Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="John Morrow" data-source="post: 2161361" data-attributes="member: 27012">I think you can seperate the two, even if they are often mixed or combined to produce a result.But it can mean that and it generally does mean that intellectual choices are normally no longer par of the decision-making process.  Reflexes are reflexes because they don't pass through an intellectual decision-making process.In my experience, this is not true.  In fact, you seem to say the same thing describing skeptics below and it's my experience that more intelligent people are often drawn to the conclusion that they already know it all and can dismiss new data.The anterior insula and prefrontal cortex are two different parts of the brain.  They produce independent and often conflicting moral assessments of the same situation.  If that's not "distinct", I'm not sure what would fit your criteria.  Is this a part of your "whole intellectual process"?  Sure.  Is that what the question meant by "intellectually superior"?  They are not rational in the sense that they are not consciously reasoned decisions.  And as the article points out, even though one can often produce a rationalization for an emotional decision, the decision may have ultimately been emotional and not reasoned.Nothing in the article claims that.  But the powerful emotions are distinct from the reasoned intellectual process.  Given the context of this dicussion (identifying the "intellectually superior" alignment), I think that "intellectual" means "reasoned", not "whatever your brain tosses out".  And if you were the free the reasoned component of your brain from such powerful emotional responses, you might make very different moral decisions as a person.  In fact, I've experienced just that in character, as have other people I have talked to.  In one particularly interesting case, a woman was with her husband in a theater and he asked her if she was thinking in character.  She was.  Why did he ask?  The character she was thinking like was a street urchin who had a very different sense of filth than the player did and she had wrapped herself around a filthy railing like her character would.  The player, upon realizing what she was doing, was suitably disgusted what she had done.  One could argue that we are all providing great examples of this at work...You might find this interesting:<a href="http://www.sciencenews.org/pages/sn_arch/6_29_96/bob1.htm" target="_blank">http://www.sciencenews.org/pages/sn_arch/6_29_96/bob1.htm</a>Yes, but much of what we are is neither cultural nor intellectual.  Look at what autism does to a person's decisions and behavior or the people who are born without an innate sense of fear.  Yes, the intellectual reasoning and cultural conditioning are there, but so are a lot of other things that make us what we are.  And you'll get the same predictable responses from certain games wether you play them with people in the United States, Nigeria, India, or Peru and even if you play them with chimpanzees. Have you ever investigated autism or spent time with someone with any degree of autism?</blockquote>

Verification