[extropy-chat] Mature rationality

[Samantha Atkins]

On Mon, 13 Sep 2004 16:05:07 -0400, Eliezer Yudkowsky
<sentience at pobox.com> wrote:
> Anyone who wishes to make a serious commitment to rationality, to learn it
> as an art the way that judo or fencing is an art, must commit to being
> rational all the time, every time, twenty four hours a day seven days a
> week, with not a single area of life reserved for relaxing with some
> comfortable nonsense, not one place left where that darned inconvenient
> rationality business can't stomp all over the things you want to believe.
>

Very well put.  It leaves open two questions:

a) What is and is not rationality?

b) Given (a) is rationality so all encompassing or fundamental to all
one's values that full commitment to it, epecially to the point of
excluding what is not accesible to it,  is the only sane choice?

 
> Once upon a time the stars were mysteries, life was mysterious, matter was
> mysterious, unexplained and unexplainable.  But, once again, a blank spot
> on the map is not a blank spot on the territory.  There are mysterious
> questions, never mysterious answers.  People have no sense of history, no
> sense of how reasonable past errors seemed *at the time*.  If only I had
> *personally* postulated astrological mysteries and discovered Newtonian
> gravitation, *personally* postulated alchemical mysteries and discovered
> chemistry, *personally* postulated vitalistic mysteries and discovered
> biology.  I would have invented a mysterious explanation for consciousness
> and thought to myself, "No way am I falling for that again."  People don't
> assign history the same weight as personal experience, even if the universe
> repeats the lesson over and over and over.
> 

Good point.  While I don't believe in a "God of the gaps" or in "God"
at all by most people's lights, I do believe that there are aspects of
human nature that require a sort of vision-logic that is not confined
to what most people mean by "rationality".   It feels strange to write
that in response to something you, of all people, wrote.  You
obviously have tons of "vision" and far greater dedication to that
vision that most religious folks can claim.   Perhaps you have bridged
the gap to a fully rational vision-logic.  But it does not seem like
this is so yet.


> There are human stories told around a campfire, full of mighty heroes and
> passionate gods and comforting resolutions; and there are the stories the
> universe whispers to itself, strange dreams of physics equations, an
> unbelievable style of storytelling in which things are explained by maths
> instead of morals.  It seems to me that the human style of storytelling -
> you know, the one that just plain doesn't work - is what people call
> "religious" or "spiritual".  

To dismiss it with "just plain doesn't work" is incorrect.  It
actually does work quite well or it would not have survived and even
thrived for so long.  It works well for binding groups together, for
raising one's eyes above the daily grind, for refining yearning for
and views of transcendence and much more.  It has done these things
for thousands of years.  Yeah, granted that it has done them with a
lot of krap in the mix.  But it is not true it is all just worthless
blather.

>It takes a mature rationalist indeed to live
> in the universe the Way it really is, one coherent unified mathematical
> process with not a single shred of human-style storytelling
> ("spirituality") in it.  It may seem harsh - ungracious - for rationalists
> to demand so complete a triumph, to leave not a single shred of consolation
> for spiritualists; but the truth is not a compromise between political
> factions.  This is the way the universe has always been.  The rationalists
> did not invent this answer, only prove themselves mature enough to accept it.
>

As the universe includes human beings there obviously is more than a
shred of spirituality (and other human activity) in it.  It may seem
ridiculous to you but imho you are one of the most profoundly moral
and even spiritual people I have ever met.

We need to work with what humans are.  Saying only those humans who
totally chuck aspects of their humanity that the vast majority
consider immensely important are "rational" and thus honest and mature
is saying that most people may be dismissed as deluded fools.   Few
will chose to follow into the rational desert you portray.  If we are
to have a hope of uplifting ourselves then shouldn't we start with the
fullness of what humanity is?  Shouldn't we use all the tools and
aspects of humans that can be at all useful?   Why start by throwing
out much of what people consider of great value?

> Bayes' Theorem plus a Kolmogorov distribution over prior probabilities is
> complete.  It assigns a probability to everything.  The probability it
> assigns to complex unsupported hypotheses is extremely low. 

Many people do not share your faith in Bayes as the determiner of all
things or even as the lynchpin of rationality.

> Religion and the religious are irrational, in the sense that they assign
> higher confidence to certain propositions than probability theory calls
> for.  Ignorance of the math is, in some ways, an excuse - it means that at
> least some spiritual people have not knowingly turned against the truth,
> they honestly believe that it's okay to draw in whatever they like on blank
> areas of the map.  


This has very little to do with spirituality.  

But that doesn't change the math, and so they're still
> irrational.
> 
> There is no God.  Thank you for asking.  Now get on with your lives,
> knowing that you alone are in charge.
> 


Yes.  We are in charge of what we believe and what we encourage others
to believe.  We are responsible for it.  It is not a quick thought
what the effects of one's beliefs are on self and others.   It is not
obvious that rationality as you define it would lead humanity to the
future it actually wants.

Rationality is vastly important.  But it will not give us the vision
or the compassion or the wisdom we need to actually form and
accomplish our dreams.   This does not mean that rationality is to be
offended.  It merely means there are aspects of human life that are
not directly accessible to rationality.

- samantha