That is me indulging vanity. Now the point I wanted to make.
There is clearly a link between emotions and even what we might term mechanical processing/RAM sorts of things. The brain obviously in some ways is a machine, but it is a machine within a web of emotions. Unprocessed emotion can dictate what you see, how well you see it, and how fast you see it. They slow you down and make you stupider and less agile.
When one looks at rigid dogmatists, like the proselytizing atheists–who I tend to think of as paradigmatic dogmatists–what you must see FIRST is corrupted emotion, frozen in time, and directing their capacity for honest thinking away into more congenial–but wrong–climates. The first line in my Grand Inquisitor is “Myth always preceded philosophy” (or something close to that). This is my point. Myth–primal beliefs about the nature of the world, of people, and of one’s self–always happen before one starts the process of “reasoning”.
You can debate facts, but you cannot debate myth–at least not until you get people deep enough to realize that deep rooted assumptions about the world can in fact be questioned, and may in fact be wrong. Misunderstanding this fact is often fatal to productive dialogue.
You cannot reason about people, per se. They are a mutable, reactive surface. You can only use reason consistently about objects. Math we can all agree is a use of reason, of logic. Its practice–if not its inspirations–is devoid of emotion, or the need for emotion.
As I say, though, there is emotional logic: it is simply not linear OUTSIDE of the emotional sphere. There it is linear, but not in a way we normally think of.
In emotional logic, if you want to avoid accessing suppressed and dangerous emotions, you must live in your head. If you live in your head, you have to do something, and you have to justify that something. Logically, this would involve immersion in an activity devoid of the need for emotion. “Science” fits this bill nicely. But you have to go further. You have to protect yourself from the possibility of unwanted emotion. How to do this? By making the world into objects. Objects are susceptible to logic, where people are not. Thus a metaphysics forms from childhood trauma.
These points are subtle, but what I am showing is how intelligent people become stupid–or rather, one of the ways. There are many.