#EATION VS EMOTION DRONE SERIES#

The Cosmos television series – created by the scientist Carl Sagan plays on this idea frequently, as do many television documentaries about science (notably those of David Attenborough, including Life on Earth and The Blue Planet).īut what about more negative affects of emotion? Do they have a place in science? It’s hardly controversial nowadays to say that that a sense of wonder underlies science. How do you know that what you know is true? That's epistemology

Part of what Hume was on about is that it’s not clear how reason – if reason is just a tool for making valid inferences – could ever tell us what we should care about.Īs Hume put it, reason gives us only the means, not the ends of inquiry or action. The 18th-century Scottish philosopher David Hume went even further, proclaiming that reason “is and ought to be the slave of the passions”. Even for the arch “rationalist” Descartes, the suspicion was that reason needs a leg up from passion. Wonder is what keeps us from becoming goldfish, drawn to every passing – ooh! – shiny thing. The French mathematician and philosopher René Descartes attached to wonder the cognitive role of fixing attention. The scientific revolution of the 17th and 18th centuries did little to diminish the centrality of wonder as the principal motivator of scientific inquiry. Both senses of wonder are indispensable to the practice of science. But wonder at the wonders of nature is not diminished by scientific understanding. Wonder in the first sense implies ignorance and is extinguished by discovery. These two roles of wonder are still reflected in ordinary language.Ĭompare the two phrases “I wonder whether…” and “It’s a wonder that…”. Since we wonder about things that are extraordinary, or new to our experience, wonder is crucial for both motivating inquiry and engendering the right degree of respect for nature. I see, my dear Theaetetus, that Theodorus had a true insight into your nature when he said that you were a philosopher for wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder. In his dialogue the Theaetetus, ancient Greek philosopher Plato has his teacher Socrates espouse the intellectual virtues of wonder. This body of evidence tells us that rationality depends on emotion but what reason is, and why it needs emotion to function effectively, remains a work in progress. This is exactly the kind of motivated rationality you want in a scientist, and real anhedonics are very bad at it. Neuroscientist Marcel Kinsbourne describes the integration of reason and emotion in terms of an “activity cycle” – a coordinated effort to motivate and sustain an appropriate course of action and a readiness to change course as circumstances demand. drbeachvacation/flickr, CC BYįar from being hyper-rational, people who do not experience emotional reactions – known as anhedonics – struggle to make rational decisions, to prioritise, and to follow through on tasks. Star Trek’s Mr Spock was devoted to logic in place of emotion.

Eation vs emotion drone