Mike has offered some interesting posts (here and here) on confirmational and disconfirmational bias. I thought I'd draw into the discussion the work of neuroscientist Antonio Damasio in his book Descartes' Error. Neuroscientist Joseph Ledoux offers similar research in his The Emotional Brain and in another very interesting book by Stanley Greenspan, M.D., shows that children brought up in an emotionally diverse environment develop higher intelligence. The conclusions of these and other researchers are that emotions are not only active in decision making but essential. For skeptics like Shermer these findings may be disconcerting because I suspect that he and other skeptics would reject the idea that their skeptical decisions flow from their emotional biases. The research suggests that they do and even a Darwinist should recognize how compelling it is.

Damasio defines an emotion as a body state, ensuing from biological regulation. He also claims that these body states are a natural part of our systems of rationality.

Nature appears to have built the apparatus of rationality not just on top of the apparatus of biological regulation, but also from it and with it.

As anyone can attest body states (rising heart rate, tense muscles, hormonal effects, etc.) can effect both one's thinking and actions. Surely the anger, sarcasm, and emotional intensity that arise within the ID debate reveals that emotions are intimately involved.

What Damasio's clinical research showed is that emotions are essential to decision making. While those body states come about through a complex network of interactions within the brain they rely on basic biological regulatory systems which he calls preorganized mechanisms that are about saving the body.

Preorganized mechanisms are important not just for basic biological regulation. They also help the organism classify things or events as "good" or "bad" because of their possible impact on survival. In other words, the organism has a basic set of preferences — or criteria, biases, or values. Under their influence and the agency of experience, the repertoire of things categorized as good or bad grows rapidly, and the ability to detect new good and bad things grows exponentially.

However, according to the research they function not just to keep the heart beating and breathing regulated. They are also intimately tied to a vast array of mental activity.

Somatic markers [emotional predispositions] do not deliberate for us. They assist the deliberation by highlighting some options (either dangerous or favorable), and eliminating rapidly from subsequent consideration. You may think of it as a system for automated qualification of predictions, which acts, whether you want it to or not, to evaluate the extremely diverse scenarios of the anticipated future before you. Think of it as a biasing device.

So if emotion is essential to assisting deliberations that sustain and promote the organism, is it always beneficial? Apparently not.

Although, I believe a body-based mechanism is needed to assist "cool" reason, it is also true that some of those body based signals can impair the quality of reasoning. Reflecting on the investigations of Kahneman and Tversky, I see some failures of rationality as not just due to a primary calculation weakness, but also due to the influence of biological drives such as obedience, conformity, the desire to preserve self-esteem, which often manifest as emotions and feelings.

He offers in his book some examples where those who's emotional "apparatus" has been impaired cannot make reasonable decisions. His first example is that of Phineas Gage in 1848. This is a well know case where a mining worker had a dynamite tapping rod pierce his eye and damage an area of the brain that is associated with emotion. After the accident the previously traditional morality of Gage changed dramatically where he would make decisions considered strange and irrational. His life degraded by his bizarre decisions after the accident. He was emotionally flat and couldn't conform to what was considered normal behavior. In a more recent example Damasio cites a patient of his who sustained damage in the area of the brain similar to Gage. Before this incident this individual was considered by all his associates as a person of great rationality and judgement. After the incident he was able to be perfectly logical in his deliberations as before, but he was totally unable to make appropriate decisions. He was also emotionally deficient and his life also degraded. These and other examples of neuropathology in the emotive systems confirmed that the emotional framework in the brain is essential to its decision making mechanisms. When they are disabled, good decision making is impossible.

What this research suggests is that bias and decision making are powerfully dependent on the emotional matrix present. Is this so hard to accept? Surely evolution has "designed" our systems to be somatically biased towards certain thinking and actions that favor organismic preferences. It should be very difficult to overrule the body states (emotions) that have served us well in favor of our biotic well being.

Aristotle, the Stoics, and others felt that the passions could and should be overcome in favor of rationality. One can appreciate their commitment to rationality and the attempt to rein in emotions that would taint it. From the research, however it appears to be impossible to be a rational being without the "passionate" systems of our bodies. What perhaps is more cogent in evaluating a person's arguments is what emotional commitments the thinker is making. In this respect one thinks of individuals who, unlike ideologues, apparently have a bias towards truth seeking and following the evidence or logic wherever it leads. I immediately think of examples like Ludwig Wittgenstein. His Tractacus was lauded by many philosophers of foundationalism as a landmark contribution. To their great consternation, Wittgenstein then rejected his early work and moved away from analytics to his "forms of life" and "family resemblance" concepts. Stephen Stich also comes to mind as one who was a staunch advocate of eliminative materialism and later reversed his opinions towards a social constructivism. Anthony Flew in rejecting his lifelong alignment with atheism based on the evidence is another example. Apparently there are individuals who have a higher emotive bias than one of ideology or prior commitments. Perhaps in evaluating a person's opinion this is what to look for.

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