Natural Order and Science

[Alex K]

-- I'll repost this if it's ok so it doesn't get buried under Harris' heap of crap

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Chad, an honest question –

Your preface is not necessary. I consider all your questions genuine. You’ve consistently demonstrated your sincerity.

...while I acknowledge that the efficacy of reason is not obviously a given and more like a working assumption which appears to yield consistent results, I still wonder, is there a coherent notion of the alternative? Could reality be unintelligible or might such a sentence be meaningless.

This is an idea I’ve been toying with lately. There seem to be two notions at play: 1) the efficacy of reason and 2) the intelligibility of reality. The first has to do with the capacity of the knowing subject. The second concerns the nature of external reality.

Just because human reason works doesn’t mean the object of inquiry (reality) is actually intelligible. Perhaps it is absurd. Perhaps it is just so. Either way, it is as it is for no reason at all. Alternatively, even if reality were intelligible that doesn’t mean the mental toolkit (reason) is valid. Reasoning could be a linguistic trick or compelling illusion. Self-evident truths only appear so to a brain functions evolved for see patterns even where none exist.

Now, I personally do not believe either of these. I believe that human reason reflects a reality that is as it is for discernable (but not necessarily obvious) reasons.

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Interesting, the thought to treat the two separately never really occurred to me before. In one direction I feel it might be justified not to, because, if reason does not work, does the concept of intelligibility even survive? Isn't that a stopping point where nothing further can even be said?
In the other direction, I kind of unwittingly assumed the mind to come from the brain, and that to be part of the outside world. Thus under these conditions, in an unintelligible world I find it doubtful that reason can be generated. But I haven't given much thought to that - of course if the mind(s) are a separate thing not dependent on worldly order for their operation, there could plausibly be reason without intelligibility of the outside world. The mind would then form a small intelligible (maybe not, but an orderly and consistent one) patch of the world on its own, which communicates with the remainder somehow.
If I, as you do in an aside in your response, entertain the idea that the mind came about through evolution, my knee jerk conclusion would be that it needs a "logical" world in order to produce reliable reason.

I also wonder what it would mean for the world to be unintelligible. If quantum uncertainty is actually non-deterministic (it might be), wouldn't "unintelligibility" already creep in there? In the same vein, the perception of the arrow of time seems to be a statistical phenomenon that becomes fuzzy when looking at small subsystems and all but disappears when considering one or two particles. What criteria does the universe have to fulfil to you for the label "intelligible" to be justified?