[ExI] A Well-balanced individual

[Kevin Freels]

>
> Bryan asked: What is a perfect human being?
>
> None so far.  Nature endowed us with a flexible brain that tilts either 
> to the side of emotionalism or rationality. 
Most people experience both. Some are extremely rational and emotional 
at the same time. They go out and stand up against the irrational by 
putting together transhumanist organizations and are very proud of their 
ability to reason. Some are neither rational nor emotional. They are 
constantly doing stupid irrational things and they could care less. 
Emotion and reason are not opposites as you suggest. Reason is how one 
comes to a decision. Emotion is how much energy you put behind that. 
Emotion being the power behind the reasoning can seem to be the decision 
maker over reason but I propose that this is more a problem of simply 
having a flawed or malfunctioning "reasoner" in the brain. Every 
"reasoner" has some amount of flaw to it or we would all agree a lot more.

>
> A  brain that tilts more towards emotionalism rather than rationality 
> was found to have a large amygdala{ the center of feelings} among the 
> female gender according to one study done during the decade of the 
> brain. Is this due to their upbringing or other genetic inheritance or 
> both?
>   
Probably both. And it may have to do with diet as well. And the diet of 
the mother while she was pregnant.
Those study results could just as easily explain the level of emotion a 
person is capable of without it having any bearing on their rationality. 
For this study to mean what you say, they had to first determine which 
women were more rational than the others and that in itself is 
subjective since different people can be more or less rational regarding 
different things that they are emotionally tied to. At most the study 
shows that a person who is emotionally attached to something is less 
likely to be totally rational about it.

Emotions are useful or they wouldn't still be part of us. Seeing that 
they are just as much a part of us as reason, I would be willing to say 
that they are equally important. We never would have went to the moon 
without emotions. Hitler would have won WWII (assuming we would have 
progressed that far). Emotions MOTIVATE. Reason solves. They are two 
different things.