When it Comes to Brains Are You on the Left or the Right?

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attacking reason, brain function, brain hemispheres, defending rationality, favouring emotion, hemispheric vices, hemispheric virtues, split brain

The current popularity of intuition and irrationality says the left brain is inferior to the right brain. In reality, there are two sides to this question! (Image: public domain)

I am always getting upset about the ceaseless attacks launched against reason and logic in these foolishly emotion-drenched days. The disciples of feeling would reduce human beings to unthinking bags of hormones. The taste for irrationality is growing.

Annoyingly, I came across just such an “attack” in G. L. Rico’s, Writing the Natural Way. Rico lists two sets of very different character traits, inferring that each set resides in one hemisphere of the brain. A careful examination of these sets (the items in bold below) reveals a clear bias in favour of those traits associated with the right hem

isphere

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Slicing the Life of Pi

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attacking reason, favouring emotion, glorifying primitiveness, individual subjectivity, irrational beliefs, rejecting reality, shallow values, simplistic morality

Can we skip thinking, ignore reality, and believe something just because we like the sound of it?

The Introduction

These are irrational times. Subjectivism (noun: the doctrine that knowledge and value are dependent on and limited by your subjective experience – WordWeb) is something I believe in myself, but the idea is being misused to justify some highly questionable moral and spiritual positions. We see this in Yann Martel’s novel, Life of Pi. Martel is a fine writer. His book is a great read, but its message is just plain foolish.

The Moral Sense

Martel ludicrously simplifies the difficult subject of the moral sense by working the popular emotional angle: “… a quickening of the moral sense, which strikes one as more important than an intellectual understanding of things; an alignment of the universe

Why Personal Philosophies of Life Are Becoming Rare

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attacking reason, cause and effect, cosmic religious feeling, expanding consciousness, favouring emotion, pre-packaged ideology, seeking answers, welfare state

Einstein had his cosmic religious feeling, but today’s preference for emotion at the expense of reason represses or impairs the urge to work out a personal philosophy of life. (Photo: S. Brunier/ESO)

What Einstein referred to as the “cosmic religious feeling” is a drive, like sex, hunger, thirst, and so on. Fear exists to make one run when flight is necessary. Anger makes one fight when struggle is necessary. Thirst makes one drink to avoid death by dehydration. Hunger makes one eat to avoid death by starvation. Lust makes one copulate to ensure the survival of the species. The cosmic religious feeling makes one quest for answers – the purpose being to advance the cause of Man’s ever-growing consciousness and to enhance our scientific understanding of the cosmos. The tools of this quest or task are introspection and intellectual striving. One of its interesting by-products is art.