“the rationality required for humans to prevail and endure
should be informed by the emotion and feeling that stem from the core of every
one of us. This view strikes a sympathetic chord, because my research has
persuaded me that emotion is integral to the process of reasoning. I even
suspect that humanity is not suffering from a defect in logical competence but
rather from a defect in the emotions that inform the deployment of logic.
The evidence comes from the study
of previously rational individuals who, as a result of neurological damage in
specific brain systems, lose their ability to make rational decisions along
with their ability to process emotion normally. Their instruments of
rationality can still be recruited; the knowledge of the world in which they
must operate remains available; and their ability to tackle the logic of a
problem remains intact. Yet many of their personal and social decisions are
irrational, more often than not disadvantageous to the individual and to
others. … the delicate mechanism of reasoning is no longer affected by the
weights that should have been imparted by emotion.
… The sociopaths about whom we hear
in the daily news are intelligent and logically competent individuals who
nonetheless are deprived of normal emotional processing. Their irrational
behavior is destructive to self and society.
Thus, absence of emotion appears to
be at least as pernicious for rationality as excessive emotion.”
Damasio AR. “Descartes’ error and the future of human life.”
Scientific American 1994 October, p144.
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| Gretel thinking |
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