Blogosaurus Vex

July 14th, 2009

This week past at TAM, popular Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe podcaster Rebecca Watson got married in a surprise ceremony at the convention (congratulations!).  It has been quite interesting to note the response of some of the skeptics in response to the announcement, who are saying things along the lines of “marriage is irrational.”  This brings us to one of my pet interests: What is the nature of rationality and emotions?  The skeptic party line seems to be, in one degree or another, that emotions are troublesome irritants that interfere with rationality and must be controlled or otherwise avoided when it’s time for making decisions.  Emotions are relegated to a second string status as nuisances that make rational evaluation and decision making harder.  I think this is wrong headed and couldn’t disagree more!

It is certainly true that merely seeking positive feelings is a terrible way to run one’s life, and our feelings can mislead us, but this is not what I mean.  We can’t rely exclusively on our feelings for making evaluations and decisions, to the extent that we do not understand them or feel unequal to managing them.  But as feelings can mislead us, so can our thoughts, and running one’s life purely on cognition also strikes me as a terrible way to be.  If it is even possible, which I don’t see any evidence for.  Certain feelings were identified by Darwin as primary and are generally accepted as such today still, meaning we come packaged with them and cannot “remove” them (surprise, fear, rage, joy, sadness, disgust and possibly contempt).  Feelings are real and they are with us to stay, so we need to consider how to deal with them in our quest to become rational.

Maybe this is a problem of terminology.  If being “rational” is definitionally a product of exclusively cognitive processes, then I suppose it is, by definition, irrational to consider your feelings.  But in that case I do not wish to be rational.

I don’t think that’s actually the way we should define rational.  If it were, it would be a rather stupid and useless term – no one lives that way and no one should want to.  The point of being rational is to honestly and openly consider all factors weighing on a decision or problem, in order to remove biases and assumptions, to consider all consequences, and to seek the truth.  I consider the most useful and meaningful definition of “rationality” to be the full acknowledgement of reality, relevant informing factors and potential outcomes, when making evaluations and decisions.  This cannot be done without a consideration of emotional factors.

Here is one reason why: You cannot remove a bias from or undue influence of feelings if you are not aware of them in the first place.  For many people they translate this to mean “To avoid the undue influence of feelings, you must ignore or shut out feelings!” but of course this is absurd.  Feelings can be suppressed and repressed but they are still there, acting to affect you (and your thinking processes, subsequent choices, etc.), only in this case they act outside your awareness.  It looks good on the outside but actually the rational process is severely compromised; is the mere appearance of rationality good enough?  It shouldn’t be, for a skeptic.

Here is another:  Feelings are consequences of your choices, not merely for your inner state but for your interpersonal interactions also.  As long as you (and others) have to live with those consequences, which you (and they) do, it’s only reasonable to consider them during the initial process.  This is nothing more than acknowledging reality and as such I consider it an integral part of being rational.

Here is a third:  Skeptics talk a lot about the cognitive errors and faults that we are prone to, and some instances of these are surely driven by nothing more than accidents of evolution that have resulted in strange glitches in our cognitive architecture.  But many more are directly related to underlying emotional factors operating outside of awareness.  It is impossible to be rational, in my sense of reflecting reality and considering all relevant factors when making evaluations, without also having emotional health. The reason for this is that emotional health comprises an awareness of one’s own emotional function and the ability to flexibly choose how to respond in any given situation, in a manner that is adaptive.  Without this awareness and flexibility, our emotions master us and drive us to behave in distinctly irrational ways, whether we like it or not, whether we are aware of it or not.

Unhealthy emotional function leads to all manner of behaviours and interactions that meet the definition of irrational (perhaps they represent a common cognitive fault), but to stop the inquiry there by shouting “Cognitive fault!” is short sighted.  What is the cause of this fault, in this case, with this person?  Merely classifying it is not sufficient – how to meaningfully make the perpetrator aware of what they have done such that they can in future avoid it (without, to name one common outcome, merely shifting the emotional burden onto a new “cognitive fault”)?  This requires seeking emotional wellness, the removal of maladaptive, inflexible responses – which itself requires, to begin with, awareness of the very existence of the problem.

Most people are woefully unaware of their emotional function and so their attempts at rationality often feel conflicted; unsatisfying and confusingly so.  Everything makes sense about this decision, why am I not happy about it? Because there is an enormous element of reality that has been ignored: emotions.  When reality is being ignored, there is no rationality.

Emotional wellness is a key component of rational function, as I define it.  I consider definitions of rationality that only consider cognitions useless for real world function and as such irrelevant.  In order to actualize as a rational being, consideration of emotional factors is necessary.  In order to accurately consider emotional factors, emotional health is required.

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