Logic Versus Emotion

"If you had to choose, would you let 1 person die, or 1000 people die?"

Thats a vague question. But I had a friend who quite literally had this issue in Iraqi.(guy with a vest took someone hostage soo he can go and blow up.) . In that situation I would shoot through the innocent to save more people.

I agee on the bible part as it being put in more of a metaphorical sense. (im a Christan so before u send me hate mail.)

Logic will never be understood if something with emotions is driving it.
 

verbatim

[PLACEHOLDER]
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The very idea of logically debating logic vs. emotion is ridiculous.
To both sides, their support for their arguments are completely sound. The entire debate rests on whose axioms with which to start with are correct, and these are complete assumptions.
No one can ever win this debate as it is grounded in emotion in the first place, and emotion always favors the person feeling it.
Well now I know why we never went anywhere. Technically after 3 hours he gave up, so I guess I won by default?
 
Uh oh. I just realized something. What is the definition of logic? Are we able to define the meaning of logic without being illogical? And if we were illogical to begin with, then that would mean that our definition of logic would be illogical. Which would mean that the things that we are doing that we think are logical are illogical in the first place.

0.0 0_0
 
Woodchuck had the most right of it. Arguing a question based on emotion, logically, will never work.

Others were right, too, to say that logic and emotion aren't so different.

But the only reason this topic has gone on so long is because there isn't a set definition for logic or emotion. When I think emotion, I think of the responses I feel to certain situations (such as anger, fear, joy, et cetera). When I think logic, I think of the tool I use consciously to weigh pros and cons in real time, and to pick one or the other on some limited list of experiences I've had. Basically, emotion is the unconscious brain's usage of logic, where it runs all the variables faster and comes up with a faster but less moderate plan for moving forward.

Not as if this topic is very seriously being debated, anyway. Godwin's law is originally about nazis/Hitler, but it's just as likely (if not more, due to its relevence to more real-world situations) for religion or any number of offtopic things to jump up. That's what happens when you make a train of philosophical thought from a bunch of Pokemon players.
 
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.



That is completely false. In a group with altruistic genes, because of lower internal strife and fairer resource distribution, individuals have a greater chance of survival. Thus, an altruistic group has a greater chance of growing larger than other groups, and will prevail in the long term. In general, evolution would predict that people will naturally care a lot for their immediate family, care about people they know, care a little about people in their community or with a similar genetic makeup, care a tiny little bit about the rest of humanity, and barely give a damn about anything else.



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.
I love when you show up in threads like this.
 
Emotion IS logic.

Emotion is a mechanism that evolved to make quick and accurate decisions. In the real world, you have to come to snap decisions, and simply don't have the time to consider every factor, doing so would be paralytic and lead to inaction. Emotion is a calculus that sums up basic facts about the situation and impels you to a decision. It is a good compromise between time and accuracy in decision-making.

Emotion and logic are simply parallel decision making processes that make different trade-offs in time and accuracy. Your decision to recruit one system or the other depends mostly on how much time you have to make a decision.

Often when people talk about this they bring up silly situations about saving 1 versus 100 or whatever. This is NOT logic versus emotion, but instead has more to do with people's values and goals (and not the system they use to evaluate what choice best accomplished those goals)

This was according to some cognitive models of emotion that I cannot remember the names of...
 
Well, I haven't had a chance to post on this yet, and I would like to.

In the end, I would have to agree with you that logic is superior. However, for the sake of the argument, you need to approach this as if both are feasible, try to present it to the other as so, and try to get him to see it your way.

The only example you have on the thread is the "Would you rather kill 1 person, or 1000 people?" You said you answered one person, which I would agree with, and he replied that that shows you think humanity is a statistic.

I would disagree. The reasoner behind logic values humanity, and thus would rather save the majority. The reason he made this decision was because of emotion, his care for humanity, and not because of some obscure idea of "cold logic".

Ask him the same question. As a valuer of emotion, what would he do, kill 1 person or 1000? I would be interested in hearing his answer.

We, and everyone, know it is better to kill one person than to kill a thousand. The user of logic would make the proper decision in this case, reasoning that the death of 1 is the lesser of two evils compared to the death of 1000.

It seems to me that the emotional person would be the one to make the improper decision. For example, they may choose to save 1 person they love over 1000 people they do not know.

For the above reasons, I would side with you on this issue. If you ever wish to continue the discussion, I would be interested in his answer to the kill 1 or 1000 question.
 

verbatim

[PLACEHOLDER]
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He said 1, I forget his reasoning. I think his rage was over how I looked at the problem in a statistical way. I argued that the 1000 people would produce more for society if they were alive than the 1.
 
What if the 1000 people were otherwise productive people who were homeless due to time times we live in?

Also, Hitler's logic was that Jews were bad so he killed them. EMOTION??? I think NOT!

Yeah. I went there.
 
He said 1, I forget his reasoning. I think his rage was over how I looked at the problem in a statistical way. I argued that the 1000 people would produce more for society if they were alive than the 1.
Hmm, I still don't really see why he has such an issue with it. Unless you argued that the death doesn't even matter, it is purely a society-based argument. I could see why that would be a bit cold-hearted, but still not inferior to emotion.
 

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Both emotion and logic are both essential elements of our species. I hate the dumbfucks who think that one is without a doubt more important than the other. This is especially true for overly religious people. Nobody gives a shit about religious semantics when there's human lives at stake, just let people do their stem cell research so they can save people who otherwise stand no fighting chance. I especially hate those people who go "it is not righteous to toy with god's creations". Well is it fucking righteous to just watch some baby born with a defunct organ suffer and die? The government needs to ignore these dumbfucks, ban their retarded praise god protests, and give their full support to innovations such as stem cell research.

Now that I'm done my angry rant, I'll stop trolling and get back to the actual discussion. Without emotion, we would not be able to get our priorities straight. A mother's emotion is what allows her to protect her baby during times of danger. Does the mother have time to stop and think about what to do when a car is about to hit the baby carriage? Absolutely not. Innate response is a must in situations such as this. Emotion is also important in helping us guide ourselves from past mistakes. Logically, robbing a bank and killing everyone that knows will benefit me. Nobody can send me to jail and I've just given myself a paycheck for the rest of my life. If everyone on Earth thought like this, society would be even more fucked up than it already is. Emotions such as guilt and regret allow us to make better choices.

Logic on the other hand, is no less important than emotion. It allows us to make optimal long term decisions, as well as organize ourselves so we don't get swallowed by the complexities of society. My emotions make me want to bet my life's savings on my favorite football team winning the Super Bowl. I mean, I could potentially turn myself into a multi-millionaire. But how fucking stupid is that? The chances of you winning are slim, and if you don't win, you're now on the streets. Logic keeps our emotions from overwhelming us and prevents us from making impulsive decisions.

Emotion allows us to make the best short term decisions, whereas logic allows us to make the best long term decisions. Essentially, logic and emotion are both parts of every human and we need to accept both a necessary part of our survival. They create a sort of balance of power within us, with each keeping the other in check depending on the situation.

On a side note, the OPs example is really really bad for a discussion like this. Think about this instead:

A serial killer murders 1000 people. The only way to prevent this is to kill the serial killer's pregnant mother before he is born: except you are the only one who can make the kill. If you make no decisions, everybody dies. Do you do it? Can you live with your conscience when you've not only two lives with your own hand, you've also killed somebody completely unrelated to the incident. But if you don't do it, you've indirectly caused the deaths of 1000 others, that doesn't seem like a very good logical decision to me, 1000 technically is more valuable than 2. Now lets add another layer to this: that mother is your sister, while one of the 1000 people who died was your son. Now you'll either be killing your own sister, or letting your own blood die. What the hell are you going to do?

We are best to never touch subjects like this with a 30 foot pole. Decisions like this are all about a balancing between emotion and logic and determining which is more important. Your decision will be very situational and you wont be able to give a true response unless faced with it for real.
 

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