Intelligent emotions

The term 'EQ' or 'emotional intelligence' has been around for a little while now. It has various definitions, but mostly commonly refers to the ability to identify, assess, and control the emotions of oneself, of others, and of groups (thanks Wikipedia). What has sparked my jaunt this afternoon is an idea related to this concept of EQ, but deals more with foundations of the concept - namely that emotions are a facet of 'intelligence' and/or add to our 'intelligence'. And I'll probably end up promoting the subconscious again, but let's just see how this ones evolves....

Several weeks (or months) ago, I was lamenting (on this blog and to someone else) that people who claim to be divorcing their emotions from their opinions or decisions (thereby being 'rational' or 'objective'), are in fact so blinded by their emotions that they are unable to discern the extent to which their thoughts and actions are based purely on emotion with a brittle veneer of patched together rational arguments.

There are very few facts in life that can be self-verified. You don't know that the air you breath is various percentages of oxygen and nitrogen without your own lab to test it. You believe what you have been told. Even a scientist can only verify their own small patch of evidence - even this requires a belief in the instruments used for measurement, or the validity of the measuring scale.

Beliefs can only be rooted in emotion.

What I'm driving at is that every single thought you have is nothing more than an interaction between your emotional response and a stimulus. Paradoxically, being highly reductionist leads to emotions as the root of all thoughts, but I suspect that being infinitely holistic will yield the same result.

So that is my introduction. So if we acknowledge the role of emotions in driving prejudices (bearing in mind that virtually all judgments are 'pre-judgements' - judging before there is irrefutable evidence - and not all prejudices need be negative), then we can start to appreciate the immense power of emotions as a source of intellect that far exceeds any attempt at 'rational' thought (which operates like a cumbersome, slow, inaccurate calculator that gives answers without being given adequate input information and can also change answers).

The next step in my train of thought suggests that emotions and the subconscious are in fact one and the same. What we call emotions are actually the format in which our ultimately sophisticated subconscious is sending us messages. Being attuned to and interpreting these messages is the key to accessing our reservoir of knowledge.

I think I have said everything I have to say on that. The catalyst for this post was the 'go back to where you came from' documentary - one of the participants concedes at the end of the series that even though people say that you shouldn't consider such issues with an emotional involvement, how can you not? I concur, claiming to have no emotional involvement when forming an opinion or making a decision either makes you obtuse or a robot - and what is the value of an opinion from a robot without all the facts?