Are there any rational emotions?

[ThinkingSapien]

While I’ve got my own opinion I wanted to see what others have to say. Within these forums I’ve gotten the impression that motivations that in part include emotion have in the past been treated as purely irrational. Are there any emotions that are either considered rational or at the least are not red flags for being irrational?

Thanx!

 

[fhansen]

While I’ve got my own opinion I wanted to see what others have to say. Within these forums I’ve gotten the impression that motivations that in part include emotion have in the past been treated as purely irrational. Are there any emotions that are either considered rational or at the least are not red flags for being irrational?

Thanx!

Emotions are quite rational-they’re a part of our natural make-up, of being alive, and they can drive or motivate us authentically, but like all things human they can be exploited, abused, faked, etc. Here’s some commentary from the Catechism:

1767 In themselves passions are neither good nor evil. They are morally qualified only to the extent that they effectively engage reason and will. Passions are said to be voluntary, “either because they are commanded by the will or because the will does not place obstacles in their way.” It belongs to the perfection of the moral or human good that the passions be governed by reason.

1764 The passions are natural components of the human psyche; they form the passageway and ensure the connection between the life of the senses and the life of the mind. Our Lord called man’s heart the source from which the passions spring.

1763 The term “passions” belongs to the Christian patrimony. Feelings or passions are emotions or movements of the sensitive appetite that incline us to act or not to act in regard to something felt or imagined to be good or evil.

1771 The term “passions” refers to the affections or the feelings. By his emotions man intuits the good and suspects evil.

1768 Strong feelings are not decisive for the morality or the holiness of persons; they are simply the inexhaustible reservoir of images and affections in which the moral life is expressed. Passions are morally good when they contribute to a good action, evil in the opposite case. The upright will orders the movements of the senses it appropriates to the good and to beatitude; an evil will succumbs to disordered passions and exacerbates them. Emotions and feelings can be taken up into the virtues or perverted by the vices.

 

[Katholish]

Emotions are reactions in our bodies to certain stimuli. They can be in harmony with reason, and can be trained by reason, or they can run contrary to reason and be harmful.

 

[Love4All]

While I’ve got my own opinion I wanted to see what others have to say. Within these forums I’ve gotten the impression that motivations that in part include emotion have in the past been treated as purely irrational. Are there any emotions that are either considered rational or at the least are not red flags for being irrational?

Thanx!

Love.

 

[wittgenstein]

There is a difference between truth and validity (rational)
For example, here is an argument that is true and valid,
1 All men are mortal
2. Socrates was a man
3. Therefore, Socrates was mortal.
Here is an argument that is valid but not true,

1. All martians eat snakes.
2. Bob is a martian.
3. Therefore, Bob eats snakes.
   Here is a syllogism that is invalid but true.
4. Obama is president.
5. Paris is in France.
6. Therefore, Michigan is part of the USA.
   Emotions are not propositions. The statement “I love my wife” does not = my love for my wife. However, even emotional statements are not rational (or irrational ). For example, " Socrates was mortal " can be true or false. However,it cannot be rational (a valid argument) because it is a statement, not a syllogism. The statement "I love my wife"can be true or false,but never valid (rational) or invalid (irrational )!
   Also,there is a difference between purpose and meaning. Unfortunately, many people mistakenly use those two terms interchangeably.

 

[Robert_Sock]

Emotions are on a separate system than cognition, although they can influence each other. Together, they make for some interesting classical conditioning.

 

[jimmy]

While I’ve got my own opinion I wanted to see what others have to say. Within these forums I’ve gotten the impression that motivations that in part include emotion have in the past been treated as purely irrational. Are there any emotions that are either considered rational or at the least are not red flags for being irrational?

Thanx!

The way I see it is that all rational thought is emotional at the same time. For all the logicalness of the conclusions a computer might make, it is still not a rational argument because it lacks all emotion and personality. Every argument, and every behavior is performed by an emotional and personal being. No man has ever said or done anything that lacks subjectivity.

 

[wittgenstein]

Google,“qualia stanford encyclopedia of philosophy”
Our knowledge is also subjective (that does not mean that it does not reflect an objective reality.). For example,“1+1=2” is only an ink pattern ( it is not a true or false proposition) until someone understands it.
A computer does not understand anything. It merely manipulates physical patterns. It lacks intentionality ( in the philosophical sense,that something can refer to something. Google, "intentionality stanford). For example an on light switch does not refer to an on light.

 

[jimmy]

Google,“qualia stanford encyclopedia of philosophy”
Our knowledge is also subjective (that does not mean that it does not reflect an objective reality.). For example,“1+1=2” is only an ink pattern ( it is not a true or false proposition) until someone understands it.
A computer does not understand anything. It merely manipulates physical patterns. It lacks intentionality ( in the philosophical sense,that something can refer to something. Google, "intentionality stanford). For example an on light switch does not refer to an on light.

As soon as someone ceases to realize this or is unwilling to accept the subjectivity of their knowledge and arguments, their argument and behavior loses all perspective and consequently it loses rationality and intentionality. Pure objective knowledge is an illusion. 1+1=2 is a meaningless proposition unless someone subjectively knows it.

 

[wittgenstein]

Agreed!
One very minor point, “1+1=2” is not even a proposition until someone understands it. Before someone understands it,it is only an ink pattern.

 

[Katholish]

Emotions are not propositions. The statement “I love my wife” does not = my love for my wife. However, even emotional statements are not rational (or irrational ). For example, " Socrates was mortal " can be true or false. However,it cannot be rational (a valid argument) because it is a statement, not a syllogism. The statement "I love my wife"can be true or false,but never valid (rational) or invalid (irrational )!
Also,there is a difference between purpose and meaning. Unfortunately, many people mistakenly use those two terms interchangeably.

The term “rational” only means “of or pertaining to reason”. In this context, if one could argue that the emotions are directed by reason, that would sufficiently relate them to reason to jusify their being dubbed “rational”. In context, this discussion has nothing at all to do with valid syllogisms.

 

[wittgenstein]

Syllogism (in the context of this thread) means rational argument. In other words,a conclusion derived rationally. Emotions are facts and can only be said to be part of a rational argument.
For example (this is getting very semantic), " I love my wife" can be part of a rational argument.

1. I love those that love me.
2. My wife loves me.
3. Therefore, I love my wife.

 

[DarkStarTheta]

While I’ve got my own opinion I wanted to see what others have to say. Within these forums I’ve gotten the impression that motivations that in part include emotion have in the past been treated as purely irrational. Are there any emotions that are either considered rational or at the least are not red flags for being irrational?

I think this is a category error, akin to asking are sound waves rational. Or a more direct analogy, is ‘pain’ rational?

Emotions are subjective phenomena, they are created in the brain based on its estimation of how to respond to the complex sensorium in which it finds itself. This is also true of pain.

Here is a TED talk that looks at the issue of pain.

We often imagine a life without pain, how wonderful would it be? It is a nightmare in reality: youtube.com/watch?v=iQ02ezXoDDI

Our brain is pretty clearly creating this experience of pain based on other sensory data combined with past history and ‘expectations’. Sometimes it doesn’t trigger pain when it should and sometimes it triggers pain when it shouldn’t. It’s actually very easy to fool our brains: bettermovement.org/2010/the-thermal-grill-illusion/

So this is an illusion created entirely by our brain. But this doesn’t mean the **experience **of pain isn’t ‘real’, it just means that ‘pain’ isn’t a thing ‘out there’ in the universe. This also applies to your visual experience, your auditory experience and everything else you experience. They inform us about the external world but the felt experience is NOT the actual external world, it is our model of it, a model that is also easy to fool. You have two fairly large blind spots (one in each eye) but try as you might you cannot perceive them directly, even if you close one eye (try this instead). So even at the simplest level you aren’t actually experiencing what your eyes receive - your brain just makes up a big chunk of your visual experience and it fills in the details based on learned patterns.

Recognizing that pain and emotions (and all our other felt experiences) have useful roles to play in our experience as human beings is a rational position, but the felt experience itself merely is; the question just doesn’t apply to any property of that category.

Rationality comes into play when you start to think about ‘knowledge’ (which is the subject matter of epistemology). Is your position on some question based on evidence and sound logic?

 

[DarkStarTheta]

Agreed!
One very minor point, “1+1=2” is not even a proposition until someone understands it. Before someone understands it,it is only an ink pattern.

Even worse than that, 1+1=2 is false, it’s clearly 10… in binary.

Point being, that part of our interpretation (understanding) is to ascribe meaning to the symbols also. It can only be ‘true’ in the abstract, both 2 (decimal) and 10 (binary) point to (represent) the same underlying concept.

This concept of 1+1=2 seems to apply to reality, but reality isn’t constructed out of simple discrete components (quantum wave functions are not discrete, the measurements are). 1 apple is trillions of atoms and we only isolate it as an ‘apple’ in an abstract sense, there are a near infinity of arrangements that all qualify as ‘apple’, and then change a few molecules here and there with molecules from an orange and when would you say it stops being an ‘apple’? 1 molecule? (note: your average apple probably has billions of foreign molecules on it), a billion? a trillion? In reality we cannot draw a line between the two. But at some point we clearly don’t have an ‘apple’ any more, or maybe we never had an ‘apple’ to begin with?

Mathematics is also an axiomatic system, which means you have to feed into it the axioms (rules) of the game. Something is only said to be true, in mathematics, relative to those rules. And we have sets of mathematical rules that appear to conform extremely well with the world we observe, this gives us 1+1=2. But we can change those rules such that 1+1=5 is true, and I don’t just mean change the meaning of the symbols as I did with my 10 (binary) example. I mean literally change the rules so 1+1=5 is true. This, of course, gives us nonsense answers that don’t appear to be useful in the ‘real world’, but they are mathematically valid. This is how we discovered non-euclidean geometry – we tweaked some of the rules of the mathematical formalism. And those tweaks away from what seemed like reality turned out to be immensely powerful tools in understanding our universe.

Bottom line: the meaning of a mathematical truth may or may not coincide with a truth about reality, The way we investigate that correspondence is through physical experiment and measurement and we have to be extremely careful and clear in our interpretations.