The Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find our Place in the Universe

Haidt, instead, suggests reason is more like a lawyer, who hears what his client (intuition) really wants, and then builds a case to argue why it’s the best approach.35*

Jonathan Haidt has suggested that feelings are so much more central to our lives than reason that they dominate most of what we do and even form the basis of our moral judgment.

Paul, who set the stage for the future of Christendom, described the anguish and self-loathing arising from his internal conflict. ‘I do not understand what I do,’ he wrote, ‘for what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do … It is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me.’

is to consciously consider the data, but then defer making a decision for a while. Go for a long walk and think about something completely different. Sleep on it. As you’re doing this, your unconscious mind, which can hold far more complexity, is mulling over the data. At some point, you’ll begin to ‘get a feeling’ that a particular decision is the

The best thing to do, they explain, when faced with a complex real-life, multidimensional problem,

The conscious mind, they explain, is limited by how much it can hold. It tends to follow strict rules, and when a problem becomes too much to handle, it gets overwhelmed. At that point, it tends to get swept along by one or more cognitive biases, and then uses its left-brain interpreter to rationalize its judgment.

‘theory of unconscious thought’. Their theory indicates that the more complex the problem, the more you should let your unconscious decide.

Ap Dijksterhuis and Loran Nordgren,

The self may be constantly changing, but its needs are usually fairly simple, even primal. Just like an infant, it generally wants to feel secure, comfortable, loved. When it’s hungry, it wants food. When it’s tired, it wants to rest.14 The ‘I’, on the other hand, develops an orientation toward more complex needs, many of which it absorbs from the