[lit-ideas] Re: When you're hot you're hot, when you're not...

  • From: "Mike Geary" <atlas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Tue, 8 Sep 2009 01:25:48 -0500

RP:

the pitcher who shakes off the

catcher?s signal...may have perfectly rational grounds for doing so.<<
The pitcher may know for instance that the batter is a sucker for high and inside pitches and think that he should throw such, but he may also know that the batter might well be anticipating such a pitch and be prepared to meet it, or the pitcher may also be angry at the club owner and consciously and/or subconsciously wants to punish him with a defeat, or the pitcher may want to impress the Press with his new curve ball or, or, or -- so the pitcher has to decide "rationally" among a swarm of conflicting reasons why he should pitch a certain pitch. I just don't put much faith in rationality. Neither did Bernie Madoff and he made off with billions off irrationality for how many years?? but very irrationally he stayed a day too long in Mississippi. I think the pitcher pitches the pitch he "feels comfortable with". Which comes first, the thought or the comfort? 


where the

assumption seems to be that if something is done "instantly," there is
no time for reflection prior to it. And this seems right: I don?t
deliberate before I duck to avoid an object thrown at my head. "No
prior deliberation," however, doesn?t entail "it's feelings all the
way down." I can explain why I ducked: "I thought that paperweight was
going to hit me in the head; I didn't want to be hit in the head; I
thought that ducking would prevent that."<<
I really don't think either rationality or emotions play a part in such scenarios. Your autonomic nervous system did all the deciding. You didn't think that the paperweight was going to hit you in the head until long (in reaction time) after the event. And though you sat around afterwards congratulating yourself on your acumen, all along it was just unconscious, robotic, neural reactions protecting your precious cerebrum and letting it tell itself how smart it was to duck. : )
Also, I don't think the author of "How We Decide" meant that unreflected decisions are "better" than those arising from reflection, but argues that often we are not consciously aware of physical cues, such as, perhaps, the spread of a pitcher's fingers on a ball at the moment of release informing a batter just what and where a hundred mile per hour ball will be in a faction of a second. Piercing concentration and years of attention to detail and (significantly, attention to failure) inform some minds and lead to decisions long before any kind of rationality can ever begin to recognize what's going on. It is the recognition of those cues that triggers the dopamine that tells the mind: "Yes, go for it." Now, I've certainly never had any piercing concentrations unrelated to sex and have seldom paid attention to anything at all, so I can't personally verify his theory. 

Just saying,
Mike Geary
----- Original Message ----- From: "Robert Paul" <rpaul@xxxxxxxx> 
To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Monday, September 07, 2009 6:33 PM
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: When you're hot you're hot, when you're not...


Eric refers to an experiment in which brain-damaged subjects were
asked to decide on a day for their next appointment with the
researcher that ?suited them best.? (The subjects were said to have
?damaged emotional centers.?) The researcher found that the subjects
took an unusually long time to make such a prima facie simple
decision, and concluded that had he or she not intervened, the
?deliberations? might well have gone on forever.

The researcher offers the hypothesis that what the subjects lacked was
any emotional attachment (here reduced to a ?good feeling? or a ?bad
feeling?) to any element of what was to be decided, and therefore got
stuck, unable to weigh one consideration against another. It?s
interesting though that the experimenters did not conclude that the
subjects were indifferent to certain elements of the over-all task:
they did not, apparently, report that they didn?t care whether it was
raining or not, e.g., even though from the information we?re given
that would be an equally justified hypothesis.

The upshot of this is supposed to be that such ?good feelings? and
?bad feelings? (in the 1950s moral philosophers made much of ?pro
attitudes,? and ?con attitudes) ?[serve as shortcuts] for
rationality.? (If you don?t know whether denying the antecedent is a
fallacy, just go with your gut.) The rationality here, of course, is
the rationality that supposedly marks ?rational choice.? Such pro and
con ?feelings? allow athletes to make instant decisions (which are
apparently always the right ones); furthermore, so it is said, they
allow people to choose from menus. I will pass by the obvious
disanalogy here and point out that So Bush (who I loathe for expanding government, entitlements and never knew the meaning of VETO) and Cheney are war criminals? Why haven't they been arrested, tried, convicted and behind bars then? What an idiotic statement! 
That he may be mistaken (the pitch he wanted to throw is hit to right
field for a stand up double), makes it no less rational.

One might say that there?s too much thinking in baseball, but in other
games ?decisions? are made (as was suggested), ?instantly,? where the
assumption seems to be that if something is done ?instantly,? there is
no time for reflection prior to it. And this seems right: I don?t
deliberate before I duck to avoid an object thrown at my head. ?No
prior deliberation,? however, doesn?t entail ?it?s feelings all the
way down.? I can explain why I ducked: ?I thought that paperweight was
going to hit me in the head; I didn?t want to be hit in the head; I
thought that ducking would prevent that.? Countless other trivial
?actions,? such as swatting flies or swerving one?s car to avoid
something in the road, may be done without deliberation beforehand,
but they are not done without thought.

Two things. To say that something is done ?instantly? does not entail
that it is done from some ?feeling,' let alone from an emotion; and it
certainly does not entail that there is no thought behind it.

Concluding historical footnote: Aristotle (who gives a far better
account of the way ?emotions? and ?reason? are both essential to
decision making than ?science? has recently ?discovered?), did not
believe that ?decisions were made purely on rational grounds,? and
Hume (almost) denied that they were made on rational grounds at all.
What is ?refuted? here is a straw man of the researcher?s own devising.

Robert Paul
nr. Reed College


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