RE: If people were 100% rational, would the world be better?
July 11, 2021 at 8:09 am
(This post was last modified: July 11, 2021 at 8:34 am by The Grand Nudger.)
I’m not sure that pursuing what me might call our biological imperatives is explicitly irrational. Caring for the disabled, raising injured or deformed children, simply pursuing things that make us giggle, even.
Boils down to what we’re excluding with term. If what we mean by rational is only the intentional and conscious application of a formal western philosophy, then we could lose all rationality and not notice. Things wouldn’t be better or worse for us in everyday life all other things being equal.
At least in thought experiment land. In reality much of the circumstances of our life and much of what brings us joy…even if we wont allow those things to be rational, are/were at least created by such a formal rational process. Things wouldn’t be equal at all.
Or, maybe, the human mind is itself some kind of rational product or process. Such that nothing we do is irrational, though much of what we do amounts to getting things wrong. This is closer to my own position. I wouldn’t call us 100% anything, but I do think that our X tends to get multiple passes at everything we do. This thing, rational or rationalizing, is a tool that we use to more successfully pursue our goals ( whatever we describe them as)
Boils down to what we’re excluding with term. If what we mean by rational is only the intentional and conscious application of a formal western philosophy, then we could lose all rationality and not notice. Things wouldn’t be better or worse for us in everyday life all other things being equal.
At least in thought experiment land. In reality much of the circumstances of our life and much of what brings us joy…even if we wont allow those things to be rational, are/were at least created by such a formal rational process. Things wouldn’t be equal at all.
Or, maybe, the human mind is itself some kind of rational product or process. Such that nothing we do is irrational, though much of what we do amounts to getting things wrong. This is closer to my own position. I wouldn’t call us 100% anything, but I do think that our X tends to get multiple passes at everything we do. This thing, rational or rationalizing, is a tool that we use to more successfully pursue our goals ( whatever we describe them as)
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