Bringing subconscious impulses into a conscious template that we can interact with is an essential skill. I agree that having a good locus of control over emotional changes can determine our own outlook on life.

Thank you for your contribution, I will look into dialectical behavior theory more.

Opposition implies two-sidedness. The opposite of reason is not emotion, or at least you haven’t shown us as much.

The opposite of reason would be un-reason. As an extreme example, committing a murder for a reason (pre-meditated) is different from killing someone without a reason (manslaughter). So shooting your annoying next-door neighbor is an applied reason, but accidentally hitting them with your car in a snowstorm with slippery roads has no applied reason, OR applied emotion.

So, I think you are wrong, and reason and emotion are not opposites. They are entirely separate, perhaps sometimes contradictory, tools to make decisions. Emotions can be used to make good decisions (using the feeling of guilt to recognize wrongdoing and apologizing), and reason can be used to make bad decisions (using ethnocentrism to define certain people in society as negative).

An emotion can be the driver of decision-making just as much as reason can, and the same goes for a lack of either.

I agree with most of this, with the exception that, to an extreme, rational thinking to explain emotions can transform into immature coping mechanisms. Rationalization will “explain away” certain emotions or reactions, like when someone with extreme fear or anxiety of lightning to believe this is natural, since lightning can instantly kill you.

Likewise, “intellectualizing” is an immature mechanism where one tries to “objectively” research or study a problem, thereby depersonalizing the person from the subject. An example would be a man with pancreatic cancer avoiding his feelings on the matter by reading clinical trials, drug trials, and survival rates for his disease at the level of a doctoral candidate instead of attending to his emotional state.

But these are extremes that you certainly didn’t imply, just worth noting, and I agree that practice is needed to find a happy medium of permitting emotional recognition and using rational thinking to guide towards a good solution.

I agree that just because one is sad about a fact’s existence, the strength of the emotion will not alter reality to change that fact. Ex. Grandma has cancer, and while it’s natural to be sad, being sad won’t change it. I think that’s a healthy worldview.

At the same time, the emotional response does carry utility in arguments, but it shouldn’t be the primary means to finding solutions. I hope that wasn’t the message you received from my comment.

Continuing on the example of “grandma has cancer.” I’m a medical student who has witnessed numerous end-of-life conversations, and the emotional conflict most families struggle to grasp is the amount of suffering the patient endures. I know this is anecdotal, but the families who seem to struggle less are those who value either a cure to illness or palliative care (pain management, functional support like eating/sleeping, quality of life measures, etc.) Families and patients who identify the particular fear of suffering can make more sound/reasonable decisions.

Families who cannot firmly identify their fears or emotions will firmly grasp onto the plan of “no suffering = do every chemotherapy and surgery and radiation treatment possible.”

So I don’t advocate for the latter scenario at all. Guarding maladaptive emotions is not a productive way to reach good solutions, you are right. At the same time, in the sphere of public opinion, it is considered rude to identify other’s as emotional, but in reality this should be more tolerable. I mean, Snickers can say “you’re not you when you’re hungry” but if you or I said that in a heated debate, our cause would be lost.

I agree with how you characterize emotions as a tool in the decision-making process. It is an available asset that supports reasoning, but certainly should not be the guiding compass.

I might have rushed here. This first bit is where I was trying to summarize the essential debate on emotion and reasoning.

If logical reasoning is a product of the mind, and emotions are also a product of the mind, and there is a belief that emotions would disrupt reasoning, then it follows that emotions should be suppressed when one is actively applying logic to a problem.

This is especially considered where, in everyday life, people who “act on emotions” instead of logic or linear thinking are seen as impulsive or unreasonable. I don’t think that’s necessarily true, as in the case of instinctive/survival-based decisions, but that feels obvious.

Instead, I’m trying to argue that non-instantaneous decision making can take emotions into context, because outright ignoring the input of emotions is a denial of an essential part of the mind. I think emotions matter greatly as we apply reasoning to problems.

What is your opinion on the intertwining of logic/reason and emotion? Or are you just a skeptic contrarian who won’t offer an original thought on the matter?

Tell me how you really feel.

If reason is at least partially driven as a neurological function, then it would follow that an emotional brain would need to intentionally suppress that aspect of consciousness to “think clearly.”

However, humans have pre- and post-reasoning actions like anticipating and reflecting, too: if humans are emotionally responding to an argument before AND after an argument in which reason is applied, then we haven’t really separated reason from emotion yet.

The only way to mitigate this is to remove all emotion from the conversation, during as well as before and after. I find this rather disturbing as an absolute, because emotions have potential to be good drivers of instinct and direction of values. If I were a surgeon who felt nervous putting a patient on an operating table, the emotion of fear is quite valid in the reasoning to operate vs. using alternative means of treatment.

Great thoughts and discussion to be had.