Q&A: Understanding as Feeling
Understanding as Feeling
Question
Hello Rabbi,
I wanted to ask what you think about the approach according to which our understandings, and especially our gut feelings and intuitions, are nothing other than emotions.
The argument for this is usually threefold:
First, our thinking is derived from certain brain states, and if there is a change in nerve cells and the connections between them, then just as we can create a varied sequence of different emotions, so too we can create a change in different thoughts. In particular, we can trigger them, and so on. If so, there is not really much difference between feelings of "understanding" and emotions.
Second, many times people also connect intuitions to something more emotional, just as the phrase "gut feeling" implies, and the like.
Third, if these really were two independent things, then we would not expect to assume that the emotional plane would affect the cognitive one and vice versa. But many times emotions do in fact influence those intuitions and even the drawing of conclusions, as is shown in research institutes that study failures of thinking, and also in the well-known saying distinguishing between questions in matters of faith / belief that stem from desires and genuine questions. Maimonides already mentioned the influence of the inclinations of an incomplete person on his system of thought. And as can be seen in people's desire to believe in conspiracies, etc.
Answer
I completely disagree, and I have written books about this. If our intuitions were mere emotions, there would be no chance in the world that those intuitions would be realized as true (that is, turn out to be correct). But that happens all the time (of course not always), and from this it follows that intuition is a tool for recognizing and understanding the world, not merely a subjective emotion.
None of your counterarguments is decisive.
- Our thinking is not derived from brain states; rather, it causes them. We think by means of the brain just as we walk by means of the legs. But the one who thinks is the intellect, not the brain. True, in principle it is possible to cause people to think in a certain way, just as it is possible to make them feel pain even when they have no wound. Does that mean that whenever they feel pain they never have a wound? It is possible to make people "see" sights that are not standing before their eyes. Does that mean that all our seeing is an illusion?
- The terminology that refers to intuition as an emotion does indeed reflect this confusion. It stems from an analytic outlook according to which anything not based on proof/argument is a subjective illusion (emotion). But that is not so.
- I did not say they are independent. Many things affect our thinking and bias it, but that does not mean they are our thinking itself. Dependence is not identity. On the contrary, after you explain to a person where he went wrong, he understands it, and thereby proves that thinking is not itself a faulty emotion, but only that sometimes it is led astray by emotion. By the way, the research institutes that examine failures of thinking themselves rely on our supposedly faulty thinking.
Discussion on Answer
1. You think by means of the brain, not that the brain thinks and it rises to your consciousness. The intellect is what thinks, and to do so it operates the brain.
2. They do have a prejudice: analyticism. And even if it makes it difficult, then it's difficult. I still think it isn't true.
3. They affect thought; they are not the thought itself. You are identifying dependence/influence with identity. That is a logical mistake. I explained this.
1. As I understand it, by intellect you mean the totality of the mental parts, and in particular judgment, within dualism.
If so, it follows from what you're saying that for a materialist it really is hard, from his perspective, to draw a distinction between emotion and thought, right?
3. If I understood correctly, you mean that the influence takes place both on the level of forming the information and on the level of judgment (where it's more inclination versus thought)? But in any case it is not itself emotional.
1. Absolutely. In a deterministic picture there is no such thing as thought. My claim is that even a determinist thinks, because he is mistaken in his determinism, and in fact he is not a deterministic machine. But according to his own view, there really is no thinking. See here in Column 35 and 175 about judgment.
3. Both and both. But emotional influence is a bias that is prone to mistakes, and it is best to avoid it.
1. What do you mean when you say that our thinking is not derived from brain states but rather causes them?
By the term intellect, do you mean the dualist view and free choice — and therefore it causes them?
2. Doesn't the very fact that for people it isn't simply obvious that this is not instinctiveness but merely emotion make that view difficult? It's not that they have a prejudice.
3. But the things that bias thinking contain something like the feeling of the thought itself.