Apr 09, 2017 5:06pm
EMOTIONS AND THEIR INFLUENCE ON BIASES AND AGENCY
1 – Emotions reflect changes in the states of property-in-toto.
2 – We use reason (a skill we can improve through practice in deflationary comparisons ) to compare properties, relations, consequences, and valuations.
3 – We use free association to define properties, relations, consequences, and valuations.
4 – Our efforts at free association are impossible not to bias, because our experience accumulates in both interest and intensity in response to our biases.
5 – So it is more correct to say that it is very difficult to learn to think sufficiently deflationarily that our emotions do not influence our reasoning.
6 – to say that many of our emotions – those that I understand – occur in the reptilian and mamalian brains, and that our cognitive biases occur most often in the human parts of the brain and that the more primitive they are the more difficult they are (often) to circumvent, but the easier they are to understand. Many cognitive biases are difficult to be aware of in the first place, and are more subtle.
Therefore, in broad terms, the less skill you have, the less will you have, the more solipsistic you are the harder it is to escape the emotions that result from your biases.
The more skill you have the more will you have the more autistic you are the easier it is to escape the emotions that result from your biases.
Apr 09, 2017 5:37pm
AGENCY AND AESTHETICS
—“Enlighten the intellect, volition will follow. Aesthetics seem to be the means of aligning one’s passions and emotions to reason.”—Rafael LaVerde
Let me expand on that a bit:
Remove sources of lack of fitness, lack of character (virtue), lack of resources, sources of normative and institutional resistance, sources of ignorance, error, bias, and deceit – all the impediments to agency – and agency will result. Then selecting a philosophy – a means of decidability – by which one can obtain one’s ends, and an aesthetic that values one’s passions in accordance with that philosophy.
