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The Role Of Emotions In Reason

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luciferchrist

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*nod*

Same here. This reinforces a point that I brought up earlier: scientists can be and often are wrong about studies related to consciousness. "Emotion" is a concept of consciousness. This is true even when applied to animals.

A scientist can try to operationally or behaviorally define the concepts of consciousness that they use but they cannot escape the fact that all concepts of consciousness count on a particular metaphysics and epistemology. They can be as meticulous as possible in controlling their experiments but they are vulnerable to bad philosophy just as the general public is. Neuroscientists are especially vulnerable since they count on concepts of consciousness in many of their inductions. As Dr. Peikoff has pointed out, invalid concepts are a blockade to the inductive process.

That neuroscientists are doing and have done brilliant and valid work in their field is a testament to their rationality since they only have very, very bad philosophy coming at them from philosophers of mind and cognitive scientists.

I do agree with this

I have looked through journals on consciousness, and it seems they are inducing information through theories. Not fact, just theories. What gets me, is that scientist are going head first into studying consciousness, and claiming how consciousness 'might' be working, when a prerequsite to consciousness is not even fully understood: the nervous system. How can one make a judgement on how a system works when the judgement is being based on half-truths? This is what has lead me away from studying psychology, and going straight into neuroscience. Granted we have a rocky road to travel, my intuition tells me by the time I am dead, we should have a pretty solid view of how consciousness actually works.

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Damasio is a great neuroscientist. Although I don't consider him to be actively corrupt philosophically, he has swallowed a lot of garbage from philosophers of mind and cognitive science.

I really have nothing to say about the model that you're presenting other than, "Be very wary" (I'm a poet and I didn't even know it!). Look at all of the concepts of consciousness that he is using: "decision", "images", "options", "anticipation", "reasoning", "strategies", "knowledge", "decision", "emotion"...need I continue? He is assuming a certain theory of consciousness in his use of each of these terms and I call it the representational theory of conscousness. This theory is fundamentally wrong.

That doesn't nullify the research that he does. It does, however, severely limit his ability to induce per what I said above in another post. I think that this is a very tragic thing.

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what do you think of this?

http://www.psychologytoday.com/htdocs/prod...1101-000001.ASP

FEELING AND REASON

Many of history's enlightened sages, from Descartes to our mothers, have dispensed the following wisdom to those of us trying to resolve an exasperating dilemma: "Calm down."

The suggestion stems, of course, from the idea that emotion interferes with rational thinking. But some scientists now think that emotion and reason may be inextricably linked within our brains, so that logical decision making, particularly in social situations, might be impossible without a dollop of feelings. An intriguing bit of evidence: the case of Phineas Gage.

Two remarkable things happened to Phineas in fall, 1848. The first was that a tamping iron, 43 inches long, one inch in diameter, pierced his brain in a construction explosion. The tapered metal rod tore through his left cheek, exited via the top of his skull, and landed more than a hundred feet away.

The other remarkable thing? Phineas survived.

Although his wound healed, our hero was a changed man. According to one acquaintance, Phineas had been a "shrewd, smart businessman, very energetic and persistent." The new Phineas, however, couldn't keep a decent job and reneged on commitments. His formidable intelligence remained intact, yet he now seemed oblivious to social conventions, swearing so vigorously women were advised to avoid his company.

More than a century later, a team of scientists thinks it understands Phineas's transformation. Armed with X rays of Phineas's skull and a battery of computers, the neurodetectives recreated on-line the tamping iron's gruesome journey through Phineas's brain.

Their conclusion: The rod wreaked havoc on Phineas's prefrontal cortex. According to University of Iowa neurologist Antonio Damasio, M.D., injury to this region of his brain "compromised Phineas's ability to conduct himself according to the social rules he previously had learned, to decide on the course of action that ultimately would be most advantageous to his survival, and to plan for the future."

Damasio, in Descartes' Error (Grosset/Putnam), says Phineas's behavior after the accident mirrors that of patients who suffer prefrontal damage from tumors. Their intellect, memory, and language skills are unchanged, but their ability to make social decisions is impaired and their emotion-processing machinery malfunctions or shuts down. The implication, says Damasio, is that reason and emotion are strange but inseparable bedfellows.

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hmmm maybe emotions are more important then we think?

http://www.psychologytoday.com/htdocs/prod...0101-000006.ASP

EXPRESSION

If you think keeping your head requires keeping your cool, think again. New research suggests that suppressing emotions may actually hamper your memory.

In a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Jane Richards, Ph.D., of the University of Washington and James Gross, Ph.D., of Stanford University, showed participants a film depicting a married couple arguing heatedly. They asked half the subjects to hide their emotions during the viewing, and while both groups later described similar emotional experiences, those who hid their feelings remembered far less.

Next, the researchers looked again at expressive suppression, or hiding emotions, and at reappraisal, or consciously construing negative stimuli as neutral or even positive. Subjects viewed slides of injured accident victims and were told personal information about each. One-third of the subjects were asked to conceal their emotions, another third were told to view the slides with neutral detachment, while the remainder had no special Instructions. The results showed that participants who suppressed their emotions recalled fewer details than the other participants.

Richards suggests that hiding emotions requires continuous self-monitoring, tapping mental resources critical in forming memories. But defusing emotions at the outset appears to help people pay closer attention. These findings hold important implications, especially when both emotions and stakes are high, such as in the courtroom. "Expressive suppression on the part of jurors--as they attempt to appear calm in front of an entire courtroom--may drain cognitive resources that are critical for evaluating and remembering instructions and testimony."

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The brain is organized to process emotions with logic you say?

http://www.psychologytoday.com/htdocs/prod...0218-000004.asp

hen it comes to higher mental abilities, man does not govern by logical thought alone. Instead, research suggests that moods help regulate specific tasks performed by the lateral prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain critical to reasoning and intelligence.

"The brain is organized to process emotions along with logic," states Richard Restak, M.D., a psychiatrist and professor of neurology at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Restak's book Mozart's Brain and the Fighter Pilot provides 28 tips on strengthening mental acuity and, when necessary, turning emotion to one's advantage.

A new study, conducted at Washington University (WU) in St. Louis, shows more specifically how emotions and learning interact. Subjects viewed pleasant, neutral or anxiety-inducing video clips, then performed cognitive tasks while their brain activity was monitored by functional magnetic resonance imaging. The results, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggest that emotional states such as enjoyment and anticipation augment tasks executed by the left prefrontal cortex, while negative emotions, including fear and anxiety, enhance tasks processed by the right prefontal cortex.

"This is the first study to show that specific brain regions mediate interactions between emotional states and cognition," says Todd Braver, Ph.D., a WU psychology professor. Co-author Jeremy Gray, Ph.D., a postdoctoral researcher at WU, agrees. "It's not simply that emotion 'hijacks' cognition but that emotions both enhance and impair higher cognition in very specific ways," Gray explains. "To understand how a particular emotion influences performance, you have to take into account the type of task in question. Our results show that the brain takes this into account."

Because anxiety enhances visual and spatial performance, subjects who viewed a clip from the horror film Halloween scored 25 percent better on tests of face recognition (regulated by the right hemisphere), than did subjects who watched comedies. Viewing comedies, however, led to a 25 percent improvement in verbal performance.

Susceptibility to positive or negative moods can also impact tasks regulated by the lateral prefrontal cortex, according to the study. Those results will be published in Cognitive, Affective, and Behavioral Neuroscience.

Even though emotion enhances certain types of learning, Restak subscribes to the precept of "mental hygiene," or keeping one's emotions in check. "Don't pay too much attention to your feelings," he advises. "If I only wrote when I felt like it, I'd have two books written." Restak has in fact penned 13.

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I agree with the "can" but not with the "could claim."

Yes, that's what I was getting at. I meant that they could not claim it and remain noncontradictory.

Not really. Philosophy has its proper province, and so does science. It is true that science depends upon philosophy, and not vice versa, but philosophy has no say over scientific issues such as the specific nature and properties of that which exists.

Yes, that is a clearer way of saying what I was getting at, thank you. Basically science is dependant upon philosophy and the two are connected. You can't say that science could exist without philosophy, for example. But science handles questions that philosophy does not and vice versa.

My main point is that you shouldn't say "well, I'm a scientist and I don't need philosophy," because scientists DESPARATELY need philosophy.

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Stephen,

I thought it would be a good idea to point out that above, when I said that emotions come before reason, while representing that I thought this was true in man's cognitive development, I meant that emotions come before reason in the evolutionary process. I should still clarify that you are most certainly right when you say that you have always had a problem saying animals emote. I thought about that point a lot, and I think it would have been better for me to say that animals don't emote, they use instincts, and that emotions should only be referred to when talking about the feelings of humans.

Also, I went back and looked up "emotion" in the Ayn Rand Lexicon by Binswanger, and there was an entry in which Rand talks about emotions being responses to facts of reality.

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...I think it would have been better for me to say that animals don't emote, they use instincts

If I had to choose just one, I would get rid of "instincts." See this post of mine, and other posts in thread, for why "instinct" is an anti-concept.

http://forum.ObjectivismOnline.com/index.p...indpost&p=50532

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