Not to say we shouldn't try to live up to the ideal you set forth. We should do our best. But there's not some category of honest people among whom you can avoid human nature.
If we agree on the facts and we agree on their implications, but we still disagree, it's likely because we weight things differently. Emotions are simply a large component for how we weight things.
This has significance, it's not just a restatement of "the problem" using different terminology. It's significant because the brain, like every other part of the body, evolved parsimoniously, and it does not have spare capacity lying around, so anything that "distracts" the emotional parts of the brain will diminish rational capacity. "Hangry" is not just a pun/quip about being hungry, it's empirically measurable, it affects outcomes.
Debating rational topics with your rational friends, whether at work, at school, or after hours over a beer, it's fun (emotion), can be frustrating (emotion) but does it ever not get heated (more emotion)?
The brain is an emotional organ. All the other organs are rational, they do what they do in entirely predictable and logical ways.
think of rationality of the brain like a signed vs unsigned char in most implementations of C, basically a byte: you could think of a byte as 0-255 or as -127 to +126. The brain is an emotional organ. Rationality is the best possible outcome, but it's not the default state; the brain doesn't function from 0 to 255 rationality, it functions from -127 to +128.
I say it this way because you talk about rationality "breaking down" as if it's some sort of default. I don't think of it that way. Rationality is something we hope to build up to and are lucky to achieve, but our default state is animal passion.
I'm not trying to convince you to change what you think, just using some restatements to open your thinking to the way psychiatry views the brain.
I'm sorry, can you please explain how you come to this conclusion based on what I wrote:
"however the part of it that has "rational debates" is not an intrinsic behavior. that part is based on cognitive skill which will perform to a greater or lesser extent based on current brain state."
I'm not really arguing with you, as your first point seemed to be some kind of "but what about...!" that didn't really negate what I was trying to say. However if you think I was saying something completely different, that would make more sense for whatever it is you're attempting to "argue".
I don't think that's a problem with the emotion itself, so much as which specific events trigger that emotion and how you chose to process them and react.
Having fear does not make you lash out at users. We all have fear, often about similar things. It's having fear associating with a person calling you out, and then failing to process that fear in a healthy way that caused you problems.
Very rational people still have lots and lots of emotions. They are not robots. They can just handle their emotions in a mature, mindful way.
In those times that I have not been able to respond politely or rationally, my lack of mindfulness as well as my own emotional reactiveness to certain stimuli (e.g. triggers) was at the core of it.
that is, if a request is not triggering strong emotion in me, I don't need to employ patience and mindfulness in order to have a reasonable and rational response. If a lot of requests are in fact triggering, this is what I would term "emotionalism", and I have to work much harder to have rational responses. Hence emotionalism is linked to irrationality especially for someone with fewer emotional maintenance skills.
emotion is not a "problem" any more than the urge to go to the bathroom is, however, both require proper training to be dealt with.
Even mature people often can't reason their way out of a conflict on their own. When people feel personally threatened, sometimes no amount of simple reasoning will bring them back to rational thinking. Most of the time, the solution is to be a genuine friend--for the long haul.
But as I understood you, point taken. The distillation of principles, information, and interpretation into an opinion does not actually occur as idealized in my breakdown. I wouldn't disagree with that.
Perhaps logic is just our way of explaining our otherwise unexplainable decision making systems.
Put in the time and focus, and one day it will just click.
models which humans will not actually be capable of understanding.
;-)