reason is a hammer

You can sit on a hammer or use it to build a chair. Reason is a tool. Reason is a means to an end and the end is whatever you want it to be. The most reasonable thing to be is reasonable just like the most circular shape is a circle. By the standards of reason, feelings alone are dumb but important feelings, like desires, can exist outside of the scope of reason.

you feel how you feel

Your feelings are truths about how you feel. One equals one. You feel how you feel. You can feel another way but then you feel that way. Reason and action can influence how we feel but they are not feelings. The reason you enjoy surfing is worth knowing, but the fact that you enjoy surfing matters. Regardless of the reasons for our feelings, our experience of reality is in large part how we feel about reality.

feelings are intelligence

Parents, teachers, and bosses deride feelings because we struggle to reason about feelings that aren't our own. The early feelings we have come from genetic blueprints shaped by our ancestors' lifetimes, while our mature feelings are shaped by our own experiences. Feelings can lack a clear origin and be nonsensical and flawed, but they are not flaws. Feelings provide decision making where reason is slow, unavailable, irrelevant, or inadequate.

your own ruler

The world is measuring you against a universal ruler, measuring how well you conform to its generic practical standard, but each of us is our own standard to be measured against. It's dumb to think you're special but you are. In some small mundane way you are better than all of us. Likely, you are better than all of us in many big important ways too. The universal ruler is largely inconsiderate of specialness and the universal ruler should, at most, be a rough template for making your own ruler.

feelings are a compass

As useful as a compass is, we consider where a compass has us going. As useful as a compass is, we look at a map if we have one. As useful as a compass is, all it does is point. Feelings provide something like a bearing. In unfamiliar territory a bearing is a godsend, but we need more than a bearing to navigate unfamiliar territory. Feelings cannot solve all of our problems or produce all of our work or tell us with precision what is right or wrong. Feelings are a tool like reason is a tool and only a fool would use a single tool for everything.
this territory is moderated
Disclaimer: I've been told I write in an authoritative tone, but if I had to guess it's because I suck at writing and take for granted that I'm not an authority. If it helps to hear I think I'm an idiot, I think I'm an idiot. Everything I say is literally made up from whatever odd things are laying around in my brain and it's plausible 100% of what I think is wrong. I share it because I think I might at least be wrong in an interesting way.
I think smart people have an understandable tendency to misclassify some forms of non-reason as dumb and amputate them because they are brilliant, skillful appliers of reason and reason is the ultimate human faculty. And I think that sucks.
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Your writing has a certain pleasant poetry to it.
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That's sweet, thanks. My vocabulary is unavailable most of the time so I'm forced to use metaphors more than average. I hope if/when I get better at writing, I don't lose that. They can be expensive to come up with and I'm not sure I'd pay the price if I had an alternative.
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585 sats \ 2 replies \ @Atreus 27 Feb
You into philosophy, Koob? Starting to sound a touch Socratic over there.
"I am wiser than this man, for neither of us appears to know anything great and good; but he fancies he knows something, although he knows nothing; whereas I, as I do not know anything, so I do not fancy I do. In this trifling particular, then, I appear to be wiser than he, because I do not fancy I know what I do not know."
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120 sats \ 0 replies \ @Fabs 27 Feb
I'm happily surprised that I understand what's being written... Noice.
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Do I know philosophy well? Not really. But I like the genre mostly because it drags you out into the middle of somewhere we are all confused and I think that's fun.
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576 sats \ 0 replies \ @Car 27 Feb
Can confirm this is how you talk.
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Feelings provide decision making where reason is slow, unavailable, irrelevant, or inadequate.
I think this is important. We train our emotions over time, with our experiences and our beliefs. In a complex situation, all of that training manifests in a feeling (or many feelings) that may be truthier than if we sat down to puzzle out the situation from scratch.
We should trust our feelings and we should be careful about how we train them.
In some small mundane way you are better than all of us. Likely, you are better than all of us in many big important ways too.
This is the meaningful way in which it can be true that most people are better than average. We all attach a different significance to everything and dedicate our efforts accordingly. That allows most of us to be better than most people at the things we think are important.
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We should trust our feelings and we should be careful about how we train them.
Indeed. This is why small things are not small. Seemingly insignificant acts have great consequences -- when you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back.
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I have recently became very interested in the things that not-reason can give you. As you say, feelings / emotions are one way this manifests -- the outputs of a computation that is every bit as all-encompassing as your full powers of reason, and likely even more broadly encompassing than that.
But what is there, even beyond feelings, as we idiomatically think of feelings? There are things that you "know" that you don't know that you know, and that you don't even "feel" in the same way that you feel lust or anger or whatever. There is so much power in this stuff.
This book by Iain McGilchrist is probably the bible of what I'm talking about. He has a newer set of books that seems to be even more exhaustive but I have not read them.
I think this is close to what you're writing about here, but not identical to it. Or maybe it is exactly the same.
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But what is there, even beyond feelings, as we idiomatically think of feelings? There are things that you "know" that you don't know that you know, and that you don't even "feel" in the same way that you feel lust or anger or whatever. There is so much power in this stuff.
I struggled with partitioning feeling-like things as I wrote this. Even the difference between reason and feeling is not very clear to me. I can say the average of what we think of as reason is distinct from the average of what we think of as feelings, but I get the sense they meet somewhere.
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I was so struck by the initial idea, and the power agentizing concepts as a thinking device, in Encyclopedia Kahneman that I didn't get more than a quarter way through it. I should probably finish it. All my good ideas about feelings are probably from him.
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347 sats \ 1 reply \ @cascdr 27 Feb
Seems like a more poetic exploration of the discoveries in Thinking Fast & Slow.
Ty King Keyan the Wise.
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I have too much dad energy.
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A bunch of points in feelings are intelligence and your own ruler people don't appreciate enough! Good way of putting them too.
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David Hume and Jeremy Bentham made similar arguments in the 18th and 19th century
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21 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b OP 27 Feb
I haven't met Bentham but I'm vaguely familiar with Hume.
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Bentham is associated with utilitarianism and pain reduction
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Enjoyed the read. I’m on a quest to increase my students’ emotional vocabulary. “You say you are angry, but just how angry you are?” I think being aware of the intensity and nuances of emotions will help all of us to manage them and not act impulsively.
I did this poster for my students after their cohort camp. You can’t manage what you don’t understand. Labelling your emotions is integral to the process.
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321 sats \ 0 replies \ @Se7enZ 27 Feb
This is fucking great.
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These are good rules for solid journalism.
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This doesn't sound authoritarian (at least not to me), it sounds like well thought-out expression of how you see things, maybe with a little hint of undermining yourself. I do not think there is a need to justify how you feel, you just being you, and me just being me, and others being others. It's how we operate. It's like the old Native American saying "there is a battle of two wolves inside of us, one bad wolf and one good wolf. Which one wins? A little boy asked the Chief - The one You feed - He responded" :-) The old Siegmund Freud would say there are 3 complex parts of us and remind us about "Me, myself and I" doctrine (Id, ego and super ego). Where Id is the primary component of instant gratification and wants and needs, ego is based on reality and your personality in the present and acts to social acceptable terms (whatever fuck that is today, lol) and finally the super ego, your moral compas, the one that stops the id from acting like a child (fuck this meeting, I'm leaving, gotta grab something to eat, I'm starving). The imbalance between these 3 complex instances is what gets people out of whack, so balance is important. OK and this concludes today's session inspired by Dr. k00b :-) ".....It matters not how strait the gate, how charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul...." Invictus - William Ernest Henley
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Is it not the incorporation of feelings and intellect that matter?
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It’s hard to separate the two, easier said than done
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All worthwhile endeavors are easier said than done. It is called proof of work;
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What a post. Like it.
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Ignore #bitcoin and be dumb. It’s as easy as that
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"to listen to others many times consecutively but still cant understand" thats another word for being dumb HAHAHA
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