are better than others
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curiouslittleboy
Deinonychus
Joined: Jun 07, 2007
Age: 20
Posts: 328
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| Posted: Sun Jun 01, 2008 2:12 am Post subject: |
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It never hurts to experiement to see what ACTUALLY WORKS in society. 
That's among the top points of science.
And is going to happen one way or another. |
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