RE: Q. About Rationality and Nature
August 13, 2014 at 5:48 pm
(This post was last modified: August 13, 2014 at 5:50 pm by Thumpalumpacus.)
(August 13, 2014 at 5:22 pm)Pickup_shonuff Wrote:(August 13, 2014 at 4:59 pm)Thumpalumpacus Wrote: Nature is neither rational or irrational, just as tacos are neither cosmopolitan nor hungry.
So I'm thinking "c", arational. The concept of rationality doesn't apply to that which simply is.
I think intelligent beings derive their reason from the attempts over the eons to perceive and predict nature accurately. Selection, being a difficult taskmaster, mercilessly winnows those whose minds don't comport with reality.
So then, nothing can really be said about nature as it is in itself, but only as our minds represent to us, representations which aren't derived by anything at bottom that can be called rational?
At the risk of sounding solipsistic (which I'm not), our perceptions are the data stream upon which we base our inductions. It is entirely possible that we are right, about nature, for the wrong reasons, in the same way that intuition can give you the right result without any possible explanation of how you got there. We may not be perceiving accurately, but we still may be perceiving accurately enough to get the job done.
As far as your use of rational, I think the difficulty I'm having with it is that it is a personal faculty, being applied to an impersonal phenomenon. I'm not sure, but I'm thinking that you perhaps mean "comprehensible"? Correct me if I'm wrong. I certainly think that the Universe is comprehensible, that it follows an internally logical set of behaviors that we humans call "laws".
Sorry if I seem overly pedantic about this.
Also, it should be pointed out that our minds, too, are natural. Where that puts us vis the rationality of nature is a little recursive. It seems the above could well be in error, then.