Because the bible tells you so?

[The Grand Nudger]

Ah, yeah, I misread.   However, to continue. 

c) 8 + 3 = 0


What happened in your mind when you contemplated b) that didn't happen with a) or c) ? (or vice versa)

Doesn't c) just 'feel wrong'?  Or did you go look up the answer with google?

Neither, honestly.  I don't have feelings about math.  I add the numbers.  8+3=11.  I've been drilled on simple addition for a long time..so it may be that I remember the answer as well.  You?  This, it would seem, offers an answer to the question of how we determine our logic is correct regardless of whether or not our brains poduce a chemical which tells us that we're on the right track (even if we may not be).  I have, in the past and present, felt that...while knowing that I wasn't.  It's an interesting experience, imo.   


I certainly didn't decide that 8+3=0 was wrong because I felt that it was......I'm not even sure what that means, in context...but maybe my brain just doesn't produce those chemicals when it handles math, or maybe I ignore them...I wouldn't know, eh?  The only thing I can say with certainty in this instance is that I don't have to rely on those feelings, whether present or not (however manufactured), in order to determine that 8+3 does not, in fact, yield 0. The rules of the system decide whether or not I am right or wrong, not the chemicals my brain produces, and the rules of the system have jack shit to do with the chemicals my brain produces (it aint my system eh?).

The stranger you meet knows your friend and gives you directions to his house. You pull up in front of the house, but it just looks wrong. You get a bad feeling about this. Now, how does 'logic' help you determine whether that bad feeling is correct, and this is the wrong house, prior to your going up to the house and knocking on the door? All you have is a 'feeling' about the rightness or wrongness of the house. That's the type of feeling I'm talking about. You go throughout your day making decisions based upon that little voice inside your head. It's not a literal voice, but a set of feelings which guide your choosing, that tell you that c) is wrong and b) is right.

I am -intimately- familiar with that feeling, though not so much in regards to a friends house. I'll take a cautious approach, weighing the consequences of ignoring intuition against the consequences of my intuition being wrong (not likely in service of truth, mind you, more likely in service of survival)..but, generally, when something "just doesn't look right" to me...I can identify the reason. That dirt over there on the side of the porch is darker than the dirt around it..almost like something is buried.....and buried things, in my experience, go "boom". I think the problem here is that the question asks me to assume that there is -only- a "feeling"...when , in my experience...that's just not the case..rather that my feelings have an impetus that can be and often is identifiable. You gave plenty of reason to be suspicious in that question. A stranger directed me to a place that looks wrong. Do I need any more reasons to be leary?

If I did find myself in a position of feeling alone - no easily discernible logical reason....I'd doubt that it represented truth..as I do when I walk out into my yard on a night with a full moon and, for a moment, really feel that there is something human, but inhuman..in the woods..watching me. That's precisely when I kick the logic into overdrive (and I know it sounds silly coming from an adult...I can't shake that feeling, that fear, that dread, regardless of what I know to be true, or..rather, untrue about it). Here again, I have means other than my intuition or a chemical cocktail provided to me by my brain alone....available.

I never ask myself, for example, whether or not some proposition "feels logical" or "feels true" - I apply the system (like I apply addition) and tell my ridiculous feelings -the pharmecuetical company in my head- to go fuck themselves. Otherwise I'd be hiding under my house with a rifle to this very day..lol. I offer this last, longer bit -not- as an argument or rebuttal, more as a description of my experiencing of feeling that there is a truly a monster in the woods, while knowing that there is truly not. In either case we could attribute that to chemical cocktails.....but one side of that experience has more than -just- the cocktail operating on it - it would seem.

Perhaps an even more amusing example of this is that I'm airborne...but afraid of heights. I don;t actually think, when I jump, that I'll be oklay. My brain screams to me that I'm about to fucking off myself..despite having done it many many times. The feeling doesn't even go away when my feet hit terra firma (I;d chalk that down to the lasting effect of a chemical released in my brain, for sure). I feel like the notion that I'm going to die is true.....even though I know that it isn't both via logic and simple experience. You have anything like that?