Feelings

Sad.
What?
The cat not coming back.
Oh, sure. Sad., yes. But he was a stray. Chances are he found a better place to live.
Don’t you have any feelings?
Feelings? Like anger, sadness, fear, joy, surprise, of course, and what’s the other one?
Disgust.
Yeah. I have ‘em. Sure. My amygdala works just fine.
That’s it. There you go again. You keep trying to reduce big emotional issues to logical explanations. You think we function only by reason? Bet you've never read any of Keats or Shelley.
Odes? To urns and daffodils? I’ve read them. Just as much beauty in a steam engine or a line of clever code.
I’m not just talking about basic emotions. There’s higher ones too.
Like?
Well, like sympathy, love, guilt, embarrassment. Even the cat looks guilty when he nicks a piece of chicken off the bench. We can’t do anything without feelings. They get us started.
Could be even more to this emotion vs reason argument than that. There was a manager somewhere, capable, sociable, and all. Had a brain tumor removed, along with bits of his frontal lobe where it was thought reasoning took place. But after the operation, his emotions had gone. He was still logical but without appropriate emotions to guide him he got stuck making decisions and became overly obsessed with details. This balance between feelings and logic, the human mind is an unmapped continent.