(February 1, 2016 at 10:59 am)Excited Penguin Wrote:(February 1, 2016 at 9:15 am)Emjay Wrote: Okay, rationalist it is then. Just not a full-time one. I can get caught up in my delusions, as you well know from playing Mafia with me. And with smoking I can go months without paying deliberate, rational, attention to the warnings on the packet. I am an emotional person but I reflect and 'introspect' a lot and try to understand myself and better myself. So I don't know - what's the ton it says about me?
Well, just that. Whether you appreciate the value of rationality or not. Everything you described as good concerning our mental faculties you did so by applying logic, therefore you are a rationalist no matter what, and so is everyone else. But understading this and being able to determine in that way what is good for you and what isn't makes all the difference in the world. I am not necessarily saying being a rationalist means being perfect. It means you're willing to improve, if anything.
I do appreciate the value of it and perhaps more than a 50-50 split after all. For instance I would like to be able to play a detached game of Mafia as I think I would achieve a lot more with a lot less effort and stress. Likewise I wish that I could rely on rational thinking whenever I was triggered into smoking, rather than being emotionally driven by irrational needs. If I could do that I could quit tomorrow. Basically more often than not, running with the emotion unchecked leads to regrets, whether it be a binge on chocolate or an angry outburst. So yes I suppose I do wish I could be a bit more like Spock. But purely intellectual arguments lack the persuasive power of emotional arguments so I can tell myself till I'm blue in the face that smoking is bad for me and that statistically it will kill me but unfortunately it can't compete with the emotional delusion. Having said that though, I did discover quite recently a way to make intellectual arguments 'stick' in that sort of way. I found that by meditating on small, individual aspects of a theory, it kind of implanted them emotionally, little by little, incrementally. So that might be a good way to approach the question of quitting smoking, but as it stands, too many fears of loss/lack of faith in a future without smoking stop me from trying.
