Category: Epistemology and Method

ARE EMOTIONS RATIONAL? AND WHY PHILOSOPHY IS SO SUCCESSFUL IN DECEIT. AND WHY I AM AN ANTI-PHILOSOPHY PHILOSOPHER

(read this: very very very important synthesis)

(A) as far as I know all emotions reflect a reaction to a change in state of some form of inventory ( property ).

( b) as far as I know all moral intuitions reflect cooperative changes in state to personal or common property ( property in toto ).

(C) as far as I know all human cognition is limited to that which can be acquired.

(D) as far as I know, that which can be acquired is limited to our ability to act in existential reality.

(E) as far as I know we can use reason to inspect memory searches. And that memory searches restimulate emotions.

(F) and that the value of our memories is ( amplitude ) is determined by these weights.

Emotions are measurements.

We may or may not measure optimally.

Emotions are not produced by reason even if they can be evoked by reason.

So I tend to position emotions as empirical measurements by our sensory system.

Trained by experience.

Open to retraining by experience.

Reason can be used to produce experiences that train or retrain us.

Imagining and modeling can be used to produce experiences that train or retrain us.

But while emotions can be said to be a logical need for an acting life form. And we can rationally and empirically test that hypothesis with consistent success.

Yet we cannot say emotions are produced rationally. We can only say in retrospect that we rationally comprehend the function of those emotions as logically necessary for acting creatures.

ALSO

this question provides yet another example of the pollution of philosophy with the verb “to be” – creating nonsense problems because our minds do not seem able to avoid the confusion created between experience and existence when we say “is” or “are”. So the vast number of sophistries we falsely categorize as philosophical problems are merely confusions created by the misuse of grammar ( effort discounts ) just as a magician misleads with gestures.

The only difference is that the magician knows he deceived others. But the sophist does not know he deceives himself.

We evolved to substitute information not existing in speech of others through inference. We also evolved to save effort in thought and speech through suggestion ( shortcuts ). The words is and are are suggestive shortcuts. But when this shortcut us combined in certain permutations it forces the circumvention of reason and the evocation of pre-rational substitution.

In other words it forces us out of reason and reality into intuition and imagination.

This is the same technique used by storytellers to invoke suspension of disbelief, priests to convince the foolish of the existence of imaginary worlds, and politicians and public intellectuals to lie, and dishonest philosophers to overload, and sophists to confuse.

Ergo: any question of philosophy that contains the words is or are and is not stated in operational language is at best sophistry, at worst, the most insidious evils that have ever been let loose on man.

It is this understanding that has made me an anti philosophy philosopher and forced me to unite science and philosophy.

Because whether religious, political or philosophical, the abuse if these cognitive biases to harm mankind must end.

Curt Doolittle.