Couldn't agree. My position is that old hypotheses that contradict science do get dispproved. And neuroscience has gathered no evidence whatsoever that previous philosophical explorations of consciousness are supported. Check out Global Workspace Theory, that's a good place to start checking this out. — Garrett Travers

That’s what I thought. You’re a Popperian, not a Kuhnian.
Kuhn’s response to the argument that a particular approach in science has gathered no evidence to support the predictions of a previous theoretical paradigm is that it is a circular argument. When there is a paradigm shift , what constitutes evidence undergoes a transformation along with the paradigm itself. Thus it is not the same evidence that rival paradigms are talking about.

Hubble's Constant put to rest the idea of the heliocentric model of the universe, did it not? There are certain claims science puts to rest. — Garrett Travers

One could say that in the arts the advent of a new style puts to rest a previous modality of expression. Even when there are revivals of older styles these always reflect the influence of the new approach, so never actually return to the original mode of expression. But this meaning of ‘putting to rest” is clearly different from what one means when one talks about the falsification of a scientific theory. I mention this because of your reference to paradigm shifts.

How we discover that universal manner is up to us, our paradigms, and our paradigm shifts. — Garrett Travers

You’re certainly free to use the concept of paradigm shift
in your own way. Many do so. I just wanted to point out that Thomas Kuhn uses the phrase not to convey the falsification of a theory by a new theory but to show the similarity between change in the arts and the sciences.
He doesnt believe science is a cumulative accretion of truths.

“The most persuasive case for the concept of cumulativeness is made by the familiar contrast between the development of science and that of art. Both disciplines display continuity of historical development –
neither could have reached its present state without its past – yet the relation of present to past in these two fields is clearly distinct.
Einstein or Heisenberg could, we feel sure, have persuaded Newton that twentieth-century science has surpassed the science of the seventeenth century, but we anticipate no remotely similar conclusion from a debate between, say, Rembrandt and Picasso.
In the arts successive developmental stages are autonomous and self-complete: no obvious external standard is available for comparisons between them.

The creative idiom of a Rembrandt, Bach, or Shakespeare resolves all its aesthetic problems and prohibits the consideration of others. Fundamentally new modes of aesthetic expression emerge only in intimate conjunction with a new perception of the aesthetic problem that the new modes must aim to resolve. Except in the realm of technique, the transition between one stage of artistic development and the next is a transition between incommensurables. In science, on the other hand, problems seem to be set by nature and in advance, without reference to the idiom or taste of the scientific community. Apparently, therefore, successive stages of scientific development can be evaluated as successively better approximations to a full solution. That is why the present state of science always seems to embrace its past stages as parts, which is what the concept of cumulativeness means. Guided by that concept, we see in the development of science no equivalents for the total shift of artistic vision – the shift from one integrated set of problems, images, techniques, and tastes to another.”

Kuhn disagrees with this cumulate e model of science:

If we are to preserve any part of the metaphor which makes inventions and discoveries new bricks for the scientific edifice, and if we are simultaneously to give resistance and controversy an essential place in the development of science, then we may have to recognize that the addition of new bricks demands at least partial demolition of the existing structure, and that the new edifice erected to include the new brick is not just the old one plus, but a new building. We may, that is, be forced to recognize that new discoveries and new theories do not simply add to the stock of pre-existing scientific knowledge. They change it. (KuhnM2, p. 7)19

Often a decision to embrace a new theory turns out to involve an implicit redefinition of the corresponding science. Old problems may be relegated to another science or may be declared entirely “unscientific.” Problems that, on the old theory, were non-existent
or trivial may, with a new theory, become the very archetypes of significant scientific achievement. And, as the problems change, so, often, does the standard that distinguishes a real scientific solution from a mere metaphysical speculation, word game, or mathematical play. It follows that, to a significant extent, the science that emerges from a scientific revolution is not only incompatible, but often actually incommensurable, with that which has gone before. Only as this is realized, can we grasp the full sense in which scientific revolutions are like those in the arts. (Kuhn M1, pp. 17)

Modern neuroscience puts the idea that they cannot be accounted for to sleep, definitively. — Garrett Travers

Do you think that it is a central capability of science that when empirical method proves a set of facts to be the case, this means that this locks in a piece of truth definitely?
If so, what do you think makes possible such nailing down of definitive truth? Is it the nature of the world itself that makes this possible , or is it the product of a presupposition that organizes our scientific theorizing about the natural world?
If the latter, then perhaps we could call this presupposition the ‘morality’ of scientific truth, and recognize it to be transcendent to the neural processes we discover.

I think that our emotions and irrational tenancies can sneak their way into even the most diligent and professional scientific and rational pursuits, so an inability to reflexively question rational thought and hold it as sacred is also dangerous in my opinion.
— SatmBopd

100%, but this is overwhelmingly supported across hundreds of experiments. — Garrett Travers

In the past you have characterized emotions as though they were the opposite of rationality. I’m wondering whether you would agree with the predictive coding model of emotion, considered by many psychologists to be the among the most promising neuroscientific theories of emotion.

“Emotions are constructed in just the same way that percepts are constructed; that is, they are predictive models of the likely causes of the sensory input, made by
re-stitching together past experiences and then classifying the current experience as an
amalgam of past experiences of a similar nature.”

http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/93282/3/Getting%20WarmerSept16.pdf


Also Evan Thompson:

“ Sense-making comprises emotion as much as cognition. The enactive approach does not view cognition and emo-tion as separate systems, but treats them as thoroughly integrated at biological, psychological, and phenomeno-logical levels (Colombetti 2005, 2007, 2009; Colombetti and Thompson 2005, 2007; Thompson 2007). By contrast, the extended mind thesis and the debates it has engendered to-date have neglected emotion and treated cognition as if it were largely affectless problem solving or information processing (Adams and Aizawa 2008; Clark 2007). Sense-making is viable conduct in relation to what has salience and value for the system. What has salience and value also has valence: it attracts or repels, elicits approach or avoidance.

Such action tendencies in relation to value are the basis of emotion. Hence, as Walter Freeman argues, ‘‘emotion is essential to all intentional behaviours'' (Free-man 2000). To describe cognition as embodied action (Varela et al. 1991) implies that cognition comprises motivated action tendencies and thus is also essentially emotive. Motivated action, especially when it involves affect, is a mode of self-regulation. Cognition as embodied action is more a matter of adaptive self-regulation in precarious conditions than abstract problem solving. The point here is not to deny that we can and do engage in high-level problem solving. Rather, it is that this kind of narrow cognition presupposes the broader emotive cognition of sense-making.

Attention to the inseparability of emotion and cognition is an emerging trend in cognitive science. For example, Marc Lewis (2005) argues that appraisal and emotion processes are thoroughly interdependent at both psycho-logical and neural levels (see also Colombetti and Thompson 2005). At the psychological level, one is not a mere means to the other (as in the idea that an appraisal is a means to the having of an emotion, and vice-versa); rather, hey form an integrated and self-organizing emotion-appraisal state, an ‘emotional interpretation.' At the neural level, brain systems traditionally seen as subserving sepa-rate functions of appraisal and emotion are inextricably interconnected.

Hence ‘appraisal' and ‘emotion' cannot be mapped onto separate brain systems. In a recent review, Pessoa (2008) provides extensive evidence from neuroscience that supports this view of the neural underpinnings of emotion and cognition. He pre-sents three converging lines of evidence: (1) brain regions previously viewed as ‘affective' are also involved in cog-nition; (2) brain regions previously viewed as ‘cognitive' are also involved in emotion; and (3) the neural processes subserving emotion and cognition are integrated and thus non-modular. In Pessoa's view, ‘‘complex cognitive-emo-tional behaviours have their basis in dynamic coalitions of networks of brain areas, none of which should be con-ceptualized as specifically affective or cognitive'' (Pessoa 2008, p. 148)

The human brain is a fascinating contraption, even so.
— Mww

It's only the coolest thing since Cartesian machine ghosts. — Garrett Travers

I think that the most interesting things we can learn about the central functions of the human brain , such as the nature of perception, learning, memory, rationality, consciousness and emotion, are in fact not at all unique to the human brain. They are already present in incipient form in the simplest living organisms. I recommend Evan Thompson’s Mind in Life

http://lchc.ucsd.edu/MCA/Mail/xmcamail.2012_03.dir/pdf3okBxYPBXw.pdf

for an excellent perspective on the origins of cognition in living systems. So I would argue the ‘coolest thing’ isnt specifically the human brain, but the general functional organizing principles shared by all living systems.

Tell me what your theory is that opposes the above research, where you got it, and let's see if I can't go track down some stuff from my database that my give it some support. What do you say? — Garrett Travers

Ok, I really like the research on consciousness that emphasizes levels of awareness, indicating that consciousness is not all or nothing but an integrative
princess that ties together memory, emotion, perception and cognition in amazingly interactive way. Equally important, I think, is emphasizing the role of awareness in predicting and anticipating. events.

Evidence is only intelligible relative to conceptual schemes
— Joshs

No it isn't — Garrett Travers

I don’t expect you to agree with me , but I would like for you to be able to tell me where I am getting this idea
from , Have you heard it before? Do you know which approaches within philosophy of science assert it, and what their argument is?

"This fallacy is committed when a person makes a claim that knowingly or unknowingly disregards well known science, science that weighs against the claim — Garrett Travers

I’m not disregarding well known science , I am
wanting to critique it based on its conceptual
foundation, which is different than refuting the evidence in favor of it. A scientific theory can be absolutely correct in asserting that it conforms with all the available evidence , and still be less useful than an alternative theoretical orientation.

Evidence? That'll be required here. I see you have a pretty decent assertion, if you can support it. Yo — Garrett Travers

I’m not interested in debating evidence. That’s like trying to parse the meaning of bible verses. Evidence is only intelligible relative to conceptual schemes. That’s the level at which I’d like to discuss this. See bert1 above

Neuroscience has never led the way in the understanding of consciousness and behavior. It has always been the handmaiden of philosophy and personality theory. Whenever philosophical presuppositions concerning psychological phenomena undergo a shift, this is eventually reflected in changes in neuroscientific models, but at a considerable lag. Today’s
cutting edge neuroscience is grounded in the philosophical speculations of the American Pragmatists a hundred years ago.

In addition, it is easy to read into the neuroscientific research only what seems to be consistent with one’s philosophical presuppositions. For instance, you align with 18th century rationalism, so to you every result that comes out of neuroscience seems to verify your rationalism. But the work of leading neuroscientists like Damasio and the predictive processing group is not consistent with your view of the relationship between affective and cognition, among other things

The one bearing the words "Arbeit Macht Frei"? Perhaps that was another doorstep, though, and the project of other Nazis.

Fol de rol — Ciceronianus

Or as Xtrix would say, Fol de troll

I'd be surprised if he wasn't, but yes it is speculative. Psychiatrist Christopher Gillberg has certainly suspected this. Based on W's behaviors as described by Monk and others - odd formal speech even in childhood, social withdrawal, reluctance to form friendships, easily slighted, eating exactly the same meal day after day, his obsessive narrowly defined technical interests, wearing same clothing each day, inability to do small talk. — Tom Storm

A quick search on Google turned up evidence of Asperger’s that did seem convincing to me. I find that remarkable. Perhaps his difficulties in parsing affectively tinged meaning gave him an advantage from a philosophical perspective. Being an outsider, he could see patterns i. what others took for granted. I’m reminded of Temple Grandin seeing herself as like an anthropologist on Mars.

More likely Wittgenstein's notion of sense is derived from freges distinction between sense and reference, which has little to do (if anything) with feeling. Sense is the expression of a sentence, while reference is the truth value. — emancipate

I always understood the later Wittgenstein’s notion of sense as a critique of Frege’s distinction between sense and reference.

but I have assumed for some years that Wittgenstein likely had autism given his presentation and behaviour. This would have made communication difficult on occasions. — Tom Storm

That seems unlikely to me because Wittgenstein’s focus was on meaning as sense , and sense is a form
of feeling. He would have had to have an extraordinarily nuanced understanding of the relation between affectivity and conceptualization, which is precisely what autistics
lack. His social difficulties may in fact have been due to too much emotional sensitivity. Just speculating here.

Heidegger’s project.
— Joshs
re: Bullshit and Time :sparkle: — 180 Proof

You’ve been hanging around Joe Mello too long.

Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound to the crowd strive for obscurity. For the crowd believes that if it cannot see to the bottom of something it must be profound.
— The Gay Science
↪Xtrix H's "thesis" is unoriginal and uninteresting – Laozi, Buddha ... Schopenhauer, Bergson, Dewey et al say more or less the same thing far less obscurely. — 180 Proof

I’m glad you quoted Nietzsche. Assimilating his critique of
Schopenhauer, and by implication Bergson and Dewey, brings one to the doorstep of Heidegger’s project.

And so the alternative he suggests is — baker

Play it by ear

I'm assuming that in the logic of super physical thinking, entering the realm of eternity with god would bring with it an entirely different perspective and value system, which would generate a different outlook on such matters. — Tom Storm

Exactly. The temporal bias of experience guarantees that there will always be an entirely different perspective and value system, generating a different outlook on the world. But there can never be a true or correct or original or final value system. Hagglund's argument goes deeper than simply critiquing the idea of heaven. He uses a Derridean deconstructive approach to show that any value that is assumed to be beyond cultural contingency, such as universal notions of the good , the moral , the just or the generous , are incoherent. It is not just that we should prefer finitude over the eternal, the unconditional or the universal, but that all such assumptions fall prey to their own deconstruction. All valuation is contingent and relative. This is just as true of our imagining of a timeless deity, value structure, notion of the good or the true as it is of scientific and aesthetic endeavor.

Isn't that more a case of refusing to accept a god on the grounds of personal taste? Would that not be analogous to saying I don't believe in the laws of my country because they are repugnant and limit my individual freedoms — Tom Storm

Martin Hagglund’s argument is that essential
to faith in God is a belief in , and desire for, the eternal.
He argues instead that finitude is preferable to eternity.

“To be finite means primarily two things: to be dependent on others and to live in relation to death. I am finite because I cannot maintain my life on my own and because I will die. Likewise, the projects to which I am devoted are finite because they live only through the efforts of those who are committed to them and will cease to be if they are abandoned. The thought of my own death, and the death of everything I love, is utterly painful. I do not want to die, since I want to sustain my life and the life of what I love. At the same time, I do not want my life to be eternal. An eternal life is not only unattainable but also undesirable, since it would eliminate the care and passion that animate my life.

This problem can be traced even within religious traditions that espouse faith in eternal life. An article in U.S. Catholic asks: “Heaven: Will It be Boring?” The article answers no, for in heaven souls are called “not to eternal rest but to eternal activity—eternal social concern.”1 Yet this answer only underlines the problem, since there is nothing to be concerned about in heaven. Concern presupposes that something can go wrong or can be lost; otherwise we would not care. An eternal activity—just as much as an eternal rest—is of concern to no one, since it cannot be stopped and does not have to be maintained by anyone.

The problem is not that an eternal activity would be “boring” but that it would not be intelligible as my activity. Any activity of mine (including a boring activity) requires that I sustain it. In an eternal activity, there cannot be a person who is bored—or involved in any other way—since an eternal activity does not depend on being sustained by anyone. Far from making my life meaningful, eternity would make it meaningless, since my actions would have no purpose. What I do and what I love can matter to me only because I understand myself as mortal. The understanding of myself as mortal does not have to be explicit and theoretical but is implicit in all my practical commitments and priorities.”

Not that remarkable, either — Ciceronianus

It all depends on whether and to what degree you have an interest in phenomenology, psychotherapy and philosophy of science, postmodern philosophy , embodied and enactive cognitive approaches to the study of feeling, mood and emotion and their relation to psychopathology and mood disorders. If these disciplines don’t thrill you, then yes, his work is unremarkable. But if they do interest you, then his writing is essential.

it does not matter how much individual humans are comforted by the idea of a supernatural superhero, who cares about them and will offer them life after death if they do this or that, if it turns out that it's complete bullshit. — universeness

What matters is that the person who discovers it is bullshit is disappointed and mourns the loss of this faith.
If so, then they have not completely extricated themselves from religious faith. Existentialists like Sartre and Schopenhauer belong within this category of mourning. One needs to understand Nietzsche’s critique of Schopenhauerian pessimism, why he celebrates a godless world , rather that simply arguing that God is not empirically verifiable. One needs to understand why for Nietzsche the ways of thinking that ground empirical proof are themselves a remnant of religious faith.

People are always attracted to what makes them feel good but do you not agree that truth is more important than what makes you feel good? — universeness

This what I believe:

“It is no more than a moral prejudice that the truth is worth more than appearance; in fact, it is the world's most poorly proven assumption. Let us admit this much: that life could not exist except on the basis of perspectival valuations and appearances; and if, with the virtuous enthusiasm and inanity of many philosophers, someone wanted to completely abolish the “world of appearances,” – well, assuming you could do that, – at least there would not be any of your “truth” left either! Actually, why do we even assume that “true” and “false” are intrinsically opposed?”

Why shouldn't the world that is relevant to us – be a fiction? And if someone asks: “But doesn't fiction belong with an author?” – couldn't we shoot back: “Why? Doesn't this ‘belonging' belong, perhaps, to fiction as well? Aren't we allowed to be a bit ironic with the subject, as we are with the predicate and object? Shouldn't philosophers rise above the belief in grammar?”(Nietzsche, Will to Power )

Most people in the world believe God exists. But like God once ruled the day, so is science nowadays. It's what you are obliged to learn at school and Dawkins, Harris, Dennet, etc. try to get rid of that idea altogether. I don't think science will replace it, but the powers that rule have abandoned it. Well, of course there are political parties and partisan vwith religious flavors, but that's all it is. A flavor. The world and is managed on the basis of science. But what's so important about it that gives it that right? — EugeneW

This is certainly true for many people today, but the historical development of worship of science ( called scientism) replacing worship of god is already an old trope, having been thoroughly analyzed and critiqued by Nietzsche in the 19th century, and in the 20th by Heidegger , Foucault and others. Science as it is treated by Dennett, Dawkins and Harris is. it an alternative to faith , but merely another incarnation of it.
They present an atheism that rejects science worship. There are also those within science studies itself that take this view ( Joseph Rouse, Dan Zahavi).

I still don't see from this why it's repugnant. Why should science legislate and organize society? That's just the same as god doing that — EugeneW

Repugnant is a strong term. I perhaps should have used ‘limited’ with respect to post-religious perspectives. My point is that when someone newly embraces a religious idea or faith, it is because they see it as an improvement over their previous stance on the world. It clarifies, unifies and harmonizes aspects of their engagement with others and with themselves. So it’s not something you want to take away from someone without replacing it with a faith or thinking that incorporates all that is advantageous and clarifying about it relative to what it superseded for them. Form my vantage, post-religious thinking keeps what is precious and valuable about belief in god, what about it clarifies our moral dealings with others, and enriches it by transcending it’s limitations. So, for instance , the co cost of omnipotence is ‘repugnant’ for me because it is a form of nostalgia. It is backward looking. To strive to connect with moral
perfection is to look behind one at some perfect Cause and perfect beginning. It presupposes a separation between mortals and the perfect God, between creator and created. postmodern post-religious views, in contrast, are future and creativity oriented. We are brought intimately in touch with the sources of moral good, because they are right in front of us as our being with others in time.

Use your special relationship with your superhero to call upon it to show me its power.I have asked priests, ministers, Jehovah witnesses, Mormons, evanhellicals, Satanists, theosophers, mystics, pagans, etc, etc, to do the same
Their gods are all as powerless as yours. — universeness

Martin Hagglund , among others, makes what I consider to be the best argument for atheism. Rather than disbelieving in a god because there is no proof, one should disbelieve because the concept itself is repugnant.

“…a vast number of religious people do not regard their faith as competing with knowledge. While accepting the freedom of scientific inquiry and democratic pluralism, they hold that religious faith is crucial for the spiritual shape and profound meaning of life. An atheism that does not engage this sense of religion will fail to transform deep-seated notions about faith. Even many people who themselves do not have religious faith believe that it would be great and beneficial to have such faith. The latter attitude is what the philosopher Daniel Dennett has described as believing in belief in God. “Such a person doesn't believe in God but nevertheless thinks that believing in God would be a wonderful state of mind to be in, if only that could be arranged.”16 This belief in the existential value of religious faith (rather than in the truth of religious claims) is the main line of defense for religion in a secular age, after its authority to organize society or legislate over science has been conceded.”

There is no left/right conservative/liberal dichotamy, just the Capitol Class with all our labor, and all the people they pay the media to keep incensed with one another. — Garrett Travers

Are there any current American political figures, journalists, commentators, consultants, activists you admire?

Reason is : think, understand, and form judgments by a process of logic.
Do you really mean to imply that Kuhn conveyed to you that revolutions in paradigms happen not as a result of this definition, and all of the behaviors in the sciences that fall into this category? — Garrett Travers

Other than that, can you try to clarify what point you're making with these passages — Garrett Travers

I guess the point I’m making is that we have to make a distinction between formal logic and forms of pragmatic logic. Only pragmatic logic gives us the creative innovations of the sciences as well as
the arts. When we construe harmonies and inferential
compatibilities among unique events, this is different from formal logic , which can only operate on structures that are in some respect absolutely identically repeatable.
Pragmatic logic recognizes that the world doesn’t sit still for us , not even for a moment. We can pretend that the world consists of such identically repeatable structures , but this is only an idealization, a convenience to simply things.

Kuhn’s notion of paradigm change does not rely on formal logic but something closer to the way change
takes place in the arts.

The transitions from classical mechanics to relativity wasn't rational? From universal constant to Hubble constant wasn't rational? Is this a joke? It's specifically rationality that overcomes a crisis in a Kuhnian revolution. The undeniable facts of observation, inductively and deductively derived (reason) is, as a point of exactitude, what sees a shift through from normal science to a new paradigm. It is the unreasonable that get in the way. — Garrett Travers

No, it is not rational if by rational you mean that there was some precise pre-existing order and the shifts in science you mention are transitions that are completely regulated by that pre-existing order. What kind of advance in knowledge would that be? Are you really satisfied with the idea that scientific enlightenment consists of additional f details to a logical scheme without putting into question the very premises of that scheme? As scientists , are we stuck with that foundation forever? That, to me, constitutes the very failure of progress.

“…when we sit down to try to figure out what will happen in the future, it usually seems as if the thing to do is to start with what we already know. This progression from the known to the unknown is characteristic of logical thought, and it probably accounts for the fact that logical thinking has so often proved itself to be an obstacle to intellectual progress. It is a device for perpetuating the assumptions of the past. Perhaps at the root of this kind of thinking is the conviction that ultimate truth -at least some solid bits of it - is something embedded in our personal experience. While this is not the view I want to endorse, neither would I care to spend much time quarreling with it. It does occur to me, however, that one of the reasons for thinking this way is our common preference for certainty over meaning; we would rather know some things for sure, even though they don't shed much light on what is going on. Knowing a little something for sure, something gleaned out of one's experience, is often a way of knowing one's self for sure, and thus of holding on to an identity, even an unhappy identity. And this, in turn, is a way of saying that our identities often stand on trivial grounds. If I can't be a man I can, at least, be an expert.

“ …if man were no more than a bystander to that procession we call the universe, or if the universe were itself no more than a spatially distributed display of interesting objects, then we might reasonably regard experience and truth as facsimiles of each other. But what man thinks he sees leads him to conjure with what he has not seen, and what he has experienced makes him wonder what he has missed. So imagination, once stirred, often leads to initiative, and initiative to action, and action produces something unexpected for men to contemplate and experience, and, finally, the newest experience throws the recollections of prior experiences into fresh perspective, thus reducing them to the level of mere chronicler's facts, facts whose historical meaning takes its shape from present rather than past interpretations.”

“I must still agree that it is important for the psychological researcher to see the efforts of man in the perspective of the centuries. To me the striking thing that is revealed in this perspective is the way yesterday's alarming impulse becomes today's enlivening insight, tomorrow's repressive doctrine, and after that subsides into a petty superstition.”

Conncections require an alignment of values, that's reason, same as love. Every bit of this is dependent on reason. Not talking rationally about this stuff is why the wrold looks the way it does right now. — Garrett Travers

This alignment of values also describes postive feeling. We wouldn’t know that there was a positive alignment without positive feeling. Accord, agreement, unification, harmony always feels a certain way that tells us it is this connectedness and coherence. I. fact, the feeling isn’t anything f outside of the meaning of coherence itself.
By e same token, we wouldn’t know the meaning, the sense of incoherence, discord and disagreement without a negative feel or ‘emotion ‘. The emotion isn’t some mindless reflex or hormone. It is the very feel of the meaning of disappointment, alienation, failure of alignment.
So emotion isnt the CAUSE of irrationality. It is our expereince of how things line up in our world , coherently or incoherently , in accord or discordantly, harmoniously or disjunctively. We have a habit of blaming our emotions for our cognitive assessments.

often find myself reflecting upon how most of the things we truly value in life are not rational at all - love, connection to places and people, art, music, sex, food, friendship, travel... We can talk rationally about them, but generally this ends up sounding like prattle. — Tom Storm

If a value is the frame, and rationality refers to the structure of relations made intelligible by the frame, the is the shift from frame to frame rational, irrational or a-rational?
If we use as an example of a value system a Kuhnian scientific paradigm, the how do we characterize the transition from one paradigm to another. It certainly isnt deductive or inductive. But is it irrational? Could we instead say that it is pragmatically useful, which is different from both rationality and irrationality? I suspect that the way we operate WITHIN values systems also has more to do with pragmatic usefulness than strict logic. That leads us to Wittgenstein’s approach to language.

I would also add that what people call ‘emotion’ ,rather being something outside of or independent of our experience of usefulness, gets to the very core of the feeling , the sense, of what is useful or not. We don’t feel logic. Logic is dead and empty. We feel usefulness. Usefulness is what matters to us, what is relevant to us , what is coherent or incoherent.

Certainly, sociopaths lack the kind of positive emotional patterns that keep most of us from going on a killing spree — ZzzoneiroCosm

If they lack certain ‘emotional patterns’ then this is because they lack certain ways of assessing the relevance of human factors. The emotion cannot be understood apart from the personal assessment and construal of a situation.

I suppose I was thinking of emotional numbness. — ZzzoneiroCosm

In the article, the notion of emotional numbness is treated like a reaction to emotional events, as if one first encounters trauma and then the body decides to emotionally ‘shut down’ as some protective device. This is too reductive for my taste. Emotions, moods and feelings are not devices or mechanisms
or inner states. They are the manifestations of our ways of understanding and coping with situations as we interpret them. Emotional trauma is already a ‘numbness’ in the sense that negative
emotion indicates a breakdown in anticipatory sense making, rather than being the cause of such breakdown.
When we lose our grip on the world , when it becomes
a fog of chaos and confusion, this is both a cognition and a feeling. The two aren't separate processes , they are aspects of the same experience.
So our ‘numbness’ is t a secondary withdrawal from stress and intense emotion, it is the emotion itself, because it is the situation itself that becomes incoherent and meaningless.

Reason and emotion (positive and negative emotion) work together in the decision-making process. A completely rational (emotion-free) person is a kind of monster. Sociopaths tend not to have a vibrant emotional life. — ZzzoneiroCosm

They not only work together , they are inseparable. The idea of affect-free reason is incoherent. Sociopaths are just as affectively driven as the rest of us.

Is it true that we ought to encourage humankind to be more selfish — ZzzoneiroCosm

I don’t think we need to encourage people to be more selfish It is impossible to produce any action, to think any thought or feeling, to have any simple perception without these being ‘for the sake of a self’ But self isn’t a little honunculus lurking inside one’s body that stands in opposition to an outside world. It is a relation to the world. The contents of the self are the contents of the world as seen from a point of view. What we think of as a subject, self, ego, the ‘I’ is the ongoing coherence and self-similarity of the flow of expereince that makes up the contents of events for each person. The self is really a self-consistency to this flow of experience, a way in which events are organized so that each is not just encountered but assimilated. Thus, what people call altruism isnt the abandonment of this assimilatory process. It is merely an expansion and enrichment of the self as assimilatory process. We are altruistic towards those we can relate to in some fashion. Improving their lives improves our lives because we are able to assimilate their values and thinking. Helping them
expands our self.

Ayn Randian notions of selfishness are based on the need to protect the self from those we cannot relate to , whose behavior and thinking is too different from our own to assimlate, embrace, relate to. Randian selfishness isn’t actually protecting some inner homincular entity ( set of rational processes) in our body, although that is what she believes it is doing; it is instead protecting our assimilative, relational processes from disruption by actions of people that we cannot relate to. If I am deeply i love, my identification with my beloved is so
close that the boundaries between my self and their self are almost non-existent. If I identify strongly with my family or community, then the distinctions between our various ‘selves’ are porous and ambiguous. In these cases, ‘ selfishness’ involves the gap of alienation between myself, my loved ones and community on the one side , and a strange or threatening individual
or community on the other side.

Rand formulated selfishness in terms of the solitary individual because too much of the world around her appeared alienating and threatening. Because of her brittle notion of rationality, she didnt have faith that one could turn the alien into the relatable and thereby embrace and assimilate it into the self. Much of the world outside her was simply wrong, irrational, or evil, so she argues that one needed to retreat to a safe, constricted space within whose bounds a hermetically sealed machine-like rationality could function to assimilate at least a limited range of features
of the world.

it is not the situation that cannot be coped with, it's the emotion one has, which may well include loss of self esteem or even self loathing. — unenlightened

Older models of emotion have tended to characterize feeling as something that takes place inside one’s body and is directed toward it, as opposed to perceptions of the outer world. So there is an inner-outer split here. Matthew Ratcliffe is among those attempting to integrate phenomenological insights with embodied approaches to cognition. For Ratcliffe, feelings are both ‘feelings of the body’ and ‘ways of finding oneself in a world’.” We don’t simply experience body states as an inward focused datum. Rather , bodily feeling is the vehicle through which we encounter the world.

“I will assume, from the outset, that contrasts between the ‘feeling’ aspect of emotion and the world-directed intentionality of emotion are misplaced. Many bodily feelings are themselves intentional and their objects are not restricted to one’s own bodily states.”

“Although these two sides can be distinguished conceptually, they cannot be separated. It is not as if the two sides or aspects of phenomenal experience can be detached and encountered in isolation from one other. When I touch the cold surface of a refrigerator, is the sensation of coldness that I then feel a property of the experienced object or a property of the experience of the object? The correct answer is that the sensory experience contains two dimensions, namely one of the sensing and one of the sensed, and that we can focus on either.”( Zahavi)

it is generally the case that traumatic stress is the most usual triggering cause. — unenlightened

Traumatic stress, as a feeling, is world-directed, a way in which things appear salient and matter to us.

I don't think a situation one cannot cope with would be empty. ?? — unenlightened

Fundamentally, depression is a feeling of loss of something that matters greatly to our lives and reaches into every aspect of our relations with others. It is connected with loss of competence and self-esteem. It is loss of a kind of sense-making. Before the depression we felt confident to venture into new situations and cope with them effectively. When the depression hits , typically after a series of failures that damage that confidence, situations no longer present us with opportunities to achieve meaning and satisfaction. Our world still exists but has become empty because we can no longer engage it and extract joy. Chronic depressives describe their world this way , like Sylvia Plath’s bell jar.

“ It is the glass wall the separates us from life, from ourselves, that is so truly frightening in depression. It is a terrible sense of our own overwhelming reality, a reality that we know has nothing to do with the reality that we once knew. And from which we think we will never escape. It is like living in a parallel universe but a universe so devoid of familiar signs of life that we are adrift, lost. (Brampton, 2008, p.171

Depression is a response to trauma. Trauma is any event that produces an overwhelming negative emotion, pain, fear, humiliation, abandonment, stress anxiety, that sort of thing. The mind, unable to cope with and process the feelings encountered cuts itself off from the feeling. Unfortunately, it does not merely cut off one negative feeling but all feelings. Life — unenlightened

Or perhaps depression is the emptiness of the situation itself rather than a secondary response to it. It would be the feeling of the failure to cope rather than a further act of cutting oneself off. Of course, a severely depressed person cuts themselves off from friends and family, but this is in response to the sense that one is unworthy of them and cannot find any joy with them.

You see, like all systems in the universe - and everything in the universe is either a system, or resources to be used in or by a system - one of the primary functions of biological systems is homeostasis. Equilibrium, to put it another way. Regression toward the mean, to put it in physics terms — Garrett Travers

The above physics-based notion of rationality uses the metaphor of a clock or engine-like machine. It does what it does and all we have to do is grasp the nature of such a closed system. Logic is ideally suited for such a task. Logic, of course depends on a starting premise. If we can assume that the starting precedent or axiom is fixed, dependable and unchanging, then human rationality becomes a purely a logical enterprise once we have induced the starting premises. In physics, the concept of time has long been assumed to be irrelevant to the understanding of homeostatic systems. Physicists argues that it didn’t matter whether we ran the equations backwards or forwards , since there is no arrow of time in a homeostatic system. They also assumed that once we arrived at a final physical theory of everything, we could essentially run the thing on a computer
and predict everything we needed to know about the world and ourselves.

Applied to ethics, this physics-based approach to rationality connects happiness, understanding and doing the right thing with properly and rationally grasping the working of the closed homeostatic system that physics describes.

Piaget, among others, provides an alternative model
that is based not on physics and a static clock or engine-like machine but on a self-organizing systems approach to living organisms. Rather than trying to reduce psychology and biology to physics , he argues
that physics at present is incomplete.

Piaget introduces the concept of progressive equilibration, which asserts that living systems are not a closed system. The nature of a homeostatic system is to evolve. So picture a dynamic homeostasis as a spiral
constantly moving upward rather than the simple circle created by static homeostasis. The direction of progressive equilibration is from a weaker to a stronger structure.

The implication of this model for ethics and psychotherapy is that the aim of a cognitive
system is not to correctly represent a static machine-like world but to adapt itself to a world that is constantly rearranging itself in more and more complex ways. Conceptual change is not through inductive logic but experimentation. Depression and other emotional ailments are the inability to keep with and adapt one’s
thinking to an evolving world.

Children are, when not abused or led astray, very enjoying of their environment, and very loving of those that provide them with resources. — Garrett Travers

Many psychologists and philosophers have described young children as psychopaths, having no moral
compass, and having to be conditioned into what we consider civilized behavior. That was also the message in the novel ‘Lord of the Flies’.

Piaget described the moral development of a child as
proceeding from an egocentric point of view to a progressively more decentered vantage. Just as young children believe the moon follows them when they walk , they believe the world revolves around their needs and everyone thinks the same way they do. Point of view is a concept that has to be learned, as does sharing.

Counselling seeks by various means to encourage you to replace your overly critical view of yourself with one more realistic; and to replace your overly optimistic view of where you should be in life with a more realistic one. — Tim3003

The earlier forms of cogntive therapy ( Albert Ellis’ Rational Emotive Therapy and Aaron Beck’s cognitive therapy) were reality-based, assuming a real world independent of our representations of it. Our beliefs could become irrational or distorted with respect to that external world and therapy consisted of correcting those distorted beliefs. Newer approaches don’t assume such an independence
between subject and world, and jettison talk of a correct picture of the world with an adaptive one. We become depressed not when our beliefs become incorrect but when our situation as we construe it changes in ways that we can no longer cope with or understand. So the arbiter here is reality as interpreted from the vantage of the individual rather than an external reality that is supposedly the same for everyone.

you're the idiot who said I was "itching to start a fight" after my very first post because I included the metaphysical principle in it. So, you saw me as your enemy from the very beginning and never for a moment even tried to understand what I was saying, and now you're trying to justify your first impression.

What a mope ... — Joe Mello

Joe, I was thinking the same thing after I saw your first post. But that’s not because I thought you deliberately wanted to start a fight. On the contrary, I think you are passionate about your ideas and wanted to share them, and were hoping to avoid conflict. But you clearly do not suffer fools gladly and that is implicit in your op. Given the diverse group on this site, it was predictable that that approach was going to guarantee conflict , even if it wasnt what you wanted. Many others on here also have strong points of view, so conflict was inevitable. How might you have worded your op so as not to have unintentionally courted opposition? It would not likely be your style , but some on here have a talent for reaching out in their op’s in a non-judgmental way to elicit a wide array of viewpoints on a given topic.
I don’t think there’s necessarily anything wrong with asserting a strong position and defending it against opposing views. Passionate debate can be quite stimulating. But it can also lead to wounded pride and a need to lash out, and then it crosses over from enjoyable sport to unpleasant insult. I think a number of participants here who seem to be your enemies could easily become friends. Just try reaching out to them instead of following your instinct to circle the wagons. You may surprised how quickly their tone will change in response to your overtures.