[rlx0x]

Well that didn't make a whole lot of sense. The most methodical use of the methods of rationality you'll find are the natural sciences and they are incredibly open to anyone interested. Its just that most people are not actually interested at all. Nor are they in rationality.

This guy is a bit like a confused version of Noam Chomsky.

[littletimmy]

He's essentially trying to say that there is more to knowledge than reason. Which is true and often ignored in today's "scientific" society [for example, the demise of humanities funding in colleges]. Proust is completely unreasonable when he talks about certain smells evoking memories of his mama, but it is unfair to dismiss his thoughts - as many uber-rationalists do - as worthless sentiment.

[harshreality]

It's reasonable, and scientifically compatible, to talk about smells evoking memories of parents. There isn't a rational process that creates the link between a sensory trigger and a memory, but there's a rational process and scientific field(s) of study by which that link (neurobiology) and its formation (psychology) can be understood.

That kind of argument seems to me like, "Nobody [unless there's a God] rationally constructed the theory of gravity, or the complexity of fluid dynamics, therefore there's more to gravity or fluid dynamics than can be understood through rationality and science."

[littletimmy]

Scientifically compatible, yes. Reasonable, no. Emotion is not reason; it is a completely separate enterprise. That's partly what the article is talking about.

[kang]

Emotion is ingrained reason through the process of evolution. For example, we feel disgust seeing an open wound because apes who didn't care got infected and died. The ones who learned to stay away, through reasoning their observations, later on abstracted it to the emotion of disgust, rather than spending energy to reason it out every time.

Similarly, a good fragrance could easily be a bad fragrance to an alien. Maybe, because good fragrances are associated with eatables, our mind categorised it to be a "good" fragrance.

Emotion is a mechanism developed by the brain to not spend energy reasoning things out every time. We understand this today and hence decide that emotion is a bias in the scientific method, but since we are humans and emotional by evolution/definition, we prove that bias did not occur by providing data for the experiment to be reproducible.

However, the evolutionary reason for the development of a particular emotion might not exist anymore. We now know that urine is sterile and no longer need to be disgusted. There are many tribes that have learned this and although the natural emotion of disgust might kick in, they still use it for its antiseptic properties to heal wounds. Many hindus drink cow urine.

[pron]

It's interesting that you bring up disgust, because that exact reaction is at the core of the seminal work by the sociologist Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process[1].

He traces the evolution of manners through etiquette books (a remarkably enduring genre going back many centuries), and shows how things that evoke a strong digust response in us today were actually slow-evolving social norms that have been internalized and turned into habitus (or a super-ego), and he even mentions urine, which for a long while hadn't evoked the same reaction as today. For example, some centuries ago in Europe, urinating under the staircase indoors was actually quite acceptable, and blowing your nose into the tablecloth was considered good manners.

This, of course, doesn't mean that the capacity for disgust isn't evolutionary, but that its particular triggers are social, even though we perceive them to be natural.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Civilizing_Process

[gress]

Actually not. This is your explanation for what emotion is, based on your scientific framework. It is not some kind of absolute truth. Given that you have no explanation for consciousness, there is a limit to your framework when it comes to explaining emotion.

[kang]

No this is not my conclusion. The reason I specifically talked about disgust, as opposed to the context of good fragrance in the previous comment, is that it specifically is a scientific conclusion, read in the works of Steven Pinker and Paul Bloom among others.

The debate is whether emotion is independent of reason, and both are pretext under consiousness, so you are sidetracking.

[harshreality]

Does that "separate enterprise" amount to knowledge? I don't think so. It's an artifact of neurology. It's an important artifact, and one that can't be ignored (when studying psychology or sociology, or managing humans, or planning events involving humans), but nevertheless that emotional artifact is not useful knowledge. Only the [scientifically and rationally understandable] mechanisms behind the emotional and sentimental connections are useful knowledge. The connections themselves may serve sociological purposes, enabling cultural knowledge generation and accumulation, not to mention improving societal stability, but in themselves emotional artifacts are not knowledge.

[littletimmy]

Sure, knowledge is true justified belief (we can add that it must be able to be transmitted). This separate enterprise is certainly true, insofar as it is a qualitative experience of somebody, it is justified and it is also a belief. He transmits it through his writing.

Your argument is presupposes your conclusion that this kind of thinking is not knowledge. That said, even if it is isn't knowledge, so what? Does not mean it is not valuable. With questioning the primacy of reason we can also question the primacy of conventional modes of knowledge.

[pron]

> knowledge is true justified belief

Or is it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettier_problem

[JackFr]

> Only the [scientifically and rationally understandable] mechanisms behind the emotional and sentimental connections are useful knowledge.

You understand that that is a pure value judgement.

At their heart, love of freedom over slavery, compassion over apathy and wisdom over ignorance are value judgements. I know them to be true, but I cannot prove them rationally.

[pron]

> It's an artifact of neurology

The fact that something is an artifact of something else doesn't mean that it can be meaningfully reduced to it (or even tractably reduced to it at all). Suppose we discovered the most basic of physical laws, and suppose that somehow computational power made a simulation of them tractable. Is our ability to simulate the universe the same as understanding every aspect of it?

On a more basic level, running software is an artifact of hardware (yet the software can simulate a computer with different semantics than the computer it's running on). So is the study of hardware the only relevant knowledge of the running software? And if you say that the software exists independently of the hardware, you'll find yourself with an idealist philosophy that, according to you, is at odds with your materialistic view.

[TelmoMenezes]

You fly through words like "knowledge" and "useful" without giving them proper thought. What do these words mean? We lived in a philosophy-starved culture. Too much social media, not enough deep thought.

And how can you know that what you call rationality is also not an artifact of neurology? In fact, Gödel proved that if you don't doubt your own rationality, you are in fact being irrational.

I think science is cheapened by this sort of blind faith. The defining characteristic of the scientific attitude is doubt, not certainty.

[eli_gottlieb]

>And how can you know that what you call rationality is also not an artifact of neurology? In fact, Gödel proved that if you don't doubt your own rationality, you are in fact being irrational.

That is not at all what Goedel's theorems actually say.

>We lived in a philosophy-starved culture. Too much social media, not enough deep thought.

No, we live in a culture that loves to engage in cheap, shoddy philosophizing by generalizing incorrectly from facts.

[pron]

> there's a rational process and scientific field(s) of study by which that... can be understood.

Yes, but only for a very specific definition of "understanding". See my other comment about universal computation and phenomenology. There are other, no less valid, forms of understanding. I believe that the idea of universal computation reconciles materialism with idealism, putting them both on equal footing. The workings of the software cannot be tractably (and certainly not meaningfully, by any common sense of "meaning") reduced to the material existence of the computer.

[JabavuAdams]

He makes some good points that are worthy of more thought and consideration.

It does seem dated, though. The point about experts not being really free to express themselves is well taken, but the idea that knowledge is being hoarded makes no sense in the Youtube era.

In the last month I've watched videos on how to grind your own optics, make a vacuum chamber to aluminize them, etc. etc. We're in the middle of a creative explosion.

[pron]

That is a very 19th-century view that you're expressing (although I know that some popular blogs are espousing this rather quaint view of rationality today[0]). Today, the view is much more nuanced. Science is based on a few assumptions and interpretations that have been the study of what's known as the philosophy of science[1]. Just to get a taste of the difficulty of going from science to knowledge, read about epistemology and, especially, the Gettier problem[2]. The paradox raised by the Gettier problem is not interesting in and of itself, but it strongly ties what we know or think we know about the world, to what we are and what we think.

This inseparable connection is a source of more modern views on the relationship between science and knowledge, like phenomenology[2]. If you want to translate these views back to scientific, or mathematical terms, you can see the essential problem a brain — i.e. a computer — introduces into the universe. Due to universal computation, a universe may contain a material approximation (that it is just a finite approximation matters little) that is more general than the containing universe itself (as it can contain any universe), and thus more general than the laws of nature, which are particular to the “host” universe. This makes subjective experience, namely the inner workings of the computer, not secondary to objective experience, namely the laws of the host universe. The mechanical construction of the computer bears little relevance to the to the computation -- or simulation -- the software is carrying out. Truth, therefore, can mean different things depending on which universe you are talking about, and neither can be said to be secondary to the other.

The scientific method has, obviously, been extremely useful in uncovering certain types of truths, and extremely unhelpful in uncovering others, that cannot be said to be of less import. Since we live in a world constructed by our software, it makes little sense to say that it is the laws of the host universe that matter more (except in the sense that they can kill us, or interfere with the software, but that only makes them important -- not supremely important).

[0]: Although the modern reincarnation justifies itself through utility rather than a deeper philosophical justification, namely, science is useful in the physical world, hence science is the "best" form of knowledge (accepting the supremacy of the physical world as either an axiom, or a materialist belief that smooths over definitions of reduction). You can call this "utilitarian epistemology", namely the view that 'what we know is what we can use'.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenomenology_(philosophy)