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The "rationality-loving Western tradition of thought" has given us cures for diseases, crops that feed 7 billion people, worldwide communications, and machines
by leereeves 8y ago
The "rationality-loving Western tradition of thought" has given us cures for diseases, crops that feed 7 billion people, worldwide communications, and machines that fly, travel to other planets, even drive themselves. Those are pretty good reasons to trust that way of making sense of the world.
And your closing remark just sounds like an attack on the pitch of his voice, further weakening your argument, such as it is.
- dingoegret 8y agoAre you really doing the whole "look what my people have invented" thing? Lol Yes no one else in the world has ever progressed humanity. We were all living in caves until teh west man invented medicine (actually first meaningfully invented by Muslims along with introducing such basic things as repetitious hygiene). No civilization or maximum crop yields in China before the white man in Europe y'all.
- buchhalter37 8y agoGreat argument for white supremacy... Watch the talk and the Q&A, interested to know what you think after that. Love, A new HN User excited to have an informed exchange of views
- dang 8y agoNow you're trolling. (In this case, lighting a piece of flamebait and tossing it into an inflammatory situation, which you helped to make inflammatory in the first place). Doing that will get you banned here. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use this site in the intended spirit, we'd be grateful.
- leereeves 8y agoWhat the hell does that have to do with white supremacy? Rationality is available to anyone regardless of race, and isn't exclusively a creation of white people either. You called it a "Western" tradition of thought and I was merely echoing your words. In truth, "the East" contributed a lot, many people in "the West" don't value rationality, and many people elsewhere do. Our rational view of the world is a shared achievement and inheritance by and for anyone who chooses to contribute.
- ultrasounder 8y agoUpvoted!.
- buchhalter37 8y agoDid you edit your comment to remove the condescending remark about my new HN account? Wow. Well I’m glad to hear that “the East” had something to contribute too!
- rwnspace 8y agoPlease, it's quite obvious your intent is in part to generate emotion and not purely 'informed exchange'. Your tone is not appropriate to this community. Some things I've learned here: give your fellow conversationalists as much benefit of the doubt as you can. It's wise to avoid tactics of rhetoric such as reductio ad absurdum. Try explain your thoughts in such a way that we do not have to guess. I'm actually quite sure you have something interesting to contribute, but please, politeness is important here.
- buchhalter37 8y agoApologies for the sarcasm. I felt that the previous comment was very much ad hominem and the edit was particularly insidious. But you’re right, no excuse for bad form here :)
- dkersten 8y agoOr he edited it out because after reflection he realised t didn’t add anything useful? That often happens to me — I write something more snarky than I meant to and only realise after the fact and then edit my comment to remove it. My intent, when I do this, is not one of malice.
- leereeves 8y agoDo you not feel your initial comment was ad hominem? "Listening to Joscha Bach is like listening to the screams of computer scientists as they are slowly squeezed to death." I initially reacted to that and replied more harshly than I should have, so I edited the comment slightly to remove the emotion. What's insidious about that?
- chobeat 8y agoNobody here criticized the value of reason. The problem is when you overvalue reason. Water is good for you, too much water kills you. Saying "too much water is bad" or "water is not good when your problem is that your socks are wet" is not an attack on water itself. You waterists should all calm down.
- gr__or 8y agoThis argument needs some reason tbh.
- chobeat 8y agoA good part of the 20th century's philosophy is about this. I mean, many philosophers talked about it extensively even before (Kant? Hume?). It's not an argument, it's a whole branch of philosophy and epistemology. I've never read a book specific to this topic but if you want one, here's one that looks good, engineer-friendly and simple enough: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/outer-limits-reason https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/outer-limits-reason
- leereeves 8y agoNobody here denied there are limits to rationality; as you point out, reason itself has in fact proven that there are. But as far as I know there's no proof that consciousness is beyond the limits of reason. The mere fact that reason is limited is not a universal argument against all rational discussion.
- chobeat 8y agoNo, it's not, but the problem with his argument is that he gives a narrow and extremely specific definition of consciouness and then all the structure works. I'm not really that much in the debate about consciousness but I'm a lot into the one about intelligence: there are many definitions of intelligence and none of them seems satisfying. You can define intelligence from a rational point of view, as some kind of function or model, but it's extremely narrow, arbitrary and limited. That's the trick he uses. To me it's not enough. The very idea of intelligence is restrictive, antropocentric and confusing. That's because with the existing tools we have (including reason) we cannot converge to a satisfying idea of intelligence, that eludes our analysis.