Quote:
Originally Posted by Catfish
Apparently humans operate not on what information they know but on their feelings. I do not know whether this is intelligence-gone-bad or just a convenient denial of the facts, based on changes most are unwilling to make?
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It's evolution. We're hard wired to generalize and form strong feelings about our experiences ... right or wrong. Sometimes it can be helpful, or even save your life. Many times it does the opposite.
For instance: if a man ventures into a swamp to explore it and gets attacked by an alligator, he'll probably feel very strongly against going into the swamp again for fear of being attacked a second time. And that's probably wise. On the other hand, if a man has a bad experience with someone very different from him, he may decide that everyone who is different is somehow bad. And he may suffer because of this.
We have to make hundreds, if not thousands of choices every day. Sometimes we have to make multiple choices at once ... sometimes we have to make them in a split second. It's not always possible to reason out every single choice. So we have adapted to make snap decisions in an instant, based on our feelings.
Of course, you and I know - intellectually - that the world is seldom if ever black and white. Every situation is different, and the outcome is almost never the same. But it's hard to overcome hundreds of thousands (or really millions) of years of evolution. Sometimes you have to work at it - and sometimes you don't even realize it is happening. But, if you can see past the illusion of labels and categories, you can save yourself a lot of suffering.
In the end, there really is no "you" and "me" ... no "this" and "that".
There is only "us".