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1:08am September 15, 2014
thaxted asked: The idea that there is a strict mutually exclusive dichotomy between thinking and sensing, that thoughts and feelings are opposites, or actually ENEMIES, bothers me so much. It used to actually enrage me. It still confuses me and makes me feel ill. And I am a natural thinker-type who had to take a lot of time to learn to engage with emotions, mine and other people's. 99% of the time when someone uses the word "rational" I think they are using it completely wrong.

thaxted:

withasmoothroundstone:

I know what you mean.  To me, sensing and what Donna Williams calls interpretive thought, are two tendencies that most people have, and that I tend more towards one than the other, doesn’t mean the other is the opposite or that I have none of the other.  If I had no capacity for rational idea-based thought I wouldn’t be able to communicate the way I do.  And feelings to me are almost a kind of thought, not something separate from thoughts.  The language people use for all this causes a lot of the problems because they think feelings and thoughts are opposites, when feelings are fast-thoughts, in my mind.  Like a feeling is a thought that happens so fast that you feel it in your body rather than reason it out in your head.  It’s not the opposite of a thought, it’s a kind of thought.  IDK.  I know what you mean though.

Yes, exactly. It’s like trying to say there’s a difference between the body (physical) and the mind (mental) when it’s clearly all part of the same system. It can’t and shouldn’t be split up into disconnected bits. None of it makes sense if you do. I *really* dislike forms of supposedly “rational” thinking that are based on reductionism and breaking things up into bits. I’ve been exposed to enough of that to see how poorly it works for understanding things. (An undergraduate and master’s degree in psychology to anyone who is wondering. Lots of examples of reductionist science at its worst.)

I agree that feelings are also a form of thoughts. It’s like automatic or reflexive thinking versus conscious processing (the “dual process model” of thinking is what it’s called in psychology*), which is exactly that. One “fast” system that is more responsive and reactive to stimuli (internal and external) like a reflex, and one system that is based on conscious and deliberately self-directed thoughts. But both systems are simultaneous and interdependent. One isn’t better than the other and everyone needs and uses both.

It makes sense to me that feelings are thoughts that you have more in your body. We think of the brain in the head as the only part of the body that thinking goes on in, but the nervous system goes through the whole body from the brain down the spine and through all your nerves in every part of your body and there’s lots of stuff going on down below the neck that doesn’t need to go to your brain first to be acted on, unless you’re using a very narrow definition of “thinking” (in which case you need to justify why that definition makes the most sense, and most ‘hyper-rational’ people I talk can’t and won’t do that except by ironically falling back on emotional justifications).

The easiest example is reflexively taking your hand away from a hot flame—the pain signals don’t have to go to your brain first for your body to act on them, or else they’d be pretty useless reflexes. ‘Emotional’ feelings, like physical pain feelings, are your body’s way of telling you what’s going on in your environment and what it means to you and you don’t have to consciously think about them in the certain part of your brain that does that in order for them to be meaningful and useful. ‘Sensing’ isn’t just rational, it’s completely aligned with contemporary scientific knowledge, supposedly the ‘bastion’ of rational thought. There’s nothing in science that disputes sensing or spirituality or emotional experiences of reality and really good scientists who are committed to learning and not just defending their assumptions are the first to say so.

(*For the record, there are a lot of different versions of “dual process” models and theories in psychology so this is a really over-simplified explanation that doesn’t capture all of the details of all of them. But the defining idea of the ‘dual process’ models is the idea of interdependent ‘fast’ and ‘slow’ systems of thinking.)

That’s all really interesting.  I haven’t studied much of this, I just figured that emotions act like thoughts, because I’ve learned to control my emotions to some extent and it’s the same way I’ve learned to control my thoughts, it’s all connected.