Emotions are not tools of cognition. What you feel
tells you nothing about the facts.
We now know that this is not necessarily the case. There are specific mechanisms we have evolved for evaluating the health and fitness of individuals that predate written language. Many of us have an intuitive feel for when someone is lying, and there are many other examples. You can even assign the strength of such feelings to a number, and put that data into a Bayesian belief network and crank out a calculation. (Not that I recommend this particular method, just showing that there is a mathematical basis for integrating feelings with rationality.)
My sister lived out a rational fiction that she wanted to be a pediatrician for almost a decade. It just made so much sense -- there are so any doctors in our family, and working with kids, I think, was sufficiently "female" for her. She always hated my calling bullshit on her.
Today, she works as a consultant to make money so she can choreograph.
You can be informed both by intuition and rationality. Ignoring your feelings is like being a mechanical or electrical engineer who ignores his sense of smell.
Ayn Rand also ignores subconscious cognition. I've had the solutions to many problems I worked on the previous night pop into my head over breakfast. How do we know that "feelings" aren't the result of subconscious processing? I strongly suspect that many of them do. I think you can wisely use such data, so long as you use rational means to corroborate it.
EDIT: Ayn Rand also holds something like this position, which she mentions in this interview, but her estimation of the relative importance of rationality vs. intuition needs some tuning.
Again showing her outdated knowledge of biology:
PLAYBOY: You attack the idea that sex is "impervious to
reason." But isn't sex a nonrational biological instinct?
RAND: No. To begin with, man does not possess any
instincts.
We now know that man possesses instincts. Has someone updated Objectivism with the new intellectual furnishings of evolutionary biology and recent neuroscience? If no one has, then this doesn't speak well of Objectivism intellectually.
EDIT: My objection specifically, no one can be perfectly rational, any more than someone can ride a bicycle and never fall. No one commands all of the relevant facts. Rationality is a powerful tool, unmatched in its potential for bringing us to understanding of the world. However, it has some serious failure modes. Where are the elbow pads and helmet?
My sister lived out a rational fiction that she wanted to be a pediatrician for almost a decade. It just made so much sense -- there are so any doctors in our family, and working with kids, I think, was sufficiently "female" for her. She always hated my calling bullshit on her.
Today, she works as a consultant to make money so she can choreograph.
You can be informed both by intuition and rationality. Ignoring your feelings is like being a mechanical or electrical engineer who ignores his sense of smell.
Ayn Rand also ignores subconscious cognition. I've had the solutions to many problems I worked on the previous night pop into my head over breakfast. How do we know that "feelings" aren't the result of subconscious processing? I strongly suspect that many of them do. I think you can wisely use such data, so long as you use rational means to corroborate it.
EDIT: Ayn Rand also holds something like this position, which she mentions in this interview, but her estimation of the relative importance of rationality vs. intuition needs some tuning.
Again showing her outdated knowledge of biology:
We now know that man possesses instincts. Has someone updated Objectivism with the new intellectual furnishings of evolutionary biology and recent neuroscience? If no one has, then this doesn't speak well of Objectivism intellectually.EDIT: My objection specifically, no one can be perfectly rational, any more than someone can ride a bicycle and never fall. No one commands all of the relevant facts. Rationality is a powerful tool, unmatched in its potential for bringing us to understanding of the world. However, it has some serious failure modes. Where are the elbow pads and helmet?