I believe you misread the two points you're quoting.
The point of the first, is expanded upon later in the article:
>Your brain may automatically make sense of someone’s movements in context, allowing you to guess what a person is feeling, but you are always guessing, never detecting. Now, I might know my husband well enough to tell when his scowl means he’s puzzling something out versus when I should head for the hills, but that’s because I’ve had years of experience learning what his facial movements mean in different situations.
The point is not that we, as people, should not partake in trying to find what someone is feeling, just that we can never be absolutely certain. Now, this would be an arbitrary philosophical point if we don't take into context that emotions are not bits. They're not on and off, but always different combinations of different signals:
>When we place electrodes on people’s faces to record their muscle movements, we see that they move in different ways, not one consistent way, when their owners feel the same emotion. Where the body is concerned, hundreds of studies show that instances of the same emotion involve different heart rates, breathing, blood pressure, sweat, and other factors, rather than a single, consistent response. Even in the brain, we see that instances of a single emotion, such as fear, are handled by different brain patterns at different times, both in the same individual and in different people.
There's no way we can be absolutely correct in emotional diagnosis, just the same as we cannot always be in the black when speculating on the stock market. There's too many factors at work and they'll never (rarely) align in the same pattern.
As for the "consciousness" point, I believe you're misconstruing unconscious to mean subconscious. Subconsciousness, in the practical sense, is part of the philosophical (and psychoanalytical) "consciousness" school. While unconsciousness is just the brain's autonomic functions, like encoding memory and recalling your multiplication tables.
> There's no way we can be absolutely correct in emotional diagnosis, just the same as we cannot always be in the black when speculating on the stock market. There's too many factors at work and they'll never (rarely) align in the same pattern.
In the real world, nothing ever aligns in the same pattern. That only happens in mathematical models. That doesn't mean we can't use language to describe those phenomena.
In the real world, we also can never be never be "absolutely certain" of anything, beyond maybe something Cartesian. That doesn't mean we can't make judgments about our surroundings.
> While unconsciousness is just the brain's autonomic functions, like encoding memory and recalling your multiplication tables.
Why are you assuming that the difference between what's "automatic" and "not automatic" in the brain is well-understood, and fundamentally distinct from the concept of consciousness?
The point of the first, is expanded upon later in the article:
>Your brain may automatically make sense of someone’s movements in context, allowing you to guess what a person is feeling, but you are always guessing, never detecting. Now, I might know my husband well enough to tell when his scowl means he’s puzzling something out versus when I should head for the hills, but that’s because I’ve had years of experience learning what his facial movements mean in different situations.
The point is not that we, as people, should not partake in trying to find what someone is feeling, just that we can never be absolutely certain. Now, this would be an arbitrary philosophical point if we don't take into context that emotions are not bits. They're not on and off, but always different combinations of different signals:
>When we place electrodes on people’s faces to record their muscle movements, we see that they move in different ways, not one consistent way, when their owners feel the same emotion. Where the body is concerned, hundreds of studies show that instances of the same emotion involve different heart rates, breathing, blood pressure, sweat, and other factors, rather than a single, consistent response. Even in the brain, we see that instances of a single emotion, such as fear, are handled by different brain patterns at different times, both in the same individual and in different people.
There's no way we can be absolutely correct in emotional diagnosis, just the same as we cannot always be in the black when speculating on the stock market. There's too many factors at work and they'll never (rarely) align in the same pattern.
As for the "consciousness" point, I believe you're misconstruing unconscious to mean subconscious. Subconsciousness, in the practical sense, is part of the philosophical (and psychoanalytical) "consciousness" school. While unconsciousness is just the brain's autonomic functions, like encoding memory and recalling your multiplication tables.