I was thinking today on my way to school how feelings are exhaustive but not exclusive, and reason is exclusive but not exhaustive.
Rason is by nature not exhaustive as it asks – What else? What’s beyond this? It’s always searching even if it has called something “the universe”. That universe that the reason constructs always has some kind of boundary.
Feelings are by nature exhaustive, as they dont’ ask “What else?” and they claim the whole space that’s provided to them. In that sense they don’t have a limit. Even if they are very selectively targeted toward one single thing.
On the other hand you have mixed feelings. You can feel many ways about the same thing. While you can’t reason in a mixed way.
So I was trying to figure out which approach is better for making a decision. Would you rather make a decision based on exhaustive type of information, or on an exclusive but non-exhaustive by its very nature.
Does the non-exhaustiveness of a decision based on reason lead to a guaranteed doubt? Even if it’s an ever so tiny doubt.
I thought yes, I thought (or I felt?) that if you make a decision based on reason and discard the feelings, you will by definition have doubt. But if you make a decision based on feelings, and discard reason, you might not necessarily have doubt.
So in that sense I thought it makes more sense to make decisions based on emotion, as it is more complete.
However, does the existence of doubt have anything to do with the whether one decision is preferable or another? Do we make decisions so that we don’t have doubt? Or do we make them for some other benefit? I guess for many situations where 99% certainty is just fine, all of this doesn’t matter. But for those situations where that 1% or that 0.01% is material… what is the prefered decision making strategy?
What’s a situation like this? Well, the one I’m grappling with is whether you pull the plug on a dream. When do you decide to stop dreaming that particular dream forever? Do you say f*** it, or do you need some kind of conclusive reason for it? Somehow f*** it makes for a better decision making moment. And somehow it’s usually after you arrived at the non-exhaustive limit of reason that an emotion can come for help and solve the problem.
