[NOTE: I plan on editing this essay to make it more reader-friendly. I like the ideas in here, but the writing could be fixed. I therefore recommend reading “Can Reason and Bias Coexist?” before this one.]
“… no sharp line divides thinking from feeling, nor does thinking inevitably precede feeling or vice versa (notwithstanding the century of debate within psychology over which comes first).” – Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works
“I’m hooked on a feeling; I’m high on believing.” – Blue Swede
Deceptive Dichotomies
As we puzzle out the world, we are often slow to grasp how the pieces fit together. Our picture of reality is a perpetual work in progress, consistently undergoing revision. This revision frequently requires us to reassess relationships between phenomena, as we learn which parts of nature directly affect each other, and which do not. We humans are easy to fool, regularly overlooking even the most basic connections around us. For instance, we rarely notice how seemingly separate concepts, such as inside and outside, up and down, and left and right, are actually interdependent: the existence of an outside entails an inside, up only exists relative to down, and left delineates right. Our mental landscapes are peppered with such dichotomies, tricking us into thinking that interrelated phenomena are entirely exclusive.
Stories From the Ground. 