LESSWRONG
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Nate Wilcox
2010
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Generalized Hangriness: A Standard Rationalist Stance Toward Emotions
Nate Wilcox1mo30

Emotions Make Claims, And Their Claims Can Be True Or False

I appreciate the general thrust of this piece, but I find this aspect concerning because it fails to acknowledge that emotions (or their analogues) are likely to have evolved long before linguistics or the capability to assert and evaluate claims.

From introspection it seems possible that emotions can be triggered by non-linguistic situations (giant spider jumps on my child -> anger), and also it is possible for emotions to not cause logical claims to form... (e.g. "why am I feeling this way?")

That pre-linguistic/non-logical layer is super important, IMO. The rest of this piece is very useful for the higher linguistic + logical layer.

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