3 ms·
Can rationality exist outside of our minds? Is it just another mental heuristic? In meditation, a common teaching is to examine an object for a long period, re
by WhompingWindows 5y ago
Can rationality exist outside of our minds? Is it just another mental heuristic?
In meditation, a common teaching is to examine an object for a long period, really just stare at it and allow your mind to focus on it fully. I see a coffee mug, it has a handle and writing on it, it's off-white and has little coffee stains. This descriptive mind goes a mile-a-minute normally, but eventually you can break through that and realize, this is just a collection of atoms, this is something reflecting photons and pushing back electrically against my skins' atoms. Even deeper, it's just part of the environment, all the things I can notice, like everything else we care about.
Such exercises can help reveal the nature of mind. There are many layers of this onion, and many separate onions vying for our attention at once. Rationality relies upon peeling back these superficial layers of the thought onion to get towards "the truth." That means peeling back biases, emotions, hunches, instincts, and all the little mental heuristics that are nice "shortcuts" for a biologically limited thinker.
But outside our minds, how is there any rationality left? It feels like another program or heuristic we use to make decisions to help us survive and reproduce.