Typically people tend to differentiate between reason and emotion, or thinking and feeling. Yet I wonder how separate they really are, specifically in regards to beliefs.

What does it mean to hold a belief based upon emotion? What makes this different from a belief formed upon "reason"?

Say we have a short syllogism:

1. If A, then B
2. A
3. Therefore, B

This would be an example of a very basic logical, rational belief, assuming 1. is justified. But is there not a catch? Can we not add in a further premise:

A. I desire/need/am coerced/am obligated to think logically

Adding this premise into the syllogism is similar to adding a clock input into an electrical logic circuit: if the clock has a 0 value, nothing else occurs. It is only when the clock is switched to a 1 value that the rest of the circuit is available.

But A. is not a logical premise. It does not take the form of a counterfactual or logical relationship at all. Perhaps one might argue that A. is a reasonable premise; yet we have only to ask why it is reasonable to understand (through logical counterfactual modeling) that if we do not accept the rules of logic, we will be put into danger and may possibly die quite quickly. But this, again, is not a logical premise.

Thus another premise, in addition to the normative premise A, is:

B. I want to do x (x being survive, understand something, create something, etc)

Therefore, I conclude that reason is in service to emotion.

So what even is emotion? Emotion is any "natural" (comfortable and effortless) state of mind. I cannot control what emotions I feel with a single thought, but rather can only analyze the causes of the emotion and manipulate the environment to either support or hinder their instantiation. I cannot tell myself "be happy!" and be happy, I must find a reason to be happy.

Once again, reason is in service to emotion.

I think, in the end, this all spirals back to philosophy of action, or the analysis of what makes us do things. In which case, I think what makes us do things is whether or not want to do things. And what we want to do is based upon incentives, i.e. pleasure and pain. I want a drink of water, because I am thirsty, so I drink some water. A man murders another person because he wants vengeance, and he wants vengeance because he desires justice, and he desires justice because the idea of injustice twists his insides.

Again, reason is in the service of emotion.

Therefore, any attempt to isolate reason from emotion is fundamentally flawed, because the very act of doing so has an emotional basis. It is this emotional basis of reason that gives reason its normative force. Without any incentive to think reasonably, there would be no reason to practice reason.

And it is precisely this emotional basis that can be criticized, opening up new avenues of thought. It is this form of narrowing the possibilities that results in people holding dogmatic views. Thus any critique of another person, like "you are not thinking reasonably", is not referring to a separate "kind" of reason but rather a gradiance of reason - we may think that a person is not justified in believing in God simply because they feel some special spiritual experience, yet we ourselves may think that we are justified in believing there is a world outside of our experiences, simply because we "feel" there must be, in the same way the religious person "feels" there must be God.

Another example: we've all had the experience, that of when you're looking over a high drop and have this strange thought or urge to jump off. But presumably you didn't (since you're reading this post), because you had some reason not to. And this reason was probably the gut instinct not to jump. You must survive, not out of reason but out of emotional instinct.

But humans are not fully under the influence of primal instincts, at least not all of them. While other animals instinctively procreate, we can wait or abstain. While other animals eat other animals, we can abstain from doing so. Reason allows us to do so. We use reason, based in emotional instinct, to fundamentally overcome these instincts (at least some of them). But we are no fully independent of these instincts (we couldn't be), because we still feel pain and pleasure, the most basic incentives. And we have a third incentive, anxiety, that is attached to many of our other instincts, like survival and procreation. We don't commit suicide just because we want to feel more pleasure later, but also because we feel anxiety when contemplating death.

And it is the human ability to conquer this anxiety, to use reason to analyze reason itself, that makes humans some of the strangest and neurotic creatures on earth.