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Comment by leereeves | Hacker News Reader

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.

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Nobody 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.

I think part of it is that the grandparent’s comment feels like a thinly veiled defense of religion - which is mostly just tedious.

I think it's more a criticism of pure empiricism as a model of reality.

Why? There's not a single reference to religion or any hint that the author might be religious.

I 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.

The 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.

the 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.

We’re probably mostly disputing definitions - I don’t consider those things separate from rationality (well except for spirituality).

Oh 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.

I think this is a pretty good blog post that summarizes how I think of it: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RcZCwxFiZzE6X7nsv/what-do-we...

You can also take rationality to religious extremes and ignore things outside our perception.

This argument needs some reason tbh.

A 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

Nobody 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.

No, 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.

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