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Wednesday
March 31, 2004

In the Hands of Strangers by Matthew Graybosch

If you think that your life, liberty, and property are safe under the republican systems that are touted as "democracy", think again. Everything you value can be voted away by your friends, your neighbors, and total strangers. They'll do so with what they think are noble intentions, because they don't know that their actions are harming you. (Read more...)
Discuss this Article (72 messages)

Tuesday, April 6, 2004 - 3:13pm

Matthew wrote:
>I've already stated that I fully accept that there are cultural preconditions necessary for what I am advocating to work. I would hope that in a culture where the majority (or even a sizeable minority) of people were Objectivists or Objectivist-sympathisers (neo-Aristotelian and neo-Thomist libertarians etc), something along these lines could work....

>...It would be impossible under my system in the sense that the minute the government sought to give the police extra powers which would allow them to violate the rights of innocent citizens, the constitutional court would step in, judge the policy to be contrary to the spirit and letter of the constitution, and prevent it becoming law.

Hi Matthew,

OK. So the *people* involved (the public in the first case, the constitutional judiciary in the second) and their judgements turn out to be the critical elements in allowing the system to a) exist and b) function. Other than the minor issue of the word "impossible" - because human fallibility rules that out - I think we are broadly in agreement then!

- Daniel

Tuesday, April 6, 2004 - 5:15pm

I think we are broadly in agreement then!

Daniel, if you ignore the rather crucial point that you are in favour of representative democracy wheras I am theorising about a system that has a relatiely tiny role for elections of any kind, then yes we are "broadly in agreement" ;-)

MH

Wednesday, April 7, 2004 - 12:49am

I think I went a little over my head trying to explain the overall root of why anyone would be irrational.

I think if you question anything enough, you will come to A=A anyway. So saying that irrational people are just irrational is just a waste of time.

Joe, you are right: energy is better spent studying irrationality in specific cases.

I see your two examples of modivation for irrationality: doing it by habit and fearing or lusting after the results, and self-reinforcing ideas.

I like your article on self-reinforcing ideas particularly

Wednesday, April 7, 2004 - 1:34am

Daniel,

Of course Objectivists will object to your "irrational act: an act of faith". The interesting part is that you talk as if people start as fully formed adults with all kinds of knowledge that are just in their heads, and then they choose either rationality or irrationality. It almost sounds like it doesn't really matter which you go with, but we'd prefer you go with rationality. That may not be what you're going for, but it comes off that way.

Now I would approach it from a different light. Why be rational? Why not irrational? What's the difference? Objectivists say it's moral to be rational, but doesn't it matter? And the answer is a conditional one, which is the root of Objectivist ethics. Roughly, the question is, do you want to live?

And that provides the reason to be rational. Life is conditional. Reality is absolute. If you want to live, you have to understand the world and act according to it. The extent to which you reject it is the extent to which your life is hampered. You should be rational because it is the means by which you live. Reality is a harsh task-master. If you screw up, it doesn't let you down easy. Anyone who's made it to adulthood has learned that lesson countless times throughout their life.

Another motivation throughout life is the pleasure/pain mechanism associated with being alive. You can't just shut off pain when you want to. You can't force reality to conform to your whims. You have to deal with what is. Which means use your mind to grasp what is.

And then later you can learn explicitly that reason is what you've been using. Reason is what allows you to grasp the world, and to live in it. Again, your life is the reason behind being rational. It's not an act of faith at all. You've got a lifetime of experience, interactions with reality, pleasure/pain mechanisms, and understanding of the world supporting you. That's some pretty strong reasons.

Wednesday, April 7, 2004 - 4:34am

Joe wrote:
>Objectivists say it's moral to be rational, but doesn't it matter?
>And the answer is a conditional one, which is the root of
>Objectivist ethics. Roughly, the question is, do you want to live?

Well, I'm happy to come at it from more of a biological than strictly logical approach ;-). My take on it from this angle is basically evolutionary.

Firstly, you're right: reality is a tough task master. That's why not just man, but *all* organisms seek knowledge of their environment in order to survive. They're constantly assessing threats and opportunities, making right and wrong guesses about what to do in their particular situations. They're not machines, like Descartes thought. They're alive, problem-solving creatures like we are. Further, we came from them in the first place, and still stand but a very short step away from them evolutionarily speaking, even in our most distinctive physical feature, our brain, which is mostly reptile and mammal, with a thin icing of cortex that is human on top (Freud used to have a nice line about his patient sharing the couch with a horse and a crocodile). So a lot of their survival skills are ours. It's not like we dropped from the sky, sui generis, armed only with the ability to debate! We survived millions of years of "conforming to what is" before we even began to learn to think rationally - or at least in a way that we recognise as *human alone*.

That's why if you start out with the premise that rationality is man's basic assessment of reality for survival ( like "whoops/ here comes a sabretooth tiger/better run away/or maybe I should fight it") it gets rather hard to see what is distinctively human about it. Animals do this sort of problem-solving all the time, very effectively. Are they rational? This approach, which seems promising at first, actually ends up not telling you much.

So we have to go to a sharper focus to look for what's unique to *us*. From a Popperian point of view, we hypothesise that rationality evolved - after all, God certainly didn't give it to us - in parallel with, or as a byproduct of, human language. Now, even then it's not that easy to unpick from our inheritance either. Animals also have many of the language functions of humans like signalling (hey, there's some food!) or expression (mate needed, now!) for example.

But look closer, and we've got another couple of language functions they *don't* have, and one of these is the ability to argue - to form arguments, to criticise, to debate - and another is the ability to write. It's in these very distinctive functions you start to see rationality as a *distinctive human quality* emerge. And not just rationality, but the *product* of rationality - the discovery and use of objective knowledge. And objective knowledge has been a huge evolutionary advantage. Since we hooked up with that baby, man, look at us go.

So you can see while I don't mind rough ideas at all, I think the idea that "rationality is man's tool to live" is a bit *too* loose. It doesn't really capture what is unique to our species (or alternatively, might force an artificially wide ad hoc divide betwen us and our relations...;-)). It mistakenly paints a picture of humans as creatures that wouldn't last five minutes without it - yet if that were true, we would never have survived over millions of years to evolve rationality in the first place! (this impression is probably not helped by the fact when we try to visualise it, we mistakenly imagine our civilised selves cast back in the wild, as utterly incompetent as lost housepets. Yet our human ancestors were nothing like this)

And you can also see why I've chosed to define rationality rather specifically as atttitude of remaining open to *arguments* as well as experience. Monkeys can do smart things to survive, but they don't know about the Modus Tollens.

Just as a final note, as this has ended up a little long, and I've probably gone back a little too far in time here: it's also worth noting that for most of history it's been easier to survive by *accepting* irrational beliefs - like the sacred beliefs of your tribe - than by questioning them openly with rational argument!

- Daniel

Wednesday, April 7, 2004 - 3:40pm

Daniel, you've gone too far into history for my tastes. I don't really care how we got to this point, only that we did. It's irrelevant to our own survival that our biological ancestors might have had tails, or claws, or gills, or anything else. You can use evolution to try to understand how we became this way, and that might give you insights into what exactly we are, but our current identity is what really matters.

Now you're looking for big differences between us and animals. That's fine, but why dismiss our similarities with animals? Pleasure/pain mechanisms, although they don't control our behavior as much as they would a non-volitional animal, still play a part in our lives. By looking for only the parts that are different, I think you're ignoring important elements. They're not everything, but they're not nothing either.

By focusing on the fact that we have language skills they don't, you make it sound like we live in order to argue! Agreed that some people here seem to, but that's certainly not universal. Our conceptual minds are tools for survival, not the justification for it.

So going back to life, forget about the evolutionary stuff. None of us live in the jungle, fighting lions and tigers and bears (oh my!) for survival. If we had to, we'd make a gun. That IS how we live. If we had a strong sense of smell like a dog, we'd probably use it. We use the senses we do have, and we make the most of them by using reason to understand them. Animals use their senses, and they have some ability to think and learn, but their minds come nowhere near our own. If they know something is poison, they simply stay away from it. Humans, on the other hand, will mass produce it and use it in factories to make computer chips, medicine, etc. That's the big difference. We rely heavily on our minds, and are able to do things with our minds that animals can't.

The recent point we're addressing here is whether being rational takes a leap of faith, or if it's justified. My answer is that it's justified because it is conducive to life. That animals use some level of thinking doesn't invalidate it, it confirms it. We can't live by reacting to outside stimulus. We have to try to understand to, to integrate it, to make sense of it, and to determine a course of action. That we have vastly superior minds than animals doesn't make that less so. In fact, it makes it more so. Instead of living on a subsistence level, fighting each other for scraps of food, we walk among skyscrapers. We build computers that complete mathematical functions in less than a millionth of a second, with parts that are too small to see with the human eye. We fly from one end of the world to another in big chunks of metal. We literally live by using our minds. Our lives revolve around are ability to reason. And to the extent we are rational, we live successfully.

Now quick short criticism of your tribal irrationality. The initial irrationality is in not protecting rights. They effectively made using your reason a liability in some ares of their lives. The results were that they lived primitive, often barbaric lives, with high mortality rates, short life spans, and limited understanding of the world around them. But even then it never made sense to be irrational. Under those irrational situations, it might make sense to keep quiet, but it never makes sense to actually suspend your thinking. If the tribe thinks that the gods will provide when you hunt, it doesn't benefit you to accept it. It benefits you to ignore it, and to master the art of hunting so you'll have food. You gain nothing from actually being irrational.

Wednesday, April 7, 2004 - 5:28pm

Joe wrote:
>Now you're looking for big differences between us and animals. That's fine, but why dismiss our similarities with animals?

But I don't dismiss them at all!? My post emphasised our similarities - you can then see the uniquely human aspects of thought start to stand out by comparison.

>By focusing on the fact that we have language skills they don't, you make it sound like we live in order to argue!

Sorry if it came off that way - and yeah, there are some people who do! But that's not my point, which is that argument is critical for the development of objective knowledge. It is objective knowledge - knowledge that we possess, but also stands apart from us - that makes us distinctively human. For example, a mathematical theory that I may propose, but that you may point out flaws that I have not noticed in it. This sort of thing requires argument, and/ or writing (or some form of recording), in order to exist. Which is why animals don't have mathematical theories.

>My answer is that (being rational) is justified because it is conducive to life. That animals use some level of thinking doesn't invalidate it, it confirms it.

The problem here is, as I pointed out, this particular test of rationality is just way, way too loose. Ok, so you're saying that animals are rational at some level - that their very survival confirms this. But this means that *anything* that thinks in a way "conducive to its life" is automatically "rational". Something survives, therefore it is rational. I don't agree. I think it's far more useful to make a distinction here. I think rationality is a difference not of intellectual quantity, but of intellectual *kind*. It's a bonus level in addition to the rest of our inherited intelligence equipment.

This is why I would argue that this idea of using survival as a test of an organism's rationality is setting too low a bar to be meaningful. The dinosaurs were around far longer than humans (so far), but I don't think this makes them rational in the least!

If we are going to call rationality a distinctively human attribute - which I would prefer to do, but I guess you don't have to - I think we then have to look at not just *thinking*, but the distinctive ways in which humans think, but animals do not. Then we'll start to see it more clearly.

- Daniel

Wednesday, April 7, 2004 - 5:54pm

You lost me Daniel.

You talk about rationality as if it were some kind of abstract thinking unrelated to life. Arguments, mathematical formulas, etc. If you view rationality as meaningless logical deductions, then I can see your original point that there's no reason to be rational. Of course, I disagree with that premise.

Rationality isn't some kind of thinking that is unrelated to life. As humans, we have unique ways of thinking, integrating, and comprehending. We think conceptually, we have volition, we're self-aware, etc., etc. That's all fine. And rationality is using these tools properly, in accordance with reality. Just because we have better tools than animals doesn't mean their purpose is any different. What level of thinking an animal is capable of is used to be aware of the world around them, so they can pick their actions accordingly. Same with ours. That our minds are more advanced doesn't invalidate the purpose. We don't use our reasoning ability to mentally masturbate in an effort to show our superiority over animals (okay, some do occasionally, but that's the exception). The purpose of our thinking is to give us the means to live our lives. The better our grasp of reality, the better we can live.

You talk about better defining rationality because we're using it too loosely when we relate it to animals. But I'm not saying animals are rational. I'm saying the purpose of their thinking is life. The purpose of our thinking is life. Reasoning is just a type of thinking, still related to life. Rationality is following the principles of proper reasoning, in order to make your thinking useful, non-contradictory, objective, etc. That we can think abstractly means there are more principles to be aware of and to follow. That we live by our minds and wealth is not zero-sum means we need a system of ethics. None of this changes the purpose, so none of it affects the conclusion.

The question was whether there is a reason to be rational, or do we just "act on faith" when we decide to be rational. Only be severing the connection between rationality and life (and reality!) can anyone suggest that rationality is baseless.

Thursday, April 8, 2004 - 12:00pm

Daniel & Joseph:

To paraphrase Daniel: He sought to distinguish human beings from other animals. He thought that rationality was insufficient, because other beasts solve problems to survive. He noted that language, beyond the primitive ability to signal, might serve as this distinction, because it allows humans to manifest their rationality in ways that are truly unique: For example, the ability to obtain, store, and apply objective knowledge.

(My apologies, Daniel, if I squeezed your posts into meaning something other than what you intended, but being something of a Popperian, I think I know where you are coming from and so I've taken the liberty.)

Joseph, who did not appear to disagree with this in substance, responded:

>>The recent point we're addressing here is whether being rational takes a leap of faith, or if it's justified. My answer is that it's justified because it is conducive to life. That animals use some level of thinking doesn't invalidate it, it confirms it. We can't live by reacting to outside stimulus. We have to try to understand to, to integrate it, to make sense of it, and to determine a course of action.<<

It appears to me, Joseph, that what you've said is: If we are rational creatures in the manner that Daniel suggests, then we act rationally (in the sense we take the action necessary that produces the desired outcome) in the same way an animal does when it comes to survival, but we must CHOOSE to act rationally when it comes to living beyond mere survival. If so, is the dividing line that neat?

We are wired for language. Because this wiring consists of concepts, like nouns and verbs, it would appear that we are not a tabula rasa when it comes to all concepts. If this is true of language, is it true of other things that are the building blocks of complex concepts? Counting, for instance. Therefore, how much of our rationality at levels of thinking beyond survival is completely by choice? How much of what we know and conclude is either delimited or pre-determined by "innate" concepts?

In other words, if rationality is the process of determining the correct action for a desired outcome, how much of that process is pre-wired and how much of it is the conscious conceptualization of experience? And if "innate" concepts, like nouns and verbs, do exist, does that square with the empirical nature of Randian epistemology?

Regards,
Bill a.k.a. Citizen Rat

Thursday, April 8, 2004 - 6:57pm

Citizen Rat,

I disagree that the line is so clear. You throw actions that achieves survival onto one pile, and "living beyond mere survival" into another pile. But you're assuming the two have nothing in common. I take it you didn't read my article on human needs. But more to the point, we don't act to "just survive", as if living on the cusp of death is our goal. What animal does? We don't try to aim for "right on the line" where the slightest screw-up will mean certain death. We shoot further. We try to secure wealth, and the means to wealth. We try to be very healthy, and not just barely alive. We try to give ourselves the means to provide for our survival even if something goes wrong. You can't divide those categories so easily. In fact, Objectivism reject dividing them at all.

As a little empirical evidence that's been noted all over the place, a natural disaster like a flood or earthquake in the US vs. a poor country, has radically different effects. In the US, there are few casualties if any, and people adjust quickly. In other countries, people die by the hundreds or thousands. Wealth is the difference. Wealth is what allows us to survive. Before the disaster, you might try to classify the wealth as "living beyond mere survival". But it's obvious when you look at the big picture that it is just another aspect of survival.

As for your innate ideas, I reject it all, and don't see the point. It's unrelated to whether rationality is arbitrary or not, because it's unrelated to rationality. If there were innate ideas, meaning automatic and from the start, they would be independent of a proper means of gaining knowledge.

But I also reject the validity of innate ideas. Ask a three-year old child what a "noun" is, and you'll get a blank look (unless he's in a Montessori school, but it wouldn't be innate then either). Or ask a child what all of these things have in common: furniture, apple, person, computer, tree, air, planet, etc.

No, the child doesn't start off with any concepts like noun and verb, just like they don't have a concept for "The Law of Identity". That they rely on it to understand reality doesn't mean they're aware of it. Just because we are suited to understand reality in a specific way does not make our understanding of reality innate. Neither does it mean that we will use the way in which we're suited, as any irrational person is living proof of.

BTW, it's Objectivism, not Randianism. Objectivist epistemology not Randian epistemology.

(Edited by Joseph Rowlands on 4/08, 6:57pm)

Friday, April 9, 2004 - 7:09am

Hello, Joseph.

You noted:

I take it you didn't read my article on human needs.

Thank you for taking the time for a detailed answer to my questions. I have read OPAR and ITOE, yet I still haven't been able to get my hands around Objectivist epistemology (a subject which I am generally weak in), so some of what may be obvious to you may be eluding me on the current topic. Nevertheless, I find it a very interesting one, which is why I jumped in. But, perhaps it will be best if I read your article first before posting further questions.

Regards,
Bill a.k.a. Citizen Rat

Saturday, April 10, 2004 - 2:13pm

Joe wrote:
>You talk about rationality as if it were some kind of abstract thinking unrelated to life...Rationality isn't some kind of thinking that is unrelated to life....

Well, let me quote myself:
“And objective knowledge has been a huge evolutionary advantage. Since we hooked up with that baby, man, look at us go.”

So I think it's pretty clear that I don't think rationality and objective knowledge is a kind of empty game. It's been the secret of our success as a species.

Joe continued:
>But I'm not saying animals are rational. I'm saying the purpose of their thinking is life. The purpose of our thinking is life.

So why don’t we have the same thinking? We’re a type of animal. This is my very point: this formulation is so broad it tells you almost nothing - or, worse, whatever you like. As I’ve shown, when you apply “survival” or “life” as a test for rationality you get answers all over the map. To me, if this was a scientific experiment it would mean that something wrong with the way the test is constructed.

Still don’t believe me? Let’s test it again. Last night I went to see a quartet of virtuoso jazz musicians perform their own compositions. During the performance - which was brilliant - this question floated back into my mind. If survival is what it’s all about, why are these guys doing this? Why don’t they just crank out Acker Bilk favourites and play halls twice the size? Why don’t they become pop musicians - or failing that, real estate agents or currency traders? All these options pay way more than being a virtuoso musician, and are a lot less hard work too. As I watched them play, it was obvious that they weren’t thinking about survival; in fact, it appeared they were trying to solve problems of a different order entirely - yet you could scarcely say they were irrational. Further, why did *I* drive back from holiday just for the night, spend $85, and sit there for two hours listening? How did that increase my wealth, or my odds of surviving a flood or natural disaster?

So you now have three options:
1) Create a very long causal chain to try to rationalise virtuoso jazz performance - and the appreciation of it - as essential to survival
2) Water down the term “life” to its very broadest sense - what we’d call “human” or existential considerations - even though the issue of being rational was initially phrased far more urgently as “Do you want to live?”, as if nature had a gun to my head. The only problem is then you can choose "life" to mean pretty much whatever you like.
3) You declare that the performers and audience alike were, despite all appearances, irrational.

Of course, I wouldn’t consider any of those options very good. They smack a bit of the old Scholastic habit of “saving the phenomena” (a misnomer, incidentally, as all they were doing was saving their own theories!).

My suggestion is simpler: come up with a more provocative theory. One that’s more specific, and more original (after all, the idea that thinking is necessary for survival is something of a no-brainer...;-)).

Let me propose one: The evolution of rationality - and with it the ability to discover and use objective knowledge - has been a huge survival advantage for the human species, which shares in many other respects the intellectual qualities of animals. However, it seems in addition, objective knowledge may have had an unintended consequence - that humans can use it for reasons *not* directly related to survival.

In fact, it may turn out that this ability to think in a way not directly related to survival might be our key point of *difference* from the animals. The ability of a man to be interested in Fermat’s theorem, or the problems of jazz composition, seems to me strikingly different from the survival-and-nothing-but imperatives of animal behaviour.

Additionally, I do not see this idea as necessarily excluded from Objectivism. After all, if the purpose of rational thought is life, and life is an end in itself, it seems to me that this allows at least *some* rational thought to be directed at *some* things that are “ends in themselves”.

One final point, on the morality of being rational. I'm getting the feeling that you're proposing that rationality is a kind of "natural law" for humans, that we cannot avoid or ignore - like the law of gravity. That's fine as a proposal I suppose. The only problem I have with it is that it then removes the moral weight from the individual’s decision. To have a moral value, the individual must make a *choice* . And a choice made with a gun to one’s head - even if it is nature holding it - cannot be said to be a moral one. Obeying gravity is certainly good if you want to live, but it could hardly said to be a moral act!

Whereas if a man is free to choose to act like an animal - irrationally - then obviously he can. And indeed, in many situations (like war, for example) he will survive - perhaps even prosper - in doing that. But now *that* becomes a moral - or in my view, an immoral - decision.

And I think we both might agree on that.

- Daniel

Sunday, April 11, 2004 - 8:12pm

Daniel,

I think we must be talking past each other, because your statements make no sense to me. You stated there was no reason to be rational, and I said life is the reason. That's simple enough. Reason is our means of grasping the world around us. It should take no brainpower to notice that the better our grasp of reality, the more able we are to live. That should be the end of that particular thread, but now you're talking about "life as a test for rationality". What? A test? God no! If a doctor properly states that you're dying of cancer, he's rational even if you die. Life is the motivation and justification for being rational.

Then you have other, unrelated issues as far as I can tell. First you seem to think that there's a whole range of action that has nothing to do with your survival. If this were the case, then I would agree with the assessment that it is irrational to pursue them. There's always more things you can do to promote your life, and if you're doing things unrelated (or worse, destructive) towards your life, that would be irrational!

But the real problem with this is that you start with the standard of "essential to survival ". I have to agree that if you justed used your brain for only those things that minimally kept you alive, that would leave a lot of things unaccounted for. But that's not right at all. The flood example should have illustrated that. Those people who plan to minimally survive death are left completely helpless during the first unexpected event. Life is not about securing immediate safety and food, and then standing still. That's a life surrounded by emergency and death. Every minute is a struggle for survival.

Objectivism has nothing to do with that kind of living, and who would want it to? Living on the cusp of death might be exciting, but not the good kind of exciting.

No, we talk in terms of promoting your life. That means more than just minimal survival, where death is always one mistake away. It means things like improving your ability to act. Learning and increasing your ability to learn, so you can adapt to new situations. Staying in good health so a sudden illness won't kill you, nor will any physical damage. Keeping your mind working in tip-top shape, since you need it. Gaining wealth, skills, and relationships. The list is endless.

So to answer your jazz question, Objectivism would ask "What values are you gaining, and why are they important?". If you're saying that Jazz is worthless, you gained nothing for the event, and it cost you time and money, and you'd willingly do it again, you can't call yourself rational. You can't make any claim to be acting rationally.

Now a better answer would include the following: Companionship. Entertainment. Letting your mind relax and refuel. Experiencing something you find beautiful to keep you focused on the positive aspect of life. Opportunity to meet people. Etc., etc. Each of these can be traced to real human needs that promote your life.

Why would people not work at the highest paying job doing something they hate? Because pride and self-esteem are critical parts of living. Liking yourself and your life are key motivators for doing what it takes to live. Again, the list is long, and the connections are not as simple as "must eat food...must drink water".

All of your discussion assumes that the choice is animal living, or issues unrelated to living. We don't live like animals at all. We have a superior way of grasping reality, and we utilize it to live in a unique way (for instance, we produce). But if you think that living like animals is all that survival involves, then I can see why you think rationality is unrelated to life. You'd be wrong, though.

Nor do I think rationality is automatic. Plenty of people act irrational at times. But if you're acting irrationally, you're not grasping the world and acting accordingly. If you live, it's because others are doing your living for you. Feel free to go into a wilderness and refuse to use your mind, and see how long survive. Feel free to do that now as see how long you survive.

And to round it all out, I disagree that a man can live better acting irrationally, even in times of war. Only if you try to equate rationality with things like pacifism does that make any sense. When does it pay to act against reality? Never.

Monday, April 12, 2004 - 5:48pm

Citizen Bill wrote:
>To paraphrase Daniel: He sought to distinguish human beings from other animals. He thought that rationality was insufficient, because other beasts solve problems to survive. He noted that language, beyond the primitive ability to signal, might serve as this distinction, because it allows humans to manifest their rationality in ways that are truly unique: For example, the ability to obtain, store, and apply objective knowledge.
>(My apologies, Daniel, if I squeezed your posts into meaning something other than what you intended, but being something of a Popperian, I think I know where you are coming from and so I've taken the liberty.)

Hi Bill
No, I think you've summarised that rather well. The only thing I'd change there is that I'm saying just *thinking to survive* is an insufficient description of rationality, because animals think to survive too. So I've suggested the qualities that we have that they don't - description, writing, argument - and suggested these are the foundations of the distinctive human quality we call "rationality". It's a fuzzy area, but we have to start drawing some distinctions somewhere!

Glad to hear you have some familiarity with Popper - while people have heard of him, most don't know much about him.

regards

Daniel

Monday, April 12, 2004 - 6:46pm

Joe wrote:
>I think we must be talking past each other, because your statements make no sense to me....Life is the motivation and justification for being rational.

Must be, because this seems to have taken the argument back to the beginning again. Cockroaches are extremely good at living - they may well survive the human race - so are they rational? And so on...

Obviously I don't like the idea of "talking past" each other, as it's the essence of rationality to keep discussion open. Hmmmm - how can I improve the situation? Perhaps I took your original position on the importance of being rational ("Roughly, the question is, do you want to live?") to mean only "survival", when, judging by this post, you also meant the looser human/existential meaning of "life" - as in "stop just living and get a life!" or something like that.

I would agree that case. Rationality is the key to this aspect. However, I would look at it slightly differently, in rationality's role in the development of a "self". Something that is not just alive, contingent on just surviving in the moment, but something more. I would conjecture that animals, despite being alive, and thinking, do not have a sense of "self" - or at least a very limited one. I would also conjecture that without higher order language functions man would not really have a sense of "self" either - or at least one not much above animal level. Like a Kaspar Hauser, say. After all, children seem to develop a stronger sense of "self" as they aquire language, and we continue to develop one as we "discover ourselves" through things like reading (ie: through objective knowledge). It is this "self" that gives us our sense of freedom that animals cannot experience, and - critically - can even detach us from the obvious requirements for survival to create our own goals. After all, no animal would risk crossing the Arctic alone merely for the abstract goal of being first to do it. And that is the difference.

- Daniel

Tuesday, April 13, 2004 - 5:25am

Daniel:

You wrote: >>Glad to hear you have some familiarity with Popper - while people have heard of him, most don't know much about him.<<

I think his method for induction was a stroke of genius. It is an utterly objective means of making rules in the context of our inherent incompleteness of knowledge and then revising or replacing those rules as we increase our knowledge.

I suspect many shy away from Popper because of his mathematical bent in describing his ideas. But then he was primarily interested in assisting the scientific community. Not many of his works are addressed to a popular audience. Nevertheless, he has much to say in regard to objective knowledge and how that is the foundation of a classically liberal society.

Regards,
Bill a.k.a. Citizen Rat

Tuesday, April 13, 2004 - 5:28am

Daniel:

You responded to my encapsulation of your position vis-a-vis Joseph with:

No, I think you've summarised that rather well. The only thing I'd change there is that I'm saying just *thinking to survive* is an insufficient description of rationality, because animals think to survive too. So I've suggested the qualities that we have that they don't - description, writing, argument - and suggested these are the foundations of the distinctive human quality we call "rationality". It's a fuzzy area, but we have to start drawing some distinctions somewhere!

I do think you are onto something here. However, I'm taking a step back from this discussion until I'm up to speed with Joseph's writings on the subject.

Regards,
Bill a.k.a. Citizen Rat

Tuesday, April 13, 2004 - 2:23pm

Daniel,

I have no idea what you're trying to get at now. You seem to be trying to define rationality as using higher level thinking skill for pointless reasons. If this is all to justify your assumption that we have no reason to be rational, it makes sense that you'd say it. It doesn't make any sense at all, though.

You have to start with understanding what it is your talking about. Reason and rationality. What is reasoning? How is this different from thinking? How does it differ from what animals do? There are a lot of elements.

First, man is conceptual. This has the effect that his range of knowledge is greatly expanded over that of an animal. Instead of trying to keep a mental picture of all of the different instances, we create concepts. We then don't have to try to remember every car or tree or house or person we've seen. We categorize and conceptualize.

Also, we have the ability to analyze our own thinking processes. This means we can use logic to weed out contradictions in our ideas. This is because we can detect that there are contradictions.

Because our knowledge is conceptual and abstract, we have the need for it to be objective in order for it to be useful. We have to keep it grounded in reality, and keep ourselves focused on what's real.

And the list goes on and on. These abilities -- such as using logic, contrasting ideas with one another, comparing to reality, and conceptualizing -- are what we call our reasoning skills. We need them in order to grasp reality, and to make decisions on how to act.

Now rationality is the practice of using our reasoning mind in the right way.

You keep trying to split our actions into those that are required for survival, and those that aren't, and then try to split rationality with it. But there is no difference. You use your reasoning mind for survival in the same way you use it for reading a philosophy paper. Any division would be arbitrary in false.

Throughout this, you've taken instances of reasoning skills, and tried to elevate them as the goal of reasoning. An earlier example was when you talked about communication or reading and writing. The current example is in the recognition of your "self". But this is just another aspect of reason. It makes sense that if you're going to conceptualize the world, and deal with abstract ideas, you have to eventually become aware the differences between yourself and other people. Since the point of reason is to identify reality, and you're a part of reality, your own identification would become important. But coming up with an understanding of yourself is not the goal of reasoning. That's not the ultimate value, or the ultimate reason for thinking. It's just another tool for identifying reality. The goal of that is life.

Tuesday, April 13, 2004 - 6:49pm

Bill wrote:
>I do think you are onto something here.

then Joe wrote:
>I have no idea what you're trying to get at now.

Obviously! Yet what I've written can't be all that difficult to grasp, as Bill picked it up straightaway.

Joe continued:
>You keep trying to split our actions into those that are required for survival, and those that aren't, and then try to split rationality with it. But there is no difference. You use your reasoning mind for survival in the same way you use it for reading a philosophy paper. Any division would be arbitrary in false.

My main criticism of your argument has been, of course, that you *don't* make any differentiations. You use "survival" as a catch-all for all the activity you see, a kind of all-purpose rationalisation. And if the phenomena doesn't really fit with "survival" as it is typically understood - like the ambition of being the first man to cross the Arctic, collecting model trains, or listening to a jazz concert - you just loosen up the word "survival" to mean "life" in the vaguest possible sense, so it really becomes whatever you want it to mean. In fact, it's not my separating out that's "arbitrary" - it's your *lumping together*!! The enduring appeal of this ancient method - which I call "verbalism" - is that you can never really be proven wrong about anything. But it comes with steep downside: that you never end up really saying anything new either, just reiterating your premises in ever-vaguer terms. I personally consider this too high a price to pay. The idea is to seek truth, not to cling to it.

I am quite familiar with this style of argument, which Objectivism has picked up from Aristotle at face value. While it seems promising at first, it carries deep and less obvious disadvantages. It is, as I have already noted, a typically Scholastic approach, and they got it from the same place you did. For while Aristotle's enthusiasm for science started a revolution, his methodology clogged it up again shortly afterward.
You don't have to take my word for it, of course - you should investigate the matter further yourself: I recommend Popper's essay "Two Kinds Of Definitions" as a good short examination of the problem, though there are certainly others.

So yes, you and I disagree, in that you *do* end up saying reading philosophy paper is the same as jumping out of the way of a bus, or that falling in love is just the same as climbing Everest without oxygen. It's all "rational", and it's all about "survival". Everything is reduced merely to an argument about the meanings of these words. And you'll always be able to justify any argument by expanding the meanings of those words (you can also contract them to exclude phenomena you don't approve of too, BTW).

This is nothing unusual about this, or even that specific to Objectivism. It's the logical end point of Aristotlean thinking. It is fairly commonplace, in fact. But just because it is common does not mean it is right.

- Daniel

Tuesday, April 13, 2004 - 7:00pm

Daniel, that post was worthless. It's clear you want to make some kind of differentiation, but you not only didn't say what that was, but why it should be. You have yet to show how reasoning works different when it's obviously related to survival, and when it's more removed. Well, prove it! Prove that we have two ways of thinking, one when it matters, and one when it doesn't. Enjoy.