There’s a really great David Chapman clip ([here](https://x.com/Meaningness/status/1886512455289069669/video/1)) about how the West (in particular, Western philosophy, with Decartes as the prime example) begins from a place of distrust of our sense data, and how paranoid and weird this is
E.g., “I think, therefore I am”, where Decartes decided that we can’t trust our sense data because a demon might be making us hallucinate that we are e.g. in this room, and the only thing we can trust is our thoughts
However, Chapman points out that this is really weird, because our sense data is pretty much always very trustworthy, and it’s our thoughts that mislead us like, all the frickin time. We don’t have control over which thoughts appear (try meditating for 10 minutes and report back), so Decartes could have easily instead said that an evil demon gives us intrusive and pointless thoughts, and it’s our sense data which is rock-solid and congruent
So anyway, by default we’re used to distrusting the signal in our body that says “I don’t want to do this!”, and instead power through and force ourself to do a thing
There’s a background belief that emotions are just random things to be ignored, basically. That they don’t contain much signal.
Vs e.g. in people who no longer have the emotional part of their brain, they can no longer make rational decisions, and essentially blow up their lives (e.g. see the book “Decartes’ Error”)
