Logic Versus Emotion

[verbatim]

Okay, I know I don't have the reputation of a serious poster, but bear with me here.

I just finished a 2 hour long discussion with someone about emotion/logic. Throughout the conversation he attempted to try and convince me that emotion is more important than logic. His main technique was to go about trying to create situations in which logic would fail and emotion would succeed (he was VERY clever, but his reasoning was flawed/I was stubborn beyond reason). We hit an impasse because we both thought we were correct and refused to back down (I maintain that I didn't back down because I was right, but he would probably say the same thing so it is irrelevant). Here are his statements (recreated to the best of my ability) so that you can (hopefully) help me figure out what I did wrong in my debate and improve myself for the future.

First point of his:
"If you had to choose, would you let 1 person die, or 1000 people die?"

My response was that'd I'd pick the one because logically the 1000 people dying is a worse situation. His reply is that my reasoning is flawed because I view humanity as a statistic. I realize I can't convince him and stonewall until the next topic comes up.

Second point of his: (After establishing that I am Religious)

I have since edited this out because I feel that another impasse will be reached, and Religious dicussions and Smogon don't have that good of a history. Please make your own thread if you feel that Smogon can successfully and nicely discuss Religion. the short story is that he cited Biblical quotes that he felt to be unlogical. I responded that a lot if not most of the Bible is metaphorical.

I forgot the rest of the examples at this point and asked him to outline what he felt was the crucial flaw in my logic (and told him that it would go online, as to be fair), his response is as follow verbatim, (beyond spellings and use of the enter key)
"Just that, when it comes to matters of others, and faiths, and things relating to over people, even if it seems you can, logic can't, or shouldn't be used as a means of solving those problems. Humans are supposed to equally balance emotion and logic. You seem to rely to heavily on logic. I guess the flaw is, You think everything can be solved with logic. But so many things require something beyond logic. That's all. XD"

I put this up for two reasons, for people to criticize me (Constructively, so I can identify my faults and improve) and to decide which one was right and which one was unjustifiably ignorant. Neither he nor I can answer the question as we are both biased parties. I felt that Smogon was the best group of unbiased intellectuals I have access to, and so brought it here.

 

[popemobile]

Throughout the conversation he attempted to try and convince me that emotion is more important than logic

I am Religious

sounds like he did a good job of it

I responded that a lot if not most of the Bible is metaphorical.

lol

 

[popemobile]

for the record, I agree that logic is far more important than emotion. All I got from this topic is that you and your buddy are really bad at arguing/debating, though.

 

[verbatim]

Lets not delve into the Religious aspects, I've edited most of that section out now.

Also you are correct, but could you point out my mistakes for future improvement?

 

[ssbbm]

that "argument" about religion is bad -___-; pascal's wager is a "lol" argument

and it sounds like his argument is based on the assumption that using logic in cases concerning people is "bad" because "emotion and logic should be balanced"; your argument (if you do argue) has to prove that his assumption is false

 

[Hipmonlee]

Logically the concept of "importance" needs some kind of basis. Important to whom in terms of what?

If you are an annoying person, and keep asking enough "why?"s eventually you will have to reach a point where someone says "because I wanted to". Whether that has to be emotional could be debated, it would go deeply into the semantics of emotion and that is a stupid argument because nobody cares about what your friend means when he uses that word except your friend and maybe some people that know him in certain circumstances, but this one probably isnt worth it.. Logic is just a tool for getting specific outcomes that are determined by emotions.

So emotion without logic might work at least some of the time, but logic without emotion doesnt even really exist.

 

[Acklow]

Ugh I hate false dilemmas. Makes you feel very incapable when answering questions. I would have to agree with you when it comes to the question of 1 or 1000. 1000 makes more sense in this case. However if he would've said something like "well the 1 person is very important and could potentially save many many future lives," then I maybe would've reconsidered...but then again, I hate false dilemmas, and these usually don't occur in real life so there's no point in me trying to face it.

That's my 2 cents.

 

[ssbbm]

@hip

idk if you can really say that; it depends on how you define emotions - if, for example, you consider bodily pleasure to not be an emotion, then one could operate on a path that used logic to achieve bodily pleasure while not using "emotion", but yeah, defining "emotion" is particularly difficult to do

 

[Hipmonlee]

Yes, and it isnt particularly useful for us to find a definition among ourselves if it isnt what this guy's friend meant. Nor is that even particularly useful.. It isnt really what the crux of the question was.

The point being the reason a person does something can never fully be explained with logic. There has to be something else.

 

[verbatim]

@hip

idk if you can really say that; it depends on how you define emotions - if, for example, you consider bodily pleasure to not be an emotion, then one could operate on a path that used logic to achieve bodily pleasure while not using "emotion", but yeah, defining "emotion" is particularly difficult to do

For our argument, I defined emotion as the result of biological reactions. I found his arguments to be nonsensical, case in point, "Why not kill the 1000, the one could save cancer". I thought that given no information on the people, besides their numerical sum, that risk would mean that I should save the 1000, because I'd have 1000 times more chance to save someone who could cure cancer (I don't remember if I told him this). However, me stating that the opposition has flawed logic is a biased statement, so I very well can't state that and stonewall (which I probably did, more error on my part).

The point being the reason a person does something can never fully be explained with logic. There has to be something else.

For the sake of argument, pretend it is possible to only have one, which would you choose? (He proposed something similar to me, I said logic, which sparked the whole debate)

 

[6-Dimension]

I think of myself as using my head more than my heart, but I don't really know either way. I have my moments on both sides of the spectrum.
Still, though, when I die, I'd much rather be remembered as a great mind than someone who was very passionate.

 

[Snkz]

These arent important questions to be thinking about

 

[MrIndigo]

Using logic to prove emotion is more important than logic.

EDIT: His first question was incorrectly asked; the answer is always the one.

What changes it is to ask: "Would you kill one person if not doing so meant 1000 people would die?" - this is where the emotional dilemma arises because now it's about whether you actively kill one person versus many more people dying without it being directly because of you. An alternative is to say "If you had to choose between 1000 people you never met dying, and your girlfriend/mother/whatever dying, which would you choose?".

The end part of his discussion also shows he doesn't know what logic means. Logic is the mathematical process of argument by which you map axioms to conclusions. This is not inconsistent with emotion; emotion affects what axioms you choose and given fixed axioms, your decision about whether the logical conclusion is a positive or a negative situation.

 

[lati0s]

Fine, from a logical point of view, believing in Religion has a huge plus if your right, and no skin off your back if your wrong (your in a hole, what do you care). If you don't believe and it's true, you've made a big mistake.

pascals wager is a poor argument for many reason's, what if a god exists that is not your god but is very jealous, he doesn't care if you believe in him but if you believe in another god he will hate you. More to the point if you say that you believe something in generally means that you think it is true, the fact that you would be better off believing it is not a reason to think that it is true.

As for the logic vs. emotion question, emotion is useful for determining what your values are, in fact it is the only way to determine what your values are as your values are a personal emotional thing. Once you have figured out what your values are every course of action can be rationally evaluated on the basis of those values so you can use logic to choose the best course.

 

[iDunno]

These arent important questions to be thinking about

I love this thread topic and comments like these aren't helping in keeping it alive.

I do not classify emotions the way you do. Sure, emotions themselves ARE a product of endocrine reactions and are technically byproducts of stresses, however reactions to these phenomenons should not be compared to these. I refer to the reactions of these biological occurrences as emotive logic. Emotional logic is multifaceted. On one hand, it focuses on subjectivity, however rational logic plays a huge role in its synthesis. Every human has a frontal lobe - some more developed than others - and every human has the ability to reason. This reason is always a lingering backdrop to emotive logic.

Altruism is not a natural phenomenon. It is taught through societal norms. In reality, evolution is survival of the genes of an individual - not the species or group. Logic is basic instinct - it is accepting things as they are because they cannot be proven otherwise. Emotion however, defies logic. It is what separates man from beast. Those without emotion live as their genes say they should live. However, on the same token, those without logic live the way society says they should live. In order to be the "ideal human being", a sense of perfect balance between emotion and logic must be achieved. This requires a "dual core processor mind" so-to-speak. You must process information using two cognitive pathways at once so rational logic does not interfere with emotive logic and vise versa. This is very hard to achieve, but not impossible.

Concerning the 1 vs 1000 challenge, there is no correct answer. No group of lives outweighs any one, just as no one life outweighs any other. Life is non-quantifiable. My answer is to do what is statistically more likely to succeed. If saving the one life is more likely than saving the 1000, I would definitely do that first. However, if saving the 1000 is statistically more likely, I would save them. There is no point in wasting any life that can easily be saved if it means trying and failing to save the lives of those you chose to save instead. If saving one man would cause 1000 to die, I would most likely save the 1000 if I had no idea who this man was. However, if the prospects are statistically equal, the case would be different. I would think of it in two ways. First of all, I would work to prevent the unnamed disaster that is effecting these people from effecting any other in the vicinity. Then, when that is established or is being established, I would begin to contemplate. If I have emotional attachments to some of these people, I may be more biased to saving them, however logically, there are people like me elsewhere who would be saddened when the one I couldn't save died. If saving my friends/family would be less likely, I will have to be inclined to save the individual...but being human, I will most likely save my friends and family instead. Because I do not want to feel the grief of loss. Because I want to protect myself from the stress of mourning. It is for selfish reasons that I would choose to save them. Emotions are self serving - they are what drives people to protect themselves; their genes. After all, life began simply as a cesspool of amino acids in the ancient oceans of prehistoric Earth. Everyone is simply trying to survive. Saving the one person would most likely not benefit me in any way, so naturally I would be inclined to take the other option on instinct.

What I am trying to say is that both emotion and logic are bullshit. Logic is a cop-out and emotion is a manipulative bitch that will twist your ideals against your will in the more severe situations you will encounter. The truth is, there is no distinction. Humans are not as capable of good will and higher thinking as they would like you to believe. In fact, it is this frame of mind that causes them to deviate to their bestial norms in the first place. Bodies are capsules for our sperm and egg. Everything we do is done to benefit our genes in the end. We are the servants of our gametes, logically. Emotion and logic are our gene's way of manipulating us to do what they want. The only thing that we can do to avoid this inevitable fate is to become a unified consciousness that can truly understand one another and think for the sake of each other as well as ourselves. Altruism can be taught. It just isn't. As long as there's a frontal lobe, there is hope.

I rambled a bit.

 

[Hipmonlee]

Altruism is not a natural phenomenon.

This is not true.

Back to what I was saying before, the point is, even taking this question as generously as I can, it still comes down to a choice between emotion with logic, or just emotion with no logic. Obviously in that case logic is advantageous.

What this is really about is should a person use logic to decide whether or not to do something counter to what they want in the short term in order to get something they want in the long term.

But, the point I would make is that people generally suck at predicting future payoffs. So in general, I recommend erring on the side of short term payoff. However, you still need the logic, just remember that logic doesnt always mean doing what you dont want to.

 

[ButteredToast]

Emotion clouds reason. Always has, always will. People will always do stupid things that they will regret later because they never thought about the consequences.

 

[Nastyjungle]

emotional reasoning is part of being a human being

logic and emotions are both necessary to problem solving in my opinion, though its probably better to err on the side of logic in most situations

 

[Furosuto]

I believe that emotions and logic are both important in our lives.

For example, lets take you 1 to 1000 people dying question for this one.
If you have nothing but logic (so you have no emotions whatsoever) then would you honestly really care if ANY of them died? It would be a waste of your valuable time trying to save them.
But if you DID have a balance of emotion, you would take the time trying to decide who lives and who dies because you're thinking "OH CRAP OH CRAP, I HAVE TO SAVE THESE PEOPLE! BUT WHO'S MORE IMPORTANT?". And you would go through the pros and cons of these people.

Now in an even more emotional point of view, what if these people are ready to die? What if the 1000 people are all Christians ready to be brought up to heaven? Or what if that 1 person was a serial killer in his life and he accepts death then because eventually even if he lives, the police will catch him sooner or later? Then he sacrifices himself for the rest.

See?
Now this goes without saying that you need logic also. If you are illogical, then you might make a stupid decision that you wouldn't understand how it's stupid no matter how many times someone told you because you're illogical.

We need a balance of emotion and logic in our lives IMO.

Now guys, just remember, to keep this thread civil. As I am typing, a MOD is viewing this thread right now.

 

[Umbreon Dan]

wow, a MOD???

 

[Brain]

I think emotion and logic are not very well defined in this thread to start with.

There are two separate cognitive processes at hand here: first, you have to determine what is the objective, and then you have to determine what are the steps to take in order to achieve this objective. In principle, the former is in the realm of emotion and the latter is in the realm of logic. For instance, "eating ice cream" might be the objective, and it is fully emotional; then, logic might tell you that your fridge is empty, the ice cream stand nearby is closed, and thus you need to go to the supermarket.

However, objectives often clash with one another: for instance, maybe you want to lose weight. That's emotional, because you would only do this if you felt bad about your appearance or felt terrible physically. But then logic tells you that you should not eat ice cream. In this case, logic tells you about the (in)compatibility of your various objectives, and then you need to figure out which one you care more about. The tricky part is often to weigh current emotions against future emotions: clearly, you will feel better now if you eat ice cream, but in the future you will feel worse, and usually it seems like a good idea to maximize your own happiness over time. Failure to properly weigh the present against the future is often said to be "emotion clouding reason", though in fact you are just badly optimizing your future emotions. In the end, objectives are always emotional.

Similarly, the idea to make the world "as good as possible" is ultimately grounded in emotion: you only do it because it makes you feel good about yourself, or because you think that working for the good of humanity will make humanity pay you back. Working to make the world better, when you don't really care about it emotionally, will just make you miserable, and no amount of logic can make you care about something if it can't be linked to anything you already care about.

On the other hand, if you do care about the good of humanity, then you need logic to tell you what will work and what won't work. For instance, if you have no other information, killing off one person isn't as bad as killing off a thousand; but maybe that one person could cure cancer, or maybe the earth suffers from overpopulation, and then you might decide differently. However, you might easily run into hard limits: for instance, it is logically defensible that killing off a huge chunk of the population might be a good thing in the long term, since it would pre-empt overpopulation problems. However, most people would be incapable of conceiving that "pruning" the population might be in humanity's best interests (realize I'm talking about nuking entire cities for the sole purpose of population control). This wouldn't be a case of emotion clouding reason, because in practice there are hard limits to how much people can care about humanity without losing it. Only certain compromises are acceptable, and that's fine.

Fine, from a logical point of view, believing in Religion has a huge plus if your right, and no skin off your back if your wrong (your in a hole, what do you care). If you don't believe and it's true, you've made a big mistake.

There is absolutely no logical reason why a God would reward believers and punish non-believers, rather than doing the exact opposite. For instance, you are making the completely unfounded implicit assumption that God does not love irony. If he does, I am sure you can imagine just how screwed you are right now.

 

[cookie]

godwin's law of a forum: as a thread gets longer, the probability of it being derailed by a religion argument approaches 1

 

[zarator]

You know, through my years at philosophy I found myself often discussing with others about this dilemma (and others, maybe more interesting, maybe less). And what often puzzles me are two flaws about each side.

On one side, emotion is often deemed fundamentally different from logic. Quite frankly, it isn't. It is just another heuristic method - or, if you prefer a less technical expression, a way to solve problems. Sure, emotion may be less apparent to your conscience, but that doesn't mean it operates in a way so different from logic. Think of it as one of those programs which are currently running in the background of your PC. The fact you don't see them doesn't mean they're different from the ones you're using right now to read what I'm saying.

To expand on this point, consider this. What can we call emotions? Love?Fear? Happiness? Let's consider fear. Fear is one of our most basic emotions, which spurs us to avoid and escape from what we consider to be threats to our physical (and often mental as well) integrity. For example, if you were on a bus and a tiger were to enter it, fear would likely press you to leave the bus as soon as possible. Now, you could have arrived to that result through careful reasoning, based on what you remember about tigers, on the likehood of its claws to shred your belly to pieces and other stuff. Fear fast-tracks all this, allowing you to reach the conclusion before it's too late to be of any use.
And the same thing happens in many more fields. Think love for example. How many times have you heard "Feel love, it'll make you do the right thing"? If we were to consider all the variables implied in a relationship with another human being, it'd take centuries to produce an undisputable solution. Again, the feelings fast track the process for us, allowing our mind to reach a conclusion within reasonable time constraints.

This isn't intended to put emotions in a bad light. Quite the contrary. We need them to live. They are as essential to our survival and well being as the air we breath every day. But rethoric about emotions don't help us to understand anything. Worst of all, people are often led to link emotions to freedom and liberty. Guys, don't do this. Emotions and freedom are different, almost opposite things. A person who always follows his/her emotions without never derailing from that path is as free as a computer executing flawlessly the programs we load on it. If freedom has to do with free will (assuming such a thing exists), then freedom can't translate in giving up to emotions. The free person is the one who decides on his/her own whether to follow emotions or not whenever they show up. And with this, I'm done with this first side.



Now, the other point - logic. It's almost funny how much ideology people put under the etiquette of "logic". At best, what people call "logic" could be referred to "common sense". But that's just it. Let's take the "one person for a thousand" dilemma. Where's the logic here? iDunno is right in saying that years of life can't be compared to apples. One life has all the dignity of a thousand. It can't be "traded" like that. Who will compensate the guy who died for the others? He won't have another life to live besides the one he was forced to give up. There are no undisputable moral grounds to force him to make such a choice (least of all logic).

People often confuse logic with utilitarianism. Utilitarianism is, in short, that philosophical doctrine, developed by Mill, Bentham etc, which makes everything revolve around utility (whereas utility isn't simply "economic" utility, but everything the subjects may see as desireable - pleasure, good, love, etc). So, making a thousand people live is more "useful" (in the utilitarian sense of the term) than sacrificing them for one only person. Well, turns out utilitarianism is not the only existing logic. And no, moral intuitionism (good is what I "feel" as good) is not the other alternative. I suggest everyone of you who think these two are the only alternatives to read A Theory of Justice from J. Rawls (1971) and everything which came after that.

In short, there's no logic behind saving 1000 people making one die. There's little (if any?) difference between logic and emotions. People just can't grasp their meaning.

P.S.: As again iDunno said, if you REALLY want to find a "logical answer" to the "1000 for 1 or 1 for 1000" dilemma, such one would be: "save the person (or the group of people) which has the highest chance to be saved". THAT's a logical argument (based, by the way, on an economic principle called maximin which has a lot more logic than what any definition of utilitarianism can include).

 

[Doomsday94]

godwin's law of a forum: as a thread gets longer, the probability of it being derailed by a religion argument approaches 1

Isn't Godwin's Law as a thread gets longer, the probability of a comparison to Nazis or Hitler reaches 1? Though it does seem different in this forum...

 

[Jorgen]

Generalized Godwin's Law: As a thread's length approaches infinity, the probability of something totally retarded happening approaches 1.

Come to think of it, Godwin's Law isn't particularly remarkable.