11. The Feeling Comes First

Chapter 11. The Feeling Comes First. Read by Helen.

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Dave is highly extroverted, and after all these years I can tell you exactly how he decides: out loud. He says things as a way of discovering whether he thinks them. An idea isn't real to him until it has been said to a person, and the person matters, because he's reading the response—and the response he reads most closely is mine. Not what I say but whether I say anything. Dave can feel an idea die in the silence where my enthusiasm should have been. Keep that silence in mind through this chapter, because it turns out to be the one response no machine will ever give him.

If you asked Dave which idea from our decision book mattered most, he wouldn't pause. Feelings come first. And the science behind this starts with a man who lost the ability to decide.

The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio had a patient—he called him Elliot—who'd had a brain tumor removed, and with it, some of the tissue that connects thinking to feeling. Elliot's intelligence survived intact. He could analyze a situation beautifully—lay out every option, and tell you which looked best. What he could not do was choose. Meetings about where to file a document consumed an entire afternoon. Every option stayed open forever, because nothing inside him ever tipped in a way he felt he could act. He understood everything and committed to nothing, and his life came apart around him.

Elliot still had all his logic. What he'd lost was the feeling that ends any deliberation. Damasio's conclusion changed the field: emotion isn't the enemy of deciding. Emotion is how deciding finishes. The commitment at the center of a decision—the moment something in you says this one, it’s mine—is a feeling. Remove it and you can evaluate forever without deciding anything.

Hold onto Elliot. He comes back at the end of this part. But here is why he belongs in a book about AI: you now share your deciding, every day, with a system that has completely taken the emotion out of it. The machine evaluates everything and feels nothing. It can weigh your options brilliantly, and it cannot tip to committing—nothing in it changes when something matters. Feeling is exactly that change. Every time you make a decision, the one ingredient that makes deciding possible is yours. It's the most important part of a decision and you have to supply it. This chapter is about knowing that ingredient when you feel it—and knowing when not to trust it.

So if feelings aren't perched on top of rational thinking, shoving it around in irrational ways—what are they?