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1489 sats \ 2 replies \ @elvismercury 27 Feb \ on: How to Be Dumb mostly_harmless
I have recently became very interested in the things that not-reason can give you. As you say, feelings / emotions are one way this manifests -- the outputs of a computation that is every bit as all-encompassing as your full powers of reason, and likely even more broadly encompassing than that.
But what is there, even beyond feelings, as we idiomatically think of feelings? There are things that you "know" that you don't know that you know, and that you don't even "feel" in the same way that you feel lust or anger or whatever. There is so much power in this stuff.
This book by Iain McGilchrist is probably the bible of what I'm talking about. He has a newer set of books that seems to be even more exhaustive but I have not read them.
I think this is close to what you're writing about here, but not identical to it. Or maybe it is exactly the same.
But what is there, even beyond feelings, as we idiomatically think of feelings? There are things that you "know" that you don't know that you know, and that you don't even "feel" in the same way that you feel lust or anger or whatever. There is so much power in this stuff.
I struggled with partitioning feeling-like things as I wrote this. Even the difference between reason and feeling is not very clear to me. I can say the average of what we think of as reason is distinct from the average of what we think of as feelings, but I get the sense they meet somewhere.
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I was so struck by the initial idea, and the power agentizing concepts as a thinking device, in Encyclopedia Kahneman that I didn't get more than a quarter way through it. I should probably finish it. All my good ideas about feelings are probably from him.
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