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 Originally Posted by NightGizmo
Regarding emotions: I forget if this is something explicitly covered in one of Ayn Rand's non-fiction books or something I cobbled together on my own, but...
Originally Posted by NightGizmo
Emotions are essentially hardwired reflexes. Certain input (external stimuli, maybe just internal thoughts) triggers those reflexes, which causes emotions and then causes a cascade of mental and physiological effects (fight/flight response, panic attack, depression, etc.).
Those hardwired paths can be changed, with effort. You can get over your irrational fears. You can learn psychological techniques to control your panic attacks. You can deal with your own mental issues and improve your anger issues. Ultimately, you can use reason to make your emotions more useful to you.
But emotions are not a substitute for reason or reality. Your emotional response to a situation could be totally irrational and inappropriate.
So there is a problem if you're acting solely on emotions without any basis on reality or reason. If your actions only impact yourself, then that's a bad thing for you but ultimately within your rights. It becomes a problem when people project their emotions onto the decisions of other people, which has become commonplace: "You offended me, therefore you need to be punished." That implies that emotions are valid realities, regardless of how reasonable those emotions/realities actually are.
There's also a problem if you pretend that you're acting on reason fully divorced from emotions. As difficultly as those pathways could be changed, those neurons won't migrate, and they won't degenerate. And for all the new connects that you're making to find waylays and detours around those emotional centers, their dendrites and axons will only grow so long. And that's ignoring all the key-pass chemicals that rush into the brain from time to time, all those hare-trigger hormones that a fired off to keep you safe from tigers and get you ready to validate your purpose.
Don't pretend that you can separate yourself from the world, your body, and what it needs to do to survive.
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