(August 6, 2012 at 4:05 pm)Rhythm Wrote: Genk, try emotions -as- heuristic. You may find common ground with Jon. Unreliable as it pertains to your metrics? Sure. Reliable as it pertains to our history as a species, yep...absolutely.
Shortcuts to "knowledge".
Please dont misunderstand me here, I'm not insinuating that emotion would be a better arbitrator of knowledge as we currently define it, but as a functional piece of humanity- they work pretty damned well. To take a line from you Genk - any sort of morality (for example) would take into account the "nature" of the species in question -in order to be objective and relevant-. Well, ignore emotion and you ignore large portion of what it means to be human. Those things which we "know" by emotional response are a large portion of what we "know", and assuming that your emotions do not play into what seems "self evident" to you, or what forms your "foundational beliefs" is probably an exercise in absurdity. You are not immune. At the very least, you feel satisfaction with your answers, regardless of whether or not you can justify them logically (as anything other than axioms). Yes?
And it is exactly at that point that the danger of including emotions to ascertain foundational beliefs becomes evident. Allowing your emotions - such as satisfaction or comfort - while determining those beliefs may lead you to answers you are most comfortable with - not answers that are logically justifiable. Attaching emotional values to those foundations would create an almost dogmatic adherence to them.
Immunity is not a requirement, but even if those "heuristics" are hard-wired into our system, we do know that it is possible to us act contrary or independently from them. And given the inherent unreliability of the heuristics (not just by my metrics, but even by the metrics of human history) we should certainly do so.
Both you and Jon are missing the same point here. The question here is not regarding the role of emotions in acquiring knowledge, it is regarding their role in establishing ay foundational beliefs upon which an individual's system of knowledge may be built.
