BUT knowing this allows us to use logic to side-step a bit towards objectivity.
Maybe, but I don’t think it’s as easy as most of us would like to believe. Being aware of the fact that our brains are connecting dots and filling spaces faster than we can think, and before we are even consciously aware that dots and spaces exist, does not empower us to alter the process. Maybe a little, I agree with you there, but probably not in a life changing way unless we are Buddha or something. Even when a hundred scientists carry out the same experiment and compare results, there’s no escape from the fact that things like “atoms,” “chemicals,” “reactions,” “measurement,” etc. are all concepts pretty much all scientists agree about — they know what those terms “mean” because they all learned them in the process of becoming scientists. That makes them all “concepts” in the way Lisa Feldman Barrett uses the term. All 100 scientists doing the experiment share a paradigm regarding what is real and how to think about what is real, which exists in their minds and they project onto the outside world. It’s not dissimilar from seeing three mounds of dirt and labeling two “hills” and the third “a mountain.”
I hope you will write on Medium about your reading of How Emotions Are Made. I’d love to read your take on her work.
Thanks, Ethah!
