Of Reason
...What can be more sillily arrogant and misbecoming, than for a man to think that he has a mind and understanding in him, but yet in all the universe beside there is no such thing? Or that those things, which with the utmost stretch of his reason he can scarce comprehend, should be moved and managed without any reason at all?
http://www.ilt.columbia.edu/publications/Projects/digitexts/locke/understanding/chapter0410.html
There is a thing about materialism proper (as opposed to, say, panpsychism) that I've never been able to understand: how does it explain rationality.
I mean this in the most mundane sense. If our reasoning ability has been selected by Darwinian evolution, it means that it gives a rational agent survival advantage. However, if the world is devoid of rationality, meaning, and reason (that exist only in the minds of rational agents), how can our rationality be of any use to us in this irrational world?
I understand Bergson and his followers that say that rationality plays no role in our survival; it is a reflective ability. Epiphenomenologists arrive at the same conclusion by another road. Reason is not a product of evolution; it is a byproduct. I've recently learned about another theory along these lines (called "argumentative theory")
http://www.sjsu.edu/people/anand.vaidya/courses/c5/s2/Why%20Do%20Humans%20Reason%20Sperber.pdf
that reason exists solely to win arguments in a dispute. It is just less risky to get something that you want by furnishing arguments rather than using clubs, but there is no real difference between arguments and clubs: both devices serve the same goal. All such views boil down to the belief in un-reason: reason has either no real utility or purely social utility (manipulating the others). This belief exists in many forms; the most amusing one, in my opinion, is the belief that your own mind is an illusion. Simpletons like Descartes took their existence for granted; he thought that if one doubts that, there is no reason to believe that anything else exists. Now it is the opposite: blind belief that everything else exists, but the existence of one's own deliberating mind is highly suspect... A great leap forward, I'd say.
Such forms of materialism that annihilate reason I do understand. It is a thoroughly repugnant yet wholesome world view. I do not have any issue with such a view. I do not see the need to argue with someone who does not consider himself a rational being. We do not have the common ground for such arguments. I am not interested in winning or losing such an argument to get advantage of the opponent. I'd be happy to lose it. Only my own conviction that the proponents of such views are mistaken stops me from excluding them from humanity and treating them accordingly.
However, only the thinnest sliver of people calling themselves materialists are willing to go all the way to this glorious end. My difficulty is understanding the majority. They say that rationality is not an illusion, a byproduct - or whatever; it is REALLY useful (and not only to win arguments, which has nothing to do with truth and only with appearances). For once, we are in full agreement. So, why is rationality useful?
At this point the contortions begin. One needs to furnish a plausible rationale that rationality is useful in a world that is not rational. The smartest of the lot ("the mysterians") declare that a mystery and leave it at that. That's clever, but it is not too satisfying. It also destroys any pretense of materialism to be a rational world view (not that it is important: the first materialists had no such pretentions). But the smart ones are also very few. The majority begins to improvise and tie themselves in knots.
Surprisingly, the most frequent answer I've heard has been the admission that nature is kinda rational because it has laws of nature. I did not believe my ears... Didn't you say the other moment that the laws of nature were generalizations that were recognized or conceived by our own minds? There are no "laws of nature" in reality. There is nature. There are explanations of how it works. These explanations have laws; these are the laws of our reasoning about nature. Nature does not know anything about these laws. It obeys no laws. It just exists. Unless these laws have independent reality (not being just cognitive devices of our minds) there is no way the rationality can help one to survive in nature. "Kinda rational" does not work at all, sorry. Either nature is rational, but then one needs to explain how it can be rational. Or it is irrational, and then we have rationalizations of the irrational; then one needs to explain why such rationalizations of the irrational help us to survive in our irrational world.
People usually take the easy way out of it. Yes, there are no laws, it is all irrational, but there are certain regularities in nature, and the laws are ad hoc rationalizations of such regularities. Recognizing such regularities helps us to survive, because one can predict what is likely to happen.
So, why are there regularities - and why are these regularities of such kind that something can be predicted using our rather limited capacities? The first question is never answered; it's a mystery - and a very useful mystery, too. If the world isn't a place in which a few rules generate complex patterns then the ability to dissect these patterns to discover these simple rules would be quite useless. Had there been 1,000,000 physical laws, it is doubtful that biological evolution would ever produce a being capable of taking advantage of rationality. So this world appears to be destined to make rationality advantageous. Why would it be of this charachter?
That is when the contortions end and the answer emerges: by chance. There should be countless irrational worlds that cannot produce a rational being, because there is no advantage of rationality in the irrational world. For that reason we do not find themselves living in such a world. But in this unimaginable infinity there are irrational worlds that so closely mimic rational worlds - purely by chance - that rational beings can emerge in these irrational worlds, because they can take advantage of this rarest of the things.
The problem with such an answer is threefold. First, it tells (at the very least) that a portion of this world is not conducive to rational inquiry on principle, because it is fundamentally irrational and only appears rational. So it is yet another admission of the limited usefulness of rationality in a fundamentally irrational world. Second, it is pure belief. It is not rational: it neither explains nor does it predict. Third, it fails one of the salient tests of rationality, which is going for the simplest explanation. There is no reason to believe that a world that appears rational shall be fundamentally irrational unless one wants to believe that it is irrational at all costs. So it is an irrational belief, even if it happens to be true. There should be a rationale of holding this irrational belief by a rational being. What is it?
Why would a rational being living in a quasi-rational world find it advantageous to itself to believe that its world is truly irrational? Shouldn't it rather believe that the world is rational, because only that is conducive to its survival? The best answer I've heard was this: it will develop such a belief to rationalize the failures of its rationality. These would not be the failures to rationalize the irrational (because the latter is filtered out by its mind, it is not even recognized). It is the pedestrian failure to rationalize the rational.
In the end we got a rational explanation of rationality in the world that is believed to be irrational - and it is pride. And the rationale for the latter is nothing else than the social dynamics addressed by the argumentative theory of reasoning. We have made the full circle and arrived at the beginning.
Blessed be the one who opens the eyes of the blind.
בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה יְיָ אֱלֹהֵֽינוּ מֶֽלֶךְ הָעוֹלָם, פּוֹקֵֽחַ עִוְרִים.
http://www.ilt.columbia.edu/publications/Projects/digitexts/locke/understanding/chapter0410.html
There is a thing about materialism proper (as opposed to, say, panpsychism) that I've never been able to understand: how does it explain rationality.
I mean this in the most mundane sense. If our reasoning ability has been selected by Darwinian evolution, it means that it gives a rational agent survival advantage. However, if the world is devoid of rationality, meaning, and reason (that exist only in the minds of rational agents), how can our rationality be of any use to us in this irrational world?
I understand Bergson and his followers that say that rationality plays no role in our survival; it is a reflective ability. Epiphenomenologists arrive at the same conclusion by another road. Reason is not a product of evolution; it is a byproduct. I've recently learned about another theory along these lines (called "argumentative theory")
http://www.sjsu.edu/people/anand.vaidya/courses/c5/s2/Why%20Do%20Humans%20Reason%20Sperber.pdf
that reason exists solely to win arguments in a dispute. It is just less risky to get something that you want by furnishing arguments rather than using clubs, but there is no real difference between arguments and clubs: both devices serve the same goal. All such views boil down to the belief in un-reason: reason has either no real utility or purely social utility (manipulating the others). This belief exists in many forms; the most amusing one, in my opinion, is the belief that your own mind is an illusion. Simpletons like Descartes took their existence for granted; he thought that if one doubts that, there is no reason to believe that anything else exists. Now it is the opposite: blind belief that everything else exists, but the existence of one's own deliberating mind is highly suspect... A great leap forward, I'd say.
Such forms of materialism that annihilate reason I do understand. It is a thoroughly repugnant yet wholesome world view. I do not have any issue with such a view. I do not see the need to argue with someone who does not consider himself a rational being. We do not have the common ground for such arguments. I am not interested in winning or losing such an argument to get advantage of the opponent. I'd be happy to lose it. Only my own conviction that the proponents of such views are mistaken stops me from excluding them from humanity and treating them accordingly.
However, only the thinnest sliver of people calling themselves materialists are willing to go all the way to this glorious end. My difficulty is understanding the majority. They say that rationality is not an illusion, a byproduct - or whatever; it is REALLY useful (and not only to win arguments, which has nothing to do with truth and only with appearances). For once, we are in full agreement. So, why is rationality useful?
At this point the contortions begin. One needs to furnish a plausible rationale that rationality is useful in a world that is not rational. The smartest of the lot ("the mysterians") declare that a mystery and leave it at that. That's clever, but it is not too satisfying. It also destroys any pretense of materialism to be a rational world view (not that it is important: the first materialists had no such pretentions). But the smart ones are also very few. The majority begins to improvise and tie themselves in knots.
Surprisingly, the most frequent answer I've heard has been the admission that nature is kinda rational because it has laws of nature. I did not believe my ears... Didn't you say the other moment that the laws of nature were generalizations that were recognized or conceived by our own minds? There are no "laws of nature" in reality. There is nature. There are explanations of how it works. These explanations have laws; these are the laws of our reasoning about nature. Nature does not know anything about these laws. It obeys no laws. It just exists. Unless these laws have independent reality (not being just cognitive devices of our minds) there is no way the rationality can help one to survive in nature. "Kinda rational" does not work at all, sorry. Either nature is rational, but then one needs to explain how it can be rational. Or it is irrational, and then we have rationalizations of the irrational; then one needs to explain why such rationalizations of the irrational help us to survive in our irrational world.
People usually take the easy way out of it. Yes, there are no laws, it is all irrational, but there are certain regularities in nature, and the laws are ad hoc rationalizations of such regularities. Recognizing such regularities helps us to survive, because one can predict what is likely to happen.
So, why are there regularities - and why are these regularities of such kind that something can be predicted using our rather limited capacities? The first question is never answered; it's a mystery - and a very useful mystery, too. If the world isn't a place in which a few rules generate complex patterns then the ability to dissect these patterns to discover these simple rules would be quite useless. Had there been 1,000,000 physical laws, it is doubtful that biological evolution would ever produce a being capable of taking advantage of rationality. So this world appears to be destined to make rationality advantageous. Why would it be of this charachter?
That is when the contortions end and the answer emerges: by chance. There should be countless irrational worlds that cannot produce a rational being, because there is no advantage of rationality in the irrational world. For that reason we do not find themselves living in such a world. But in this unimaginable infinity there are irrational worlds that so closely mimic rational worlds - purely by chance - that rational beings can emerge in these irrational worlds, because they can take advantage of this rarest of the things.
The problem with such an answer is threefold. First, it tells (at the very least) that a portion of this world is not conducive to rational inquiry on principle, because it is fundamentally irrational and only appears rational. So it is yet another admission of the limited usefulness of rationality in a fundamentally irrational world. Second, it is pure belief. It is not rational: it neither explains nor does it predict. Third, it fails one of the salient tests of rationality, which is going for the simplest explanation. There is no reason to believe that a world that appears rational shall be fundamentally irrational unless one wants to believe that it is irrational at all costs. So it is an irrational belief, even if it happens to be true. There should be a rationale of holding this irrational belief by a rational being. What is it?
Why would a rational being living in a quasi-rational world find it advantageous to itself to believe that its world is truly irrational? Shouldn't it rather believe that the world is rational, because only that is conducive to its survival? The best answer I've heard was this: it will develop such a belief to rationalize the failures of its rationality. These would not be the failures to rationalize the irrational (because the latter is filtered out by its mind, it is not even recognized). It is the pedestrian failure to rationalize the rational.
In the end we got a rational explanation of rationality in the world that is believed to be irrational - and it is pride. And the rationale for the latter is nothing else than the social dynamics addressed by the argumentative theory of reasoning. We have made the full circle and arrived at the beginning.
Blessed be the one who opens the eyes of the blind.
בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה יְיָ אֱלֹהֵֽינוּ מֶֽלֶךְ הָעוֹלָם, פּוֹקֵֽחַ עִוְרִים.