>That is, we do not come to know the world through only our external senses - we see the world differently when we feel pleasant or unpleasant.
So, what they're saying is that pessimists have been right all along!
In seriousness, though, I consider myself a very logical person, I've often wondered I am simply good at rationalizing away emotions that truly drive my thinking. Begs questions on the origin of cognition.
Are we rational beings experiencing emotions, or are we emotional beings hiding behind a facade of rationalism?
From my own experience meditating (various forms of observation of mind, awareness, identification, arising thoughts, emotions, and sensations) and dealings with people, I think we're emotional beings hiding behind a facade of rationalism. Neurodivergents, such as those with the psychopathy "warrior genes" are probably one of the few exceptions.
It's my experience that most people don't recognize when emotion is coloring their otherwise 'rational' thinking.
Psychopaths feel emotions, they are just disconnected with the emotions of external entities (simplified summary). Is there something else I'm missing when you say that?
Psychopaths feel very little emotions, particularly emotions around bonding with other people. They can get angry or irritated, but they won't feel things like fear. People with those psychopathy neural architecture cannot be motivated through pain, fear, or punishments though they can be motivated through rewards if it is framed in a way that makes rational sense.
In the clinical world, there is a strong coupling of psychopathy-the-neurological-architecture, and anti-social personality disorder, which is defined more along the lines of behavior rather than genetics or neuroscience. On Quora, there is a community of people with psychopathy that writes about their experiences, advocating for the decoupling of psychopathy and anti-social personality disorder -- and if you think about it, that kind of advocacy is very rational. It's not because they want people to understand them, but because the misunderstanding people makes dealing with non-psychopaths more inconvenient, and sometimes irritating.
One Quoran whose posts are a good starting point to read up on is Athena Walker. Reading Walker's posts and others like her's, is a great exercise in finding out just how much emotions and narrative you project onto the things you read. There are a lot of things we neurotypical people think is rational, but they are experienced through the lenses of emotions coupled together with social bonding and shared narratives with other people.
Just as an example ... Years ago when I was just starting out in martial arts, I found myself in the company of combat veterans. None of them are psychopaths. One of them, a senior student, was talking about having to clean up a friend who killed himself. He shot himself in the head with a shotgun. When the senior student went to go clean up the house, he had scrape the pieces of brain and fragments of skull into the bag. I winced and made a face, and both my teacher and the senior student said: that isn't a person anymore; it's a corpse. They had read my face and knew what was going into my head. That I was feeling the mutilation of a living person, that the person is suffering and in pain, because _I_ am simulating that suffering an pain as if it were my brain and skull fragments blown out. And the disgust with flesh and blood.
This is pretty typical of how neurotypicals feel and think about death if they had not spent some time seriously examining their beliefs, thoughts, and feelings about death. At some recent point in my life, I realized I would not give up my empathy -- it isn't so much that it makes me human as it is a part of who I am, just as the lack of empathy is part of who Athena Walker is -- but I can have empathy and be rational about it too: that's a corpse, and someone suffered and tried to end that suffering.
So, what they're saying is that pessimists have been right all along!
In seriousness, though, I consider myself a very logical person, I've often wondered I am simply good at rationalizing away emotions that truly drive my thinking. Begs questions on the origin of cognition.
Are we rational beings experiencing emotions, or are we emotional beings hiding behind a facade of rationalism?