Is there any rational reason to care about rationality?

[Ecurb]

Here's an attempt to respond to Atheist's post, using his own style

Administrators

Why limit it to adminstrators?

and owners

Mother Thersa "owned" nothing. This is assinine.

of hospices

Since you clearly have no idea what hospices are, I won't even bother to respond to this laughable comment.

...a perfect analogy

Thanks. Finally you're making sense.

...nice work...

Thanks, but, coming from you, no compliment.

Atheist's yapping, point by point posting style is worth no more than a lampoon; it certainly isn't worth a response. India is not Europe or the U.S.; Indians die of treatable diseases regularly. Mother Theresa provided hospices where they could die in relatively comfortable beds instead of in the rain and dirt of the streets. She did not provide medical care, and never said she was going to -- just like Christopher Hitchens never provided medical care and never said he was going to. Hitchens and Theresa are therefore equally guilty of murder or manslaughter (although, as I pointed out, Mother Theresa had more difficult decisions to make about how to spend the money she raised than Hitchens who, wicked atheist that he was, never raised any money for indigent Indians.

[The Atheist]

Atheist's yapping, point by point posting style is worth no more than a lampoon; it certainly isn't worth a response.

Irony: continuing to respond.

Notes for you next time:

1 "asinine" only has one s. Next time choose words you can at least spell, let alone understand.
2 I know what a hospice is. Allowing patients to die of infection while waiting for them to die of cancer is not an option.
3 I did say "Administrators and owners". Again, I'm not surprised you don't understand the difference.

[Ecurb]

According to the Atheist, the more you try help people, the more guilty you are if you "allow (them) to die". If you don't help them at all, you are guiltless. However, if you provide sick, indigent people with shelter, and they die under your roof, you should be clapped in irons and shipped off to prison. Yes, Atheist, people die of infections. Yes, some infections are treatable. The question is: who has the legal responsibility to treat them? Is it the responsibility of whoever is providing the dying and indigent with shelter? If so, why?

Let's look at another way: who was kinder to the ill, indigent Indians? Hitchens, The Atheist, and I, who did absolutely nothing for them? Or Mother Theresa, who provided them with beds, love, and shelter, but failed (just as The Atheist, Hitchens and I did) to provide them with treatment for their infections?

[cafolini]

But Theresa tortured terminal patients. One had to tell her to tell Jesus not to hug her so hard. It gave her a lot of pain.
ROFLMAO

[Scheherazade]

~

~ R e m i n d e r ~

The OP:

This question's been on my mind lately. In some debates and discussions with friends of mine (with entirely different worldviews), I couldn't help but notice how high reason and rationality were being elevated in the arena of religious and philosophical speculation. It seemed logical and basic initially, but after a while I came to feel that not every question does, in fact, have any rational answer. "What is the meaning of life?" "Does God exist?" "Why does evil exist?" "Why is murder wrong?" "Why does reason itself matter?" (I realize some people may object to some of my examples, and argue that some of them do in fact have rational answers, but I hope my point is clear).

So why is reason so important? Is there any logical answer to the question? If not, what would the implications of this be?

Off-topic posts will be removed without further notice.

[Ecurb]

"Reason" has long been a problem for materialists and empiricists. If all of our thought processes are merely the result of material (chemical and physical) reactions in our brains, what reason do we have to trust them? Given this materialistic version of causation, why is faith in logic superior to faith in magic, or ritual (or anything else we happen to have faith in)? They all come from the same source: evolution, chemistry, and physics. I believe this was C.S. Lewis's argument against materialism in one of his books. As with many metaphysical questions, there are no good answers (that I know of, anyway). In addition, it should be noted that although "faith" in reason may be contrary to strict materialism, it is consistent with other non-religious systems of thought.

That's why postmodernism has provided such an effective critique of "the age of reason" modernism. Like the religious worldviews the preceded them, modernism, empericism, and materialism are built on a foundation of culturally constituted and unverifiable axioms and postulates. Faith that the whole can be built logically from the parts has been eroded (postmodern thought sees the possibility of the whole being more than the parts). Faith in grand, reductionist theorizing has been replaced by contingent and localized theories. "Things fall apart (as Yeats wrote, in The Second Coming), the center cannot hold". Unfortunately, although postmodernism has provided a cogent critique of modernism and materialism, it has been less successful at providing an alternative. "What rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?" -- (Yeats)

[cafolini]

LOL I know he said that. Yeats didn't realize it was obviously the other way around? He didn't see the beast coming from Bethlehem?

[The Atheist]

This question's been on my mind lately. In some debates and discussions with friends of mine (with entirely different worldviews), I couldn't help but notice how high reason and rationality were being elevated in the arena of religious and philosophical speculation. It seemed logical and basic initially, but after a while I came to feel that not every question does, in fact, have any rational answer. "What is the meaning of life?" "Does God exist?" "Why does evil exist?" "Why is murder wrong?" "Why does reason itself matter?" (I realize some people may object to some of my examples, and argue that some of them do in fact have rational answers, but I hope my point is clear).

I have to put my foot firmly in deterministic camp and say that everything can be explained rationally, although we don't know a lot of the answers yet.

The three questions you pose are dead simple, for instance:

1 There isn't one
2 No
3 Evil is a human construct. Is a dog/lion/bear/baboon that kills its young evil? Is a storm that kills 100,000 people evil?

[MorpheusSandman]

"Reason" has long been a problem for materialists and empiricists. If all of our thought processes are merely the result of material (chemical and physical) reactions in our brains, what reason do we have to trust them? Given this materialistic version of causation, why is faith in logic superior to faith in magic, or ritual (or anything else we happen to have faith in)? They all come from the same source: evolution, chemistry, and physics. I believe this was C.S. Lewis's argument against materialism in one of his books. As with many metaphysical questions, there are no good answers (that I know of, anyway).

I'm aware of CS Lewis' argument and I don't find it a strong one. One thing evolution has shown is that random processes will adapt towards what allows it to survive in its given environment, and this can be applied to almost everything, including the chemical and physical reactions in our brains. If we set towards trying to figure out the way things work, then we can device a whole network of cause-and-effect or, perhaps more accurately, entanglement implying cause-and-effect, in order to figure out. We can apply the same filtering system to our own minds and the modes of reasoning it produces. I've long argued that all animals probably have some instinctual form of logic/reasoning in their own minds that allows their brains to process information and act in the manner that will most likely produce the desired result. Early man didn't need to know what a "modus ponens" was to intuitively figure out that "if stick hurts me, it will hurt animal; stick hurts me, stick will hurt animal!" and, what's more, their empirical experiment proved them right, so they were able to pass on this reasoning mode to the next generation because the found out that it worked.

That's why postmodernism has provided such an effective critique of "the age of reason" modernism. Like the religious worldviews the preceded them, modernism, empericism, and materialism are built on a foundation of culturally constituted and unverifiable axioms and postulates. Faith that the whole can be built logically from the parts has been eroded (postmodern thought sees the possibility of the whole being more than the parts). Faith in grand, reductionist theorizing has been replaced by contingent and localized theories. "Things fall apart (as Yeats wrote, in The Second Coming), the center cannot hold". Unfortunately, although postmodernism has provided a cogent critique of modernism and materialism, it has been less successful at providing an alternative. "What rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?" -- (Yeats)

I have no idea what you're on about here: what in the world does modernism and post-modernism have to do with empiricism and materialism? If anything, since the advent of modern science, empiricism and materialism have begun dominating scientific and philosophical discourse to a degree that it never has, and, AFAICT, post-modernism did absolutely nothing to slow it down. In fact, Einstein's General Relativity fits quite well into postmodernism's fractured, multiple, relative perspective on matters. Even Godel showed that that mathematical systems can either be complete or consistent, but not both, and that there will always be certain axioms unproved within a consistent system. Yet these things still fit perfectly with empiricism, materialism, and rationality.

[MorpheusSandman]

I have to put my foot firmly in deterministic camp and say that everything can be explained rationally.

I do wonder about the limits (perhaps even constraints) of rationality when trying to process things that are outside the confines of our own universe. I think that's why there's so much controversy in modern cosmology and quantum physics; our logic is so tied up into our various systems that break down at certain points in both.

[Ecurb]

I'm aware of CS Lewis' argument and I don't find it a strong one. One thing evolution has shown is that random processes will adapt towards what allows it to survive in its given environment, and this can be applied to almost everything, including the chemical and physical reactions in our brains. If we set towards trying to figure out the way things work, then we can device a whole network of cause-and-effect or, perhaps more accurately, entanglement implying cause-and-effect, in order to figure out. We can apply the same filtering system to our own minds and the modes of reasoning it produces. I've long argued that all animals probably have some instinctual form of logic/reasoning in their own minds that allows their brains to process information and act in the manner that will most likely produce the desired result. Early man didn't need to know what a "modus ponens" was to intuitively figure out that "if stick hurts me, it will hurt animal; stick hurts me, stick will hurt animal!" and, what's more, their empirical experiment proved them right, so they were able to pass on this reasoning mode to the next generation because the found out that it worked.

I have no idea what you're on about here: what in the world does modernism and post-modernism have to do with empiricism and materialism? If anything, since the advent of modern science, empiricism and materialism have begun dominating scientific and philosophical discourse to a degree that it never has, and, AFAICT, post-modernism did absolutely nothing to slow it down. In fact, Einstein's General Relativity fits quite well into postmodernism's fractured, multiple, relative perspective on matters. Even Godel showed that that mathematical systems can either be complete or consistent, but not both, and that there will always be certain axioms unproved within a consistent system. Yet these things still fit perfectly with empiricism, materialism, and rationality.

I dont remember Lewis's argument all that well, but I think he would say that natural selection selects for belief systems that improve descendent-leaving success -- which does not necessarily imply that it selects for belief systems that are "true". Obviously (for example) there may very well be (or have been in the past) selective advantages to religious world-views -- and that may be why so many people were religious. But can we say with any certainty that our own non-religious world-views aren't based on the same selective processes?

Empiricism and materialism are modernist (I think, although it doesn't much matter what labels we give them). They tend to be reductionist (we can understand the whole by looking at the parts). The Atheist says, "I have to put my foot firmly in deterministic camp and say that everything can be explained rationally, although we don't know a lot of the answers yet." I assume he means this in a reductionist way -- given more complete knowledge, we can "reduce" the workings of the Universe to physical principles. I'd suggest (and I'm certainly no expert on Postmodernism) that the postmodernist approach would be to reject that and say, "1) The whole can be more than a sum of the parts; 2) Reductionist explanations are often inferior to those using multiple levels of reasoning, and a more web-oriented mode of thinking; 3) all 'rational' explanations are culturally constituted, influenced by lingusitic limitations, and subjective."

If you're interested in Einstein and Godel, here's a New Yorker article about their relationship at Princeton. I highly recomend it (not for anything having to do with this thread, but just because it's a good article): http://www.newyorker.com/archive/200...28crat_atlarge

[cafolini]

When the modernist hears that the whole is more than the sum of the parts, he nods yes like a baboom because he/she feels achieving a whole is some kind of marvel. When you say the same thing to a postmodernist, he thinks that a lot has been missed in determining the whole parts. He/she doesn't think that there is in fact a whole. She thinks the whole is unachievable. She/He's coming from awareness of what can be done, not from idiotic wholism.

[The Atheist]

I do wonder about the limits (perhaps even constraints) of rationality when trying to process things that are outside the confines of our own universe.

That would be a fair point, but I don't acknowledge any other universes at this stage, so am happy to just ignore the idea.. No part of physics calls for their existence, there is zero evidence that there is such a thing, and every theory I've seen proposing additional universes has been puerile garbage.

Given the scale of the universe we do inhabit, I can't see any possibility of the question being other than theoretical anyway.

I think that's why there's so much controversy in modern cosmology and quantum physics; our logic is so tied up into our various systems that break down at certain points in both.

That's not quite accurate. The big question came about when the matter/energy deficit became apparent and lunatic theories have gradually evolved into a fair semblance of consensus around dark matter/energy.

If you have a look at the controversies that do exist, they mostly surround the lunatic theories that haven't yet lost favour entirely. String theory, for example. Very hard to disprove, but not entertained beyond a few media junkies.

[The Atheist]

I'd suggest (and I'm certainly no expert on Postmodernism) that the postmodernist approach would be to reject that and say, "1) The whole can be more than a sum of the parts; 2) Reductionist explanations are often inferior to those using multiple levels of reasoning, and a more web-oriented mode of thinking; 3) all 'rational' explanations are culturally constituted, influenced by lingusitic limitations, and subjective."

I'm quite happy for postmodernists to be wrong. They have no impact on science, especially physics.

The really sad part of that kind of thinking is that it's no more than a plea for magic. Conan Doyle and the Cottingley Fairies.

Look at it: "the whole is more than the sum of its parts".

Physics tells us that that is impossible, because if there is more than the parts, then we missed a part. The only thing that can be added to the parts that science cannot measure is magic. Conscience, consciousness, love, emotion and abstract thinking are the main culprits in the search for non-physical existence and I know many otherwise quite rational people who firmly believe that those things are "above" the physical level.

Interesting you mention C S Lewis, because he quite rightly used exactly that argument in favour of god. He was merely copying old Tommy Aquinas so many centuries earlier with the Summa Theologica. If you accept the belief that there is more than the sum, then the path can only lead to the Abrahamic god.

That isn't why I reject the thinking, by the way - I reject the idea because like multiverses and string theory, it's nonsense backed up by neither logic nor evidence.

[MorpheusSandman]

I dont remember Lewis's argument all that well, but I think he would say that natural selection selects for belief systems that improve descendent-leaving success -- which does not necessarily imply that it selects for belief systems that are "true". Obviously (for example) there may very well be (or have been in the past) selective advantages to religious world-views -- and that may be why so many people were religious. But can we say with any certainty that our own non-religious world-views aren't based on the same selective processes?

I never meant to suggest that natural selection would select belief systems that were true; if anything, I think natural selection has lead to a combination of true beliefs and useful biases/illusions/lies in our cognitive processes. I can certainly see advantages to religious belief systems for a primitive man (strengthen communities, give them confidence that they were chosen/special, justify their desire to conquer/convert, etc.) which would increase their chances of both survival and reproduction. All I meant was that if someone is concerned with truth, we can analyze our own cognitive processes in a rigorous manner and determine which lead to truths and which don't. There's an entire section of studies in cognitive neuroscience around this that deals with, eg, biases and how they distort out ability to find truth. Even in these biases, though, we can often understand why they would've been useful in our survival. Take, eg, our bias to assume agency behind phenomena. Imagine two early humans in the wild; the leaves rustle, and one of them immediately runs assuming it's a predator, and the other stays put because he's not sure. Well, the one who's not sure may be right most of the time (it's probably just the wind), but the time that he's not right and it's a predator means that he's taken out of the gene pool. In such situations, it's better to respond in the manner that will guarantee survival 100% of the time as opposed to responding in the matter that's more likely to be true.

Empiricism and materialism are modernist (I think, although it doesn't much matter what labels we give them). They tend to be reductionist (we can understand the whole by looking at the parts). The Atheist says, "I have to put my foot firmly in deterministic camp and say that everything can be explained rationally, although we don't know a lot of the answers yet." I assume he means this in a reductionist way -- given more complete knowledge, we can "reduce" the workings of the Universe to physical principles. I'd suggest (and I'm certainly no expert on Postmodernism) that the postmodernist approach would be to reject that and say, "1) The whole can be more than a sum of the parts; 2) Reductionist explanations are often inferior to those using multiple levels of reasoning, and a more web-oriented mode of thinking; 3) all 'rational' explanations are culturally constituted, influenced by lingusitic limitations, and subjective."

Empiricism and materialism far precedes modernism; one can find strains of the former going back to Aristotle, and the latter have been scattered about the world since before 1000AD. The primary difference between modernism and postmodernism is that the former, while recognizing that there was an influx of fractured perspectives/views in the world, thought that everything could be collected together into a coherent whole; while the latter, while recognizing the same thing, thought that coherency was impossible. Both tended to try to combine a number of varied voices/perspectives, but the difference is that postmodernism didn't make an attempt at making them cohere. If anything, it's the modernist that would say the whole is more than sum of the parts, while a postmodernist, would just try to produce all of the various parts without an attempt at creating a whole. I'm also not sure how you're using "reductionist," since in science reductionism is more cleanly defined as reducing everything down to its smallest component and giving it a name. A reductionist would never say "red," they'd give you a number that a particular shade of red corresponds to.

That would be a fair point, but I don't acknowledge any other universes at this stage, so am happy to just ignore the idea.. No part of physics calls for their existence, there is zero evidence that there is such a thing, and every theory I've seen proposing additional universes has been puerile garbage.

I think you need to do more research on this, because just about every modern area of science is pointing towards multiple universes, as there is too much that doesn't make sense without them. The recent theory of Inflation, eg, which explained how the visible universe was rendered flat (something necessary for life), predicts multiple universes and was recently corroborated by examinations of the CMBR.

That's not quite accurate. The big question came about when the matter/energy deficit became apparent and lunatic theories have gradually evolved into a fair semblance of consensus around dark matter/energy.

If you have a look at the controversies that do exist, they mostly surround the lunatic theories that haven't yet lost favour entirely. String theory, for example. Very hard to disprove, but not entertained beyond a few media junkies.

I was actually thinking about how our models for gravity break down inside black holes and at the singularity. We can still model them via quantum physics, but we lose General Relativity as the numbers come out to infinities, so something is clearly wrong. The attempt at reconcile QP and GR has taken up a huge chunk of theoretical physics for around the last century, and, so far, the only thing that has been successful at reconciliation is the many-worlds interpretation of QP, that solves a couple other mysteries as well and is actually much simpler. String Theory (and practically every other quantized gravity theory out there) has yet to be really tested, much less proven/disproven. Right now all we have are theories with a logical consistency but without an ability to test them against each other. We may be able to when quantum computing becomes available, but we're looking at several decades if current trends hold.