(Your) feelings are not (your) bias
Feelings count in the pursuit of truth
Goodness gracious I can be emotional.
I also have a history of dissociation, which has presented me as quite cold, both to myself and others.
I didn’t always think I had a lot of emotions, but it turns out I was just ignoring them.
Well, surprise, I have many of them, of all sorts an varieties.
Unfortunately, I tend to notice the difficult ones more than the pleasant ones, and it can make feelings seem overwhelming. I got tired of emotions, I unintentionally became afraid of them. I wanted to avoid them and I spent a lot of time thinking that emotions must then be unhelpful or not right. I found philosophies and life hacks that supported and encouraged this idea, and it’s only now that I saw that I was just looking for support for my own thoughts.
That search for evidence of your own view is a bias, namely a confirmation bias. We all have a tendency to go look for information that supports our own world view.
Yet since my feelings led to a search for confirmation, did that make my feelings unhelpful, incorrect, or dangerous? I don’t think so.
Feelings might have led to me following a bias, but the feelings themselves were very appropriate for my circumstances. So feelings are not biases. We can act on biases because of feelings, but I do not believe that acknowledging your feels is an automatic bias.
Story Time
I am not a psychologist and this is anecdotal so I am going to write about this from my own point of view.
Feelings for me can be about something concrete, but have very little to do with that very same object. I leave the house empty for two weeks to go on holiday. I get to the train station-did I lock the door. Oh god, I don’t know, did I lock the door?
There was one time in London when I walked all the way back from London Bridge station to my apartment in Burrough to double check that I had locked everything as I was supposed to. I was already late for the plane.
Anxiety is a feeling; I feel anxiety. I feel anxious. Our flat was a dump and I was not worried too much about burglars, and I had locked the door- I knew it too.
My anxiety? Not about the doors, but manifested in the doors.
My anxiety? Flying across the ocean, missing a flight, being home. Being home.
Dissociation is a tendency to avoid feelings, but ironically it was, for me, the feelings that compelled me to do dissociate in the first place. In reflection, I did not want, was a afraid of, the feelings that I had. I am not even sure I believed that I could psychically survive a direct confrontation with them.
So, I looked away from my feelings, and I was so scared of them that I imagined that they must not be good-they dont feel right, they dont seem positive, they don’t seem constructive, they just don’t-Why don’t I just try to be virtuous instead?
So I found things that confirmed my belief that my feelings were inadequate for me to be a good human. Rationalism, Buddhism, stoicism, I was able to take anything and repurpose it to my needs. I found the things that supported my beliefs.
My feelings compelled me to rely on biases to develop a worldview, but they were not the bias in itself.
My feelings were in fact accurate and very helpful. They were real, and my fears of my feelings were warranted. Exaggerated (we survive our feelings, they can’t harm me), but valid and sounding a psychological klaxon that things were not OK!
My feelings are incredibly important to me understanding myself and the world. I would argue that they help me see the world more accurately than I would without them.
So what is the point of all this?
The point of this is, I need to listen to my feelings to act correctly.
If I have come to a logical conclusion, but I do not feel right about it, then I hesitate before acting. There are a variety of reasons.
Do I actually have a bad feeling about this particular belief despite my logic?
- Why? Might my first principles be incorrect?
- How certain am I in my first principles that I am willing to go against my instinct?
- Could my logic be incorrect? How confident am I in my logic.
- If I am using another person’s argument, how confident am I in it?
OR Are my bad feelings about this signaling something else?
- Is there something in my life that I need to address before making a dramatic decision?
- Is this in conflict with another belief that I hold important?
- Am I being destructive?
- Am I being nihilistic?
Introspection is key here for me, and uncertainty leads to a cautionary principle: I would have burned a lot of things down to the ground in my life (metaphorically) if I just listened to my feelings about everything, because most of those feelings weren’t about everything at all.
Since then, I have had to sit with these feelings and feel them. It has been unpleasant, has wrecked me for an entire day and can leave me feeling hungover the next day. Yet somehow, that still feels better.
Those negative feelings even shielded me from all of the happy feelings that were there somewhere in my brain. They were there, and I had to live them, but they were like a bad sea I needed to sail through. Sometimes the weather sucks.
While difficult, these feelings were not bad. They did not make me less of a person. They were unpleasant but necessary. They are not my weakness, or my biases, or my humanity getting in the way of me being good.
My feelings were in fact making me a better person.
To conclude:
Of course I have biases, and I make lots of mistakes that would be better avoided. However, I do not count my feelings or intuitions as biases anymore. They are not to be given a free pass, but they are worth investigating as much as any other sense in our bodies.
So by all means, tackle your biases, think about your ideas and see if there is a weakness to your argument. H
However, be careful with your feelings. Your feelings are not biases, they are your humanity: they are billions of years of intuition.
Dennett: Competency does not require cognition.
Originally published at https://charlield.substack.com on July 7, 2022.
