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#71
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Re: Intellect & emotions---Choice
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I’m impressed Margaret. Your above comment indicates that your understanding of this area has evolved since you’ve begun this thread, and you now seem to understand and acknowledge that your original so-called hypothesis—that “we do that which we most want to do, emotionallyâ€â€”in addition to being circular and somewhat vacuous, also erroneously ignored the impact of the third part of the mental trilogy, our more recently evolved human cognitive consciousness/intellect, by which we humans are able to rationally reason, discern truth, and from which freewill seems to emerge (although you yourself may not yet completely accept the freewill thing). I think the LeDoux’s book may have been tremendously helpful in your evolution. And considering that you’ve also recently changed your mind regarding intelligence differences, more or less now acknowledging that intelligent differences are indeed real (mostly due to JimB’s suggestion that you read Pinker’s book I think), I must say that I’m pleasantly surprised—you’re learning and growing. That’s downward causation for you. Congratulations. |
#72
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Re: Somatic Behavior Choice Hypothesis
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Regarding Todd's post, I see that he was referring to the conventional wisdom of intellect/emotion separationas a "serious error". However, it does seem to me that you still treat intellect and emotion as two completely separate entities (that interact with each other). My interpretation of Todd's early post is that having different names for emotion and intellect might not even be conceptually correct, according to recent neuroscientific evidence. I would, however defer to Todd on this one. |
#73
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Re: Somatic Behavior Choice Hypothesis
Found one of my old posts from 2/25/03 that’s somewhat relevant to this thread—
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#74
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Re: Intellect & emotions---Choice
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Last edited by TomJrzk; May 5th, 2006 at 09:47 AM.. |
#75
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Re: Somatic Behavior Choice Hypothesis
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Re: Somatic Behavior Choice Hypothesis
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#77
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Re: Somatic Behavior Choice Hypothesis
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#78
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Re: Somatic Behavior Choice Hypothesis
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#79
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Re: Somatic Behavior Choice Hypothesis
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It's interesting that you'd take such an oversight as a character flaw when you knew that I meant 'ultimately responsible'... |
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Sorry for the delay in responding ... suggest central/peripheral distinction
... I'm just catching up on this interesting discussion, as time allows.
Just for the record, although "polite" is a compliment I won't reject out of hand, I really wasn't biting my tongue with Margaret. I was honestly reserving judgment because there are some fundamental concepts that I seem to think of very differently and I want to avoid misunderstanding as far as practical. "Emotion" and "Intellect" both have a long history as concepts, and for most of that history they have been defined in intuitive and phenomenological terms rather than operational or technical terms. Failing to make them technical risks our slide into compelling illusions that represent how we explain our own behavior to ourselves but probably not what actually drives our behavior. We know from a great deal of evidence from various lines that the engines of explanation and the engines of behavior are different mechanisms in human beings. On the other hand, making intellect and emotional into technical ideas risks the not lesser crime of "destroying" the phenomena we care about examining, in a similar manner to that in which early behaviorists temporarily "destroyed" mental and cognitive phenomena. I suspect that Margaret and I make different tradeoffs on the technical definition of the concepts. She relies more on her intuition about what emotions and intellect represent, and I think I do share her intuitions, but I am also more skeptical of them. So I look for experimental evidence about the details of the decision making process, but I tend to try to avoid interpreting them as evidence for a battle between intellect and emotion. My exposure to the literature relevant to human decision making has left me with the impression that it is divided roughly in half. Cognitive and social psychology on one hand, and political psychology on the other hand. The cognitive psychology and social psychology tradition, which I am most familiar with and comfortable with, treats human rationality as flawed for various reasons, converging on the idea that various things lead us to use shortcuts in our reasoning. This includes but is not limited to extremes of emotions, and also includes a tendency to be overconfident in our own opinions, to use stereotyped modes of thinking to reject new evidence, to rely on seemingly superficial markers of credibility, and so on. The political psychology literature agrees that human beings use shortcuts and heuristics, but tends to take the view that these are adaptive, that people actually make better decisions together because of the shortcuts and sometimes even when we avoid reasoning. I think there is a lot to be said for both of these viewpoints, and I agree with a lot in each of them. Much of the literature in both camps shares at least one important concept, the notion that human beings vary between a high attention, high motivation mode of thinking (central processing) and a low attention, low motivation mode of thinking (peripheral processing). They disagree on the implications of this, and the value associated with central vs. peripheral processing. I bring this up in part to suggest that the more operational and technical distinction in human decision making might be better stated as central vs. peripheral processing rather than intellect and emotion. And Margaret is right, I am usually very little concerned about who wins arguments here, and I usually find them annoying rather than stimulating. I do enjoy a well made argument, even when I disagree, which is why I can usually tolerate Fred for a while even though we eventually annoy each other into oblivion in nearly every thread. He does often argue very well, and I learn from that. kind regards, Todd |
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