Comment by quacked
6 years ago
Well, I think that emotion isn't really a legitimate source of information, primarily because it's so subjective. How many relationships dissolve because one party is connecting their experience of an emotion to the actions of the other party, but it's all a complete misunderstanding?
Emotion serves as an indicator, but not as justifiable evidence or information. I still get angry, fearful, heartbroken, elated, etc. but I now spend a great deal of energy trying to make sure that I don't attach my experience of an emotion to a belief that the emotion gives me real, trustworthy information about the true state of the world.
I thought a great deal about this while I was reading "Thinking Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman, which I highly recommend.
I don't see why we should go from "emotion shouldn't be considered an infallible source of info about the world outside our consciousness", to "emotion isn't a legitimate source of information." There are many situations in life that aren't accessible by pure reason, such as basically all aspects of social life.
Yeah. It's just another tool. Emotion works quickly over large and/or vague sources of information using heuristics. Sometimes this is useful, and sometimes it isn't.
Some emotion is a tool for sensing the world, but other emotion is the process of our actual being. It is truth in itself. If something makes me feel bad, that's a fact. Maybe it can change, maybe it can't. It's not a heuristic, it's not judging or discerning anything, it just is in itself the essence and existence of my being.
isn't emotion basically system1 in thinking fast and slow? optimized for making snap decisions yes but far from being an illegitimate source of information. there are a lot of examples where system1 gives you the wrong answer, but IIRC there are also plenty of examples where system1 is exactly right especially when there is time pressure. the book "Blink" is basically its antithesis offering examples where trusting system1 leads to better outcomes than overthinking it with system2.