> Hello everyone,
>
> Paul Henry Rosenberg writes Oct 22/98:
> Doyle posits an absolute disjunction of reason and
> emotion -- I reject that. I believe that real human emotions almost
> invariably have cognitive content, and of course that cognitive
> content is in large measure socially constructed.
>
> Doyle
> Lets see if I can clear up this disagreement. I see emotions as a
> modular function in the brain. That module can be examined separate
> from the neo-cortex. This doesn't mean that the brain isn't
> interconnected, and that feelings are separable from thinking
> (cognition) as we experience them in life, because the mind is
> globally interconnected.
Okay, that's fair enough. But the degree of interconnection -- qualitatively, if not quantitatively -- is truly intense.
> This is the same thing as saying hearing is
> a functional module of the mind, but it is integrated into the mind
> inseparably from its interconnection with the rest of the mind. We
> can observe the properties of hearing, how loud, how high, how low.
> We can observe these in separation from seeing, or feeling, or
> thinking. But they are interconnected. Just try learning language
> without hearing. That is how deaf people can come to adulthood with
> no language at all.
Emotion is far more fundamentally integrated with cognition, IMHO. Without emotion there's no foundation for preferencing, which severly limits the range of cognition.
Furthermore, emotion is linked into perceptual systems every bit as mush as into conceptual systems.
> Doyle
> The functional process of feeling has properties unlike thinking.
> Thinking arises in the neo-cortex with respect to the frontal lobe,
> the parietal lobe, and the temporal lobe. Even the occipital lobe
> affects thinking, we can't think color for one, without the occipital
> lobe contributing. No one as yet actually knows where feelings arise,
> except that the circuits which carry feelings into the neo-cortex are
> cloudily known.
"The emotions are mechanisms that set the brain's highest-level goals" -- Steven Pinker, *How The Mind Works* p. 373.
> Doyle
> Because I can conceptualize the difference between feelings and
> thinking doesn't mean in reality they can be separated in human
> thought.
Human beings have conceptualized the difference between feelings and thinking for thousands of years. And I'd say, for the most part, we've been doing it all wrong. In actuality the two are almost entirely interfused and we've false dichotomized them as totally separate. You appear to be perpetuating that false dichotomy.
> It is a technique of thinking on my part to help me to be
> clear about what I am considering.
But it's producing confusion (at best) in your audience.
> Paul
> As far back as *Metaphors We Live By* (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980) there's
> been an explicit argument against positivism/objectivism based on an
> empirical study of cognition. Lakoff and Johnson weren't dealing with
> physiology, but their work is indicative of the kind of consequences
> that can come from critically examining human cognition in ways that
> most leftists would unfortunately dismiss, or not even consider in the
> first place.
>
> Doyle
> I take my views from Lakoff. Lakoff emphasizes that feelings
> represent intensities, and one can understand moral systems as
> attaching feelings to rules in calculi of intensities where the rules
> become a model for how to act in the world.
I'm not sure where you're getting this. Lakoff does speak about moral focus in a manner somewhat analogous to what you're claiming about feelings as intensitites, but I'm not aware of him making a connection between moral focus and feelings as intensities.
> Lakoff uses this
> technique to marvelous extent in his book on "Moral Politics". In
> addition Lakoff makes the point in his book that these moral systems
> are related to the body in the family, and how we feel about that.
Not the body, actually. His argument is that the moral model of family relations serves as the source domain for structuring the target domain of politics at large.
> That if you examine individuals they are often riddled with different
> moral calculi from one arena to another.
This is actually just an aside -- that there's no guarantee of consistency. His main point is that there IS a consistency across a wide range of different issue areas.
> For instance as a teacher
> someone might hold liberal views, but as a parent be a strict, and
> conservative parent. This contingent quality of feelings, and this
> scalar nature of feelings is what I'm driving at.
I think we need to go back to the source material in Lakoff, and try to sort things out from there.
> Doyle
> Secondly understanding feelings this way explains why logic fails when
> it comes to moral systems clashing. Lakoff uses the example that on
> abortion neither the left nor the right can understand one another,
> despite the fact that the main positions each have logical problems
> which the other side constantly throws up in the face of the other.
Feelings have nothing to do with Lakoff's point. He's arguing that both sides are operating from different source domains. It's a problem of conceptual incomensurability having nothing to do with emotions. Except, of course, that people get might angry as a result! <G>
> This seems to me is a significant advance for socialist insight about
> how morality really works. Morality (strong feelings attached to how
> we might think of behaving, and not necessarily even a rule in the
> sense of written commandments) is contingent, it is not fixed.
Lakoff does elucidate how morality is contingent, as well as presenting an argument that "liberal" (which can include democratic leftist) morality is OBJECTIVELY superior to "conservative" morality.
But the bit about feelings is Doyle's addition.
> Morality leaks even in the individual (though slowly and unlike
> cognition). It is hopeless to regard these as debates to be won upon
> the issue of logic, but logic is important in other ways. Logic ought
> not to be looked at as simply rules, but the ability to form rules or
> "understandings" (which I think is a connectionist way of saying rule
> like in a parallel to how rules logically are derived), and the
> limitations of how much each of us can do logical thinking. The
> ability to think is not computer like (in the sense of sequential
> architectures in computing means), but restricted to a level which is
> controlled by feelings, and by an ability to connect details in
> ill-logical ways which is actually the dominant and most important
> part of the process.
I'm truly mystified as to what the above means, much less whether I agree or disagree. It sounds intriguing, though!
> Doyle
> I will give an example in chess. ...<SNIP>...
I understand the example perfectly. I just don't understand what it's supposed to be an example of!
> Doyle
> In my opinion then it is necessary to drop a faith in logic as the
> primary human goal in understanding consciousness. Instead while
> respecting what logic can do, we need to understand how seeing
> patterns is working for us.
Oh, definitely! Pattern recognition and creation is overwhelmingly what the brain (and nervous system generally) is all about.
> In that, "understanding" is shaped by
> feelings, but feelings aren't fixed, but contingent. An understanding
> is often times hardly strongly felt. It may be calm, or it may not,
> and only that persons history can really tell us what their scalar
> intensity might be.
I still don't get the continued concern with intensity.
> Paul
> Finally, I'd like to point out that this is NOT totally irrelevent to
> the subject matter of LBO. The basic laws of neoclassical economics
> are based on assumptions about human nature, which are in part
> cognitive assumptions. Those assumptions have been tested and found
> wanting, with virtually no notice being taken of the fact. I believe
> that leftist ought to be paying a whole lot more attention to such
> matters. The embeddedness of the social in the biological is NOT, as
> conservatives has always supposed, an open-and-shut argument in their
> favor. It only looks that way if you don't bother to check out the
> facts.
>
> Doyle
> I agree with this, and this is the important point I think for the
> left. I want to get up on the roof tops and shout this out, Paul has
> said what is epochally important goddamn it. Connectionism I think
> leads to forms of social structure much closer to who we really are.
> I think they point toward solutions to how the state might work for a
> classless society. I am very hopeful.
Well, I guess we agree on the most important things, and I continue to hope we can sort out the rest.
-- Paul Rosenberg Reason and Democracy rad at gte.net
"Let's put the information BACK into the information age!"