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I think part of it is that the grandparent’s comment feels like a thinly veiled defense of religion - which is mostly just tedious.
by fossuser 8y ago
I think part of it is that the grandparent’s comment feels like a thinly veiled defense of religion - which is mostly just tedious.
- staplers 8y agoYou can also take rationality to religious extremes and ignore things outside our perception.
- dingoegret 8y agoNo the Rick & Morty cult of Athiest pounding Dawkins books is getting tedious. I get it though, I was also once 14 years old and thought being nihilistic was cool. Do you realize human civilization is a result of religion? The first cities were built as communities around temples. No one was irrational until suddenly, magically they were; with the accidental discovery of coal. The most impressive history of human development coincides with with the worship of rationality by pure accident. That's what transitioning to a powerful new energy source to replace agrarianism will do. Not because people stopped being religious. Are you kidding me
- chobeat 8y agoWhy? There's not a single reference to religion or any hint that the author might be religious.
- fossuser 8y agoI suppose it’s the tone and the comment about “growing up in a rationality loving western tradition of thought”. Maybe I’m paranoid, but in experience what comes next is typically some mystic mumbo-jumbo or talk about things we “just can’t understand” etc. then usually the speaker is religious. I’d be happy to be wrong. The religion argument is just boring.
- chobeat 8y agothe alternative to reason is not religion. It can be empathy, emotion, spirituality. You can call it mumbo jumbo if you want to, but it's an integral part of how humans experience themselves, the others and the world.
- fossuser 8y agoWe’re probably mostly disputing definitions - I don’t consider those things separate from rationality (well except for spirituality).
- chobeat 8y agoOh they are. When you have to take decisions, give priorities, give up control in favor of something else, you will see how big the gap is. Then if you see emotions as a subset of rationality, then it's again your rational view of the world and how you make sense of it, but it's not the position held by most people.
- fossuser 8y agoI think this is a pretty good blog post that summarizes how I think of it: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RcZCwxFiZzE6X7nsv/what-do-we-mean-by-rationality https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RcZCwxFiZzE6X7nsv/what-do-we...
- anongraddebt 8y agoThe logical positivists of the early 20th century held a semi-silly, self-defeating, and untenable position/range-of-positions in epistemology. No one in analytical philosophy takes their original, strong version of empiricism seriously. One problem is that the more nuanced and plausible weaker versions of empiricism are not held by a number of prominent thinkers in the sciences. Instead, many of them (experts in their respective domains) continue to believe in and espouse semi-silly, self-defeating, and untenable versions of empiricism. Whether Bach actually does is perhaps arguable. What the parent was referring to when he mentioned western rationality being myopic at times is probably something like what I described above.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y agoI think it's more a criticism of pure empiricism as a model of reality.