Lunch break is coming up in the home office!
@xahteiwi recently wrote:
… they are willing to trust their feelings more than obvious facts, in case they contradict each other … can somebody frame that in such a way that that, if true, wouldn’t be extremely disconcerting?
My best take would be: In the daily lives of most people, most of the time, “reality” doesn’t actually matter. Politics don’t affect them right then, right here. What matters is walking to the groceries, not falling off your bike, driving your car, cooking your food, eating, sleeping, anger management, looking at flowers, raising your kids, talking to your friends, raising a family. All of these things you can do with “fast thinking” (Kahneman), or “feelings”. Sure, as somebody from the outside, you might feel like saying that voting matters, that politics matter, that international politics matter, but as an individual, you might respond: all that matters is what affects me directly, and what I can affect directly. Everything else is an illusion, a fantasy. You are getting worked up over nothing.
I don’t want to be smug about it. That would be a very cynical take, devoid of respect and love for our fellow humans – something I try to actively avoid or I’ll die old and lonely with a shrivelled black heart with no hope and no friends.
To love our fellow humans is hard, some days. From an evolutionary perspective, it’s no surprise, though: like all species we live at the absolute edge of what we can take. So naturally, a lot of individuals cannot cope with the stress, the noise, the forms, the laws, the education, the reading, all of it. Often I don’t feel like coping with it all.
What should our reaction be, in the face of all this? Despair is an option, but it’s not constructive. Throwing ourselves to the ground and howling is not helping. The reason I take the question so seriously is that I struggle with the exact same feelings every time I talk to people, read the newspaper, check out social media.
How not to despair is a serious question.
@22 mentioned a Buddhist doctrine: even if the majority of people’s waking moments are in fact “asleep”, on reactive autopilot, there still is a path for individuals to cultivate that sliver of awareness and steadily broaden it so more and more of their lives are spent “awake”.
It’s tricky.
I broadly agree with the sentiment but the part where I’m a bit more sceptical is the implied goal of it all. Perhaps I’m too much of a biologist, here. If waking up and enlightenment were a kind of hyper attention and conscious and rational processing of reality, I suspect we wouldn’t get far. Every eye contact a piercing stare, a meditation on the gaze and the abyss that separates us all, every decision a meditation on the power of the state, it’s coercive agents, the nature of collective organization, the evolutionary benefits of collective action, stone age hunting, bread baking, and on and on.
It’s impossible to think things through unless you are willing to draw a line and where you draw the line is arbitrary, a judgement call made by your class, your upbringing.
I felt it necessary to check whether I could work Sartre’s gaze into the above and read parts of the Being and Nothingness Wikipedia page before deciding against it. What a colossal waste of time, a fantasy of myself playing the role of an intellectual. Or perhaps this is not the right kind of thinking it through? How would we decide what the right way of thinking it through is? Or do we use the value systems of class and upbringing again, i.e. our feelings… it’s just that we think our feelings are sophisticated, of course. But I think if you start thinking it through you always end up at the same place: reading all the newspapers, sitting for hours, or trying not to fall of your bike – it’s feelings that make decisions.
It’s feelings because even reading papers gets you to political science, to fourth power, to representation, systemic corruption, the influences of capitalism and on and on. The decision made using feelings has just moved elsewhere. Living life is not mathematics. The process of science is full of feelings, too. There is no escape.
#Philosophy
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I always say if you’re not using feelings, you’re only using half your brain. (Or if you wanna go with a heart/brain metaphor 🤷🏻♀️)
Reason&logic is great at finding solutions, and feelings are great at finding problems. If we don’t listen to our hearts we’ll mess up pretty badly.
– Sandra 2022-12-09 00:07 UTC
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I was also thinking about that saying I heard when I was a child: “you’re only using 10% of your brain!” And now I’m thinking: “we’re all using 100% of our brain … and sometimes even that is not good enough!” (As I said in the post, from an evolutionary perspective: not surprising.)
– Alex 2022-12-09 10:02 UTC
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I don’t see the dichotomy. There are almost no obvious facts outside of some very narrow realms like mathematics or physics. And biology already took care of the ones that matter. We don’t need to understand gravity or to be able to do advanved mathematics to throw balls and drive cars. Even flat earthers don’t jump out of third floor windows...
But in the realms of politics, social interactions, economics and even biology, what are the obvious facts? Most of the decision making is under uncertainty, you can only guess the odds and can’t calculate the correct bevahior like in a Kahnemann&Tversky experiment. Most of the arguments about irrational decision making rely on these experiments, which are not at all common in real live.
Well, maybe playing the lottery is obviously stupid because the odds are known and bad. But think about the payoff if you get lucky. Makes some evolutionary sense to take the minuscule risk. Will Microsoft or Exxon Mobil be the better investment in the next 10 years? And if Exxon is trading at 1/3 the valuation of Microsoft, is its relative cash flow decline rate over- or underestimated?
So people resort to feelings and tribalism (”I like this company”, “I am a value investor”). It’s probably the worst in politics and what most people mean be bemoaning the problem. Usually they consider their side as rational and the other as driven by (primitive) emotions. Was already the same in old Athens...
– Peter 2022-12-09 15:39 UTC