Logic and emotion are both important. I think most of us get that. I think there's always those two sides. In a situation, you can look at something in a way that we would normally call rationally, and then you can look at something emotional, and you could tap into either one of those, and they both seem to have a kind. Of utility in the real world. So logic obviously trains us to think clearly. It helps us organize our knowledge.
We can use it to make connections between different things in life, different ideas and notions. We can use logic to draw important conclusions that we can then rely on to move forward. Logic can help reduce our bias that. We bring to a given situation. It helps us remain objective in the face of otherwise triggering situations. Logic moves us towards solutions that quote, unquote, add up. So we know logic plays an important role. It can distill a situation down to.
Some of the more salient points, and. We can stitch those together to make arguments and draw conclusions, and just helps us maneuver through life without getting pulled or swayed in different directions from emotions that may or may not help the situation. But emotions also play a major role in maneuvering through the complexities of life. Emotions are important. As I've argued in many other episodes and in my writing, emotions exist for evolutionary reasons. They are not something to dismiss.
And even the biases that we bring to a situation, those exist for evolutionary reasons, they are not to be ignored. Emotions. I think of emotions as tapping into the high dimensionality of the real world, of the situations that we encounter. By high dimensionality, I simply mean the. Many factors that contribute to the things. That we experience or measure, talk about. There are many, many factors, a confluence of variables that come into play.
And emotions allow us to anchor onto something without having to have a label. For what all those factors are. There's a reason that we evolved that way. And listening to emotions as a kind of signal in our environments helps us navigate through the complexities of life. So both logic and emotions are important, but they cannot be mutually exclusive. It cannot be true that one must choose between logic and emotion because they both play a role in reality.
They must work together because nature isn't dualistic like that. Situations are gray. They sit somewhere within a spectrum. It's never the extreme of something. And so if you think of logic and emotion on a spectrum as being. Kind of different, one being to almost. Strip away the emotion and look at just the specifics, or just look at the more salient aspects, and to make decisions absent emotion. And then on the other end, if. You think of feeling something deeply or.
Passionately and having that govern your life, it's not one or the other. Things aren't dualistic. And in fact, we shouldn't think of logic and emotion as being opposite ends of a spectrum. Nature is gray, it's intricate, it's complex, it's nontrivial. And I think in some sense, we all get this. But society does seem to one respect both in some way. I think most of us respect an objective, logical mind, because in situations that can be calming, that can add clarity.
That can punch through situations that would. Otherwise be messy and pull us apart. But we also respect what it means to feel something deeply, whether that's love for another individual, or passion about a particular avenue that we take in life, or fear, or anxiety, or whatever it is. We have some respect for emotion because in many ways, sometimes it seems emotion can govern our lives. And then that's true more for some than others. But society still tends to choose a side.
It doesn't seem to know how to. Make logic and emotion work together. And I think the reason for this is because of the way this is usually attempted. So the usual approach to trying to make logic and emotion complementary is in terms of what you might call well rounded decision making and communication. So let's think about a few ways that society might try to make logic and emotion work together in decision making.
We can, let's say, use logical reasoning as normal to analyze facts and evaluate options. We can try to assess the consequences. Of a given set of decisions and then emotion. The way that might be folded in is to consider how each option that we're assessing through logic actually aligns with our values. Right? How the options that get teased out through a logical consideration or analysis of a situation overlap with our emotional well being.
And then in that way, you could think of emotions as providing insight into the personal preferences and priorities of our life. You can think of it in terms of effective communication, where logic can be used to present facts and evidence and well reasoned arguments. But you could also add emotional peel to make your message more relatable. Right. When people get engaged with the stories. That you tell, because they are overlapping. With some emotional aspect of their own.
Psyche, then they will get drawn to that story. And if you have a good logical thing to say, then it's good to draw people in. And so, in effective communication, you could imagine blending logic and emotion. Problem solving. Obviously, logic can be used to break down difficult problems into more, smaller, manageable parts. We can try to use logical frameworks to kind of identify causes. And again, lead to solutions through the.
Structure of logic and emotion could then be brought to bear by considering the. Emotional aspects of the problem. For example, how is it affecting the people involved? There is a certain empathy and understanding. That could maybe bring a more holistic. And even sustainable solution. To bear out on the logic that. We'Re using negotiation and persuasion, you can use logic to again, present kind of a logical case for a given position. Can think of this in the legal system, for example.
But you could also use emotion to understand the emotional drivers of the people involved. You could empathize with people's perspectives. You could try to appeal to a. Set of shared values. Creativity and innovation. Logic can help structure our thinking and. Analyze the various contributions to the process of problem solving and the process of innovation. But emotion is also there because in order to embrace creativity, often that does involve tapping into emotions or intuition.
And even the willingness to take risks. Might come from the emotional side of. What would otherwise be kind of a logical look at why I am doing something on the creative side of things. Our relationships with people. Clear communication and understanding is important, and logic can help in that regard. But part of building strong relationships means you do have to connect emotionally and. Express a level of empathy.
We're told that we have to understand the feelings of others, and there's lots of other examples. But the point is decision making, effective communication, problem solving, creativity, innovation, the relationships of other people. We can see that logic brings a. Level of clarity, and that emotion can. Help make the connection or tell the story to people. It can help find the overlap between. The case that you're making and the. Human beings with their emotions who are receiving that message.
But in this episode, I want to. Challenge this kind of usual way that. I've just gone through in the last couple of minutes of making logic and emotion work together. Now I'll be clear. I don't think it's all wrong. I think there are reasons to have. A level of empathy. There are definitely reasons to consider the emotions of others as well as ourselves, that being cognizant of the emotional side of things can definitely help in communication.
And if you have a good message, to say that leveraging the emotional side. Of things can help with that communication. Emotions are not there to be ignored, as I'll talk about more in a bit. But the examples that I gave have a problem with them being aware or. Empathetic to someone's feelings, such as showing an ability to understand and share the. Feelings of another and connect emotionally, have. A level of emotional engagement, empathize with their perspectives.
That can be problematic because people feel. Things for unknown reasons. We can feel anger, fear, sadness, joy, disgust, surprise, trust, anticipation, or whatever kind. Of list of emotions the psychologist or you yourself think exist. Now, these are all important to acknowledge, but again, and they do exist for evolutionary reasons, but there is something problematic. With trying to really dig deep into. Them and peel back the layers and. To use that in trying to relate to people.
So. I don't believe in the kind of psychology approach of peeling back the layers of emotion and coming up with some explanation. And I don't believe in that any more than I believe in doing this. For any reasonably complex phenomena, what we. Sometimes call the causal opacity of something, the fact that under complex systems and. Situations, this notion that we can peel. Back the layers and understand the reason for why something exists in that kind. Of deterministic sense, that's a fairy tale.
Complexity precludes the possibility of knowing how the emergent behavior arises. Obviously, when we're talking about emotions, this is aligned to the most complex phenomenon. That we know of meaning. The human brain, the human mind, has the most pieces and interactions of any. Phenomena that we've studied to date. So emotions are at the very top of the complexity scale.
And to suggest that we can not only one, recognize that the emotions are there and that they're probably important because they're there for evolutionary reasons. But two, try to peel back the. Layers of the emotion in that kind of psychology, psychological fashion, and understand the reasons why they're there and what they mean. I think that's problematic. I think it goes against the epistemic uncertainty, the fundamental causal opacity that we. Know exists under complexity.
Now, to be clear, emotions absolutely should. Be paid attention to. They are there for evolutionary reasons. They are critical signals. They should be paid attention to, but. Not attended to in the sense of. They have to be dealt with, they have to be inspected, they have to be coaxed, they have to be explained. Let me give an example. To be clear, if someone tells me that my argument offends them, well, I. Should be under no obligation to redress my logic.
I should not have to go back into the structure of my logic and start to go against it, start to compromise it to the point that it no longer has structure or that things. No longer quote unquote, add up. And I think this is what society does much today. When we look at those examples, decision making, effective communication, problem solving, negotiation, persuasion, we don't really know why an individual. Has the emotions they have.
For example, people can say they are offended, when in fact, that might not really be the issue. People will often project their insecurities onto. A kind of proxy statement. They might say they're offended, but maybe. They were really just triggered because it revealed some weakness or sensitive issue on their part. It's not really that they were offended. By what you said. Maybe it's their own lack of ability to state the argument or to know why they feel the way they feel.
And so they try to shut the whole conversation down by merely saying they're offended. And then if I continue to press. Forward with my logic, they assume that. Their emotions are not being considered, and so that must be wrong. But if I go against my logic, then we're no longer having a rational conversation. I think this example of someone saying they're offended, but maybe that's not the real issue. That's true for the range of emotions that we might have.
Whatever is in that list of different emotions, whether we're talking about sadness or some level of apprehension or fear, we often don't know why we're feeling it. We know it's there for a reason. We know it's important. But when we go to communicate it to others or to ourselves, and we try to peel back the layers and. Understand it, it's almost like pretending that we can understand a dream as though. We know what the images meant or. What the feelings meant.
They exist for reasons, but trying to explain them deterministically causes problems. So when I go through those examples that I did previously, they don't sound bad, and they're not all bad. I think that there is a time. And place to maybe use a bit. Of emotion to communicate a message better to someone. But demigogues could do this as well. They can appeal to the masses by saying things that are emotionally triggering. The media can do this as well.
And so whenever something can be used for bad, just as well as it could be for good, there seems to be a need for a solution that rises above that. And so the big challenge here is. Finding out how to be logical while respecting our emotions. Let's do a quick recap. I said that logic and motion are both important, right? Logic helps us think clearly, organize our knowledge, draw conclusions, reduce bias, remain objective. Emotions exist for evolutionary reasons.
They play a major role in maneuvering through the complexities of life. They tap into the high dimensionality of situations, and they cannot be mutually exclusive. Nature isn't dualistic like that. It's gray, intricate. It's nontrivial. Whatever the solution is to logic and emotion, working together. It must sit within the middle somewhere. But I think society gets this wrong. It tends to choose either logic or. Emotion because society doesn't really know how to make these work together.
And we can try to latch on. To emotions to help consider how options align to values. We can try to connect to the audience's emotions. We can try to break apart problems and then use emotional emotions to kind of see how it affects the people. Involved, try to understand emotional drivers, or. Connect with people emotionally to express empathy. And all this is not in and of itself, that bad. But the reason why those things don't. Work is because if you just take.
It at that level, you try to be empathetic with someone. You might be being empathetic to an emotion that doesn't have an obvious reason. To it, and I don't think it ever does have an obvious reason to it, or it might be given for the wrong reason. The example of somebody saying they're offended, but they're not really offended. There's something under, you know, beneath that, underlying it. There's no way to really truly empathize. Or tap into the reasons of a person's emotion.
It doesn't mean you don't acknowledge them. But the way society seems to approach this is that you almost have to. Give up your logic in order to. Account for someone's emotions. I think that's really the way to. Sum this up, right? By trying to make logic and emotion. Complementary, society ends up either walking away from logic or not accounting for the emotion at all.
If I redress my logic in the hopes of appeasing someone who says they're offended, then neither of us are being rational, so that can't be the solution. If I maintain my logic, the other person will feel their feelings are not being acknowledged, and so this cannot be the solution. But again, logic and emotion exist for a reason, and they must have a. Way to work together.
Let's think of an example to lead us to how what I think is going to be a solution is a solution to getting emotion and logic to work together. You say I'm working away, and maybe something comes up on social media and it kind of triggers me, and it makes me think, yeah, I'm really passionate. About this, and maybe it's about whatever it is, maybe building software, but I. Don'T have time to go build a new tool.
Let's say I see something on social media and I want to go build a tool because I think I could put that together and then people would use it. And I love building and I love the idea of people using my tools, and so then I start jumping into it. But this doesn't have any obvious use to my everyday work. It's not, let's say, the product that my company is working on. It's not some certain consulting that I might be doing or whatever my job. Is that's not directly related.
If I look for direct evidence of the utility or the return on investment, then I'm going to have to turn away from my passion because the direct evidence isn't there. It's not obvious that anyone's going to use this tool. It's not obvious how this really relates to my business or to my life. And if I jump into it in a full fledged fashion, that's going to come at a great cost, because now time is being taken away from my. Other tasks that I work on. If I look for direct evidence of.
Utility or Roi, I would have to. Turn away from that passion. But then this isn't paying attention to critical signals given to me by my emotions. I feel passionate about this for a reason. Again, emotions exist for evolutionary reasons, but if I choose to act on it, investing as much time as my emotions. Want me to, this will also cause problems. The solution would be to recognize the importance of something I feel deeply about. But to cast that recognition onto a logical structure.
I can choose to work on my. New project piecemeal, and there is a. Logical reason to do this. So let's take something that I am. Passionate about, but map it to a logical structure. A logical structure has one or more premises that lead to a conclusion. Recall my episode on logic. Premise number one, piecemeal work is more tractable. Premise number two, there are no shortcuts. For things that matter. If we accept those premises, then I can draw the conclusion that I should.
Work on this new project over the long run. In this case, I felt something deeply. But I didn't jump into it. I didn't act on it. I observed it from a distance. I didn't push it away because I could not see any direct evidence for its utility. But I did not jump in fully. So that it would effectively tear me. In many different directions and reduce my ability to do my everyday work.
I observed what was emotional and I. Recast that onto a logical structure of one or more premises connected to a conclusion. And I use that to do what. Logic does so well, which is to see a better way forward, to rationally. Understand how I could take something that is emotionally important. You can do this for all kinds of things. You can take something like climate change. Now, climate change might be od, to.
Call that kind of a feeling or an intuition, but I think a lot of us do have an intuitive sense similar or the same as an emotion. That, let's say, dumping a lot of. Industrial byproduct, let's say, into rivers or releasing a lot of gases into the atmosphere is maybe not great for the climate. But if you try to chase the evidence, you're going to get into problems. I talk about the problems with flipping and flopping. Studies that are done, you can always pick a side.
I've used examples of this in nutrition. If you try to find all the studies that point to climate change being there, you will find some studies, you will find evidence, but you will also find studies and evidence that could suggest that what we call climate change has been going on for eons, and that the human recorded history isn't that long. And so you can go back and forth. But both dismissing climate change and protesting. Fully are in some sense equally pointless.
Because one is either looking for direct evidence to try to make their logical argument, but it keeps flipping and flopping, and so you can't really do it that well. And the other fully embraces emotions because. The evidence isn't fully there. So they might go protest, but they. Can'T really make the argument and back and forth. But an argument can be made based on complexity and dynamics alone. We know that ruin is unpredictable, rapid and destructive.
This is sometimes called the Seneca effect or cascading failure. We know that small perturbations are rapidly transmitted to the entire structure of something that is complex. Because you have many nodes, you have. Many connections, they're very interdependent. The climate depends on critical nodes that make up a vast, complex network. Now, we've seen cascade failures in things like the Great Depression, the 73 oil crisis, the 2008 financial crisis, and of. Course the Covid-19 pandemic.
So again, we might try to go look for the direct evidence, just like the direct evidence of my wanting to. Build things passionately for a certain problem. But we won't find the utility or the ROI directly. I'm not saying there is no evidence for climate change, but the evidence approach, the looking for studies approach, just like healthcare is going to flip and flop in both directions, because it's a nontrivial. Complex problem, you can't peel back the layers. It has causal opacity.
It's too hard to make that add up. It's not a deterministic system, it's nonlinear, it's nondeterministic. It's complex. So chasing the studies, chasing the evidence, is problematic. And yet we seem to have kind of this emotional, intuitive sense that we probably could be pushing the environment too far by jumping into technical innovation and industry. We have a sense that it's probably true that we can't just do whatever we want. So how do we deal with that?
How do we take the emotion, the intuition, associated with something like climate change, and cast it onto rationality without chasing a bunch of studies or evidence? Well, we can map this to a logical structure. Premises two conclusions. Premise one, the climate is a complex system. Premise two, complex systems can collapse when intervened on. Connect that to a conclusion. We should take measures to limit human intervention into otherwise natural systems.
We didn't have to go look for the direct evidence, we didn't have to go look for a bunch of studies, but we didn't have to walk away from this intuition that we couldn't catch a label to, which was something seems to be maybe wrong with dumping a bunch of chemicals or gases into the environment. We can map it to a logical. Structure and we can still use it to make decisions. And the point is not to take aside, is climate change, is man made climate change real, is it not?
The point is not to take aside, but to realize that these are the conversations to have. I could also argue premise one, the climate is a complex system. Premise two, complex systems are highly adaptive. Conclusion we should allow a reasonable amount of technological process to occur unimpeded. And then, of course, you could drill down to further logical arguments from there. The point is, this is the conversation to have. Again, I said at the beginning, logic.
And emotion are both important, but society tends to choose one side because it. Doesn'T know how to make them work together correctly. Society ends up either walking away from emotions altogether in the hopes of trying to do something purely logically. And then you're not acknowledging these evolutionary emotional signals that are there for a reason, or they fully embrace emotion and they're not able to structure an argument for what they feel, and both end up being incorrect.
And the big challenge was to be logical while respecting your emotions. And when we look at the example. Of doing work that you're passionate about. You can cast that onto logical structure so that it can be a practical thing you do every day. We looked at the example of climate change.
Maybe all you have is an intuition that releasing chemicals is bad, but you can cast that onto a logical structure, and you can have the more reasoned, intelligent and rational argument, not one that chases studies and direct evidence, but one that takes a look at the properties of how dynamic systems operate and uses that to connect one of our premises. To the conclusion about how complex systems. Happen and what an intervention may lead to.
To be logical while respecting our emotions demands that we recast our emotions onto. Logical structure, logic and emotion are both important. Society tends to choose a side because. It doesn't know how to blend them. That's because the way we try to. Make them work together is flawed. If I redress my logic in the hopes of appeasing someone who says they are offended or any other emotional aspect. I'm supposed to consider, neither of us are being rational.
If I maintain my logic, the other person will feel their feelings are not being acknowledged. Neither of these can be a solution. The challenge is to be logical. While respecting our emotions, direct evidence is. Not a good way to do logic. The solution is to recast our emotional. Cues onto a logical structure. Recognizing the importance of emotions is critical, but we should not be acting on them immediately.
We need to look upon our emotions with a reasoned mind and think about how can we cast that onto a logical structure. This will direct our emotions towards constructive ends, rather than us just being owned by them. And the way to do that is to look upon your emotions, cast them on to a structure of logic, because only then can we all feel in a rational way. Okay, that's it for this episode. Thanks so much for listening. Until the next one, you take care. Of you. I'm it.