Rule by reason, rule by feeling?

All our impressions come to us via our body: this contains the senses. While signals may originate from within the body, the body is the medium that transfers them to a specific part of the body, the brain, which processes these signals. The two remaining parts of a human are the thoughts and emotions. Except that they originate and are “sensed” by the brain, what can we tell about them? And how do they affect living well?

When studying the emotions one comes to the conclusion that their goal is to propagate the body’s genes (and thereby the emotions themselves). Fear protects the body against external harm by avoiding danger, anger allows one to obtain needed resources even in the face of opposition, sadness saves energy and makes one avoid situations which are not pleasant or that are unproductive (depression being the ultimate result of the feeling that nothing you do matters), and joy reinforces the body that the current situation is good, and makes us actively seek out opportunities for repetition.

Where does that leave the mind?

In all probablility, some animals do not need a mind since their world is simple and predictable and reflexes suffice. However, especially for large, long-living animals the environment may change, and also they have more possibilities to affect the environment. Being preprogrammed to deal with such changes is practically impossible, so the human brain has evolved the power to store and remember and combine concepts encountered. Where emotions are not directly roused, the mind finds the link between the current situation and emotions (if applicable) and therefore guides action. In contrast with what you see on "Star Trek", where the Vulcans have abandoned emotions in favour of ratio, the ratio in itself is not enough to take decisions since it cannot intrinsically tell us what is good or not good. Without emotions to bring the message home, even a question of "It is good that I cross this busy freeway without looking?" becomes impossible to answer, since something is only rational in the respect that it achieves a goal, but the goals themselves (or rather, their value) cannot be determined by the ratio. And even if a rational creature would decide that survival is a good idea, the extra energy and impetus given by emotions would help in reaching such a goal, so emotions would evolve anyway.

One could say (as Mattias Alexander has said) that we evolved on the savannah and our current “reflexes” and emotions have been adapted to a world that no longer exists. So while (in his case) walking poorly might have been a natural reflex to the unnatural circumstances in which humans live today (and are only very slowly evolutionally adapting) one needs knowledge and the mind to steer the process and complete what the emotions were needed to do: ensure optimal survival and procreation of the organism.

Does that leave no place for emotions except as default parameter settings to be tweaked by the mind after it has deliberated the situation? Not entirely. Our brains are built in such a way that we often obtain knowledge without being conscious of it. In experiments where volunteers had to repeatedly choose cards from one out of two stacks, most were found to pick more cards from the stack with the highest average, even though they were not conscious that this stack was better, or even that they were picking more cards from it! Often, other learning processes precede those of the rational mind, and complex decisions can certainly not be reasoned about with full certainty, because logical laws and absolute facts are seldom available. In this case, we should trust our intuition instead of ratio. While rational thinking may be good for solving a math problem, buying a house or choosing a job are so complex that intuition and feelings are necessary. Feelings also give feedback on how well your body thinks you are doing. Ignore them at your own peril.

The lesson of today and yesterday are thus:
1) the mind and emotions are intended for the well-being of the body, especially for survival / reproduction.
2) Thoughts can be unreliable because of fallacies. Investigate the most important or persistent thoughts on reality.
3) Emotions can be unreliable since we do not live on the savannah anymore and the world is quite complex. The only way to investigate them is to use your thoughts.
4) Pure rational thinking is good for problems with few unknowns and lots of absolute laws. For complex problems on which little data is available, intuition should be chosen. Preferably use them both, when conflicting ratio should prevail when your reasoning is fool-proof (as in careful mathematics). In any case it might be good then to investigate your intuitions and feelings to see which information they bring.
5) Your feelings may not always be right, but they do give you information. If the information is correct, you profit, if it is not, use your thoughts to try to modify your feelings so they are based on a more correct version of reality.

Of course, philosophy is not of much use unless it is applied. Next time I hope to look at living again, and choices.