0.22 Commentary on descartes’ discourse on method and meditations  (Page 4/6)

However, since emotional intelligence is not completely concrete, it can be subject to skeptics, or however as Descartes puts it you should try “to reject the quicksand and mud in order to find the rock or clay”. It is also shown here that since emotional intelligence consists of calculating real things which exist in certain numbers, and can be manipulated in a mathematical like way, that emotional intelligence and non-emotional intelligence - where you manipulate real things in certain numbers – are the same. So you can do math for emotional things and you would be using your emotional intelligence, or you could manipulate non emotional things in your mind (say just calculating different probabilities of something simple) and it wouldn’t be using your emotional intelligence as much. Emotional intelligence and non-emotional intelligence are similar in nature because you are manipulating things in both instances; one just affects you to a greater degree.

There is another question Descartes asked that relates to the previous quote of those, and it is basically “how do I know that anything is even real”? He states the following showing how someone could doubt the existence of everything:

Accordingly I shall now suppose, not that a true God, who as such must be supremely good and the fountain of truth, but that some malignant genius exceedingly powerful and cunning has devoted all his powers in the deceiving of me; I shall suppose that the sky, the earth, colors, shapes, sounds and all external things are illusions and impostures of which this evil genius has availed himself for the abuse of my credulity…” (pg 32 the European philosophers)

Asking that question is like asking how certain and true anything is, only it is suggesting that there could be a large degree of uncertainly present. It also might mean that the world is either false and simply not there at all. If the latter two things can be identified then the degree of uncertainty involved will also be somewhat resolved.

Saying that the world is false is implying that it is generating emotions in you that are not accurate. The ultimate objective of anything real is to generate emotion, so if something is real but “false” then it must be generating emotions that it shouldn’t be generating. It would still have to be real, however, since it is generating emotions (unless you are imagining it, but then in that case what your imagination is creating can be considered real, and that thing is itself based off of something else that was real – or had some real characteristics – at one point). So if everything was false someone wouldn’t have any basis to know what truth is at all. If something generates an emotion, then that emotion is real. Your mind might have an emotional bias, however, and be distorting that emotion. For instance, if you have a prejudice against someone they are going to cause you to feel things about them which are false. So how does anyone know that anything they feel is unbiased? The physical world must be real because we can be certain that something physical is there, however it could be shaped in a way that deceives our emotions. A way to figure out how true something is is to take that thing and compare it in all ways it presents itself in various situations, that way you can take data from where you see it more true in one instance and apply that to see how it might be false in another.