By: Vasudev Ram

Vasudev Ram — Thu, 23 Nov 2017 19:13:00 +0000

Good post.

>On the plane back, I got to thinking about the issue of critical thinking. Somebody whose opinion I respect said that much of what is going on today is driven by a failure to think critically, accelerated by an intellectual laziness to simply follow one’s emotions.

I have been thinking on similar lines for a while (after observing both myself and the world around me), and saying as much to a few friends, not as much as you’ve written, but a subset of it, and in different words. Some of those words: “thinking and logic are highly underrated these days”, and “neither head over heart, nor heart over head; consciousness should rule over both head and heart.”

By: sigmaalgebra

sigmaalgebra — Tue, 21 Nov 2017 01:24:00 +0000

To borrow from Yoda, “Always hard to understand, emotions.”.

To borrow from a common lament of men about women, “Can’t live with emotions; can’t live without emotions.”.

To borrow from Dickens, emotions are “The best of times, the worst of times.”.

To borrow from the movie Contact,

You’re an interesting species; an interesting mix. Capable of such exquisite dreams; such horrifying nightmares.

Even if a person is plenty ready, willing, able, and eager to emphasize “critical thinking,” rationalism, etc., it remains that it is important to understand emotions:

(A) It’s important to understand the emotions of others; otherwise one is at high risk of hurting the emotions of others and being alone. One of the main strengths of humans, the main reason we have dominated the world, is that we have the brain power to do well being together; one of the greatest threats to us is being alone.

(B) It’s important to understand ones own emotions if only to understand the emotions we know best, our own, as a first step to understanding the emotions of others.

It is good to try to pay attention even to sick-o, degrading pop culture because it appeals to the emotions of so many other people, and it’s important to understand their emotions. So, e.g., if you watch a movie, pop culture or not, that appeals to a lot of people, from the fact of that appeal you can get some insight into the emotions of the people who liked the movie.

At times, emotions can even be a contribution to “critical thinking”: If you just met someone, talked with them for a while, left, and felt upset, then you just, fully unconsciously, got a signal, detection, symptom that there was something wrong with that person and a warning to be careful and maybe stay away.

Good art can teach about the deeper, more fundamental, more important emotions of many people. E.g., R. Wagner understood a lot about emotions, understood so well that he was able to put just black marks on white paper that decades later good musicians can play and, then, communicate those emotions to others.

E.g., at one point in his opera Die Walküre, Wotan has to say farewell to the daughter he deeply loves. So, there is a really good performance at

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pTaH8USQH4

Well, at one point when I was 15, likely from an awful misunderstanding from some terribly poor communications from some horrible fears to communicate, all from some really bad pop culture nonsense and data and for no good reasons at all, I had to walk away from a girl of 13, see her high school graduation picture below (she was prettier when she was 13, the prettiest female I ever saw in person or otherwise, sweet, adorable, an angel, as I better understand now, likely very afraid) that I was very much in love with, and still am.

Emotional lesson: That kind of love never ends.

So, commonly when I hear Wagner’s music about Wotan’s farewell, the music so closely represents my feelings of my catastrophe that day when I was 15 that I scream out in agony.

Wagner was good at understanding emotions. Apparently he guessed, and correctly, that enough people in his audiences had had such bad cases of farewells that his music would effectively communicate a common, strong emotion.

So, why does a person pay attention to such art? One reason, to get evidence that such bad stuff is part of what in life happens to nearly everyone and, thus, is not unusual or particular to the person listening. Then the listener feels better about the pains of their farewells.

https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/cba7b21ee90fa24c719336c6bbfb089b680d6c6f45217d5f3c0ecbd63abfa428.jpg