Quotes About Rationality

Once we have isolated the computational and neurological correlates of access-consciousness, there is nothing left to explain. It's just irrational to insist that sentience remains unexplained after all the manifestations of sentience have been accounted for, just because the computations don't have anything sentient in them. It's like insisting that wetness remains unexplained even after all the manifestations of wetness have been accounted for, because moving molecules aren't wet.

Day-to-day political debates are also contests between metaphors. Citizens are not rational and pay no attention to facts, except as they fit into frames, and the frames are fixed in the neural structures of [their] brains. In George W. Bush's first term, for example, he promised tax relief, which frames taxes as an affliction, the reliever as a hero, and anyone obstructing him as a villain.

The beauty of reason is that it can always be applied to understand failures of reason.

It has become commonplace to conclude that humans are simply irrational—more Homer Simpson than Mr. Spock, more Alfred E. Neuman than John von Neumann. And, the cynics continue, what else would you expect from descendants of hunter-gatherers whose minds were selected to avoid becoming lunch for leopards?

How, then, can we understand this thing called rationality which would appear to be our birthright yet is so frequently and flagrantly flouted?

Submitting all of one's beliefs to the trials of reason and evidence is an unnatural skill, like literacy and numeracy, and must be instilled and cultivated.

reason, by itself, is just a means of getting from one true proposition to the next and does not care about the value of those propositions.

Si uno ensalza la razón, entonces lo que importa es la integridad de los pensamientos, no las personalidades de los pensadores.

hándicaps racionales

Those who are governed by reason desire nothing for themselves which they do not also desire for the rest of humankind.

If contemporary humans seem irrational, don't blame the hunter-gatherers.

cuando las personas aumentan su curiosidad intelectual y su cultura científica, dejan de creer en milagros.

The psychologist David Myers has said that the essence of monotheistic belief is: (1) There is a God and (2) it's not me (and it's also not you).6 The secular equivalent is: (1) There is objective truth and (2) I don't know it (and neither do you). The same epistemic humility applies to the rationality that leads to truth. Perfect rationality and objective truth are aspirations that no mortal can ever claim to have attained.

The penultimate chapter will lay out how some of today's florid outbursts of irrationality may be understood as the rational pursuit of goals other than an objective understanding of the world.

Foremost is reason. Reason is nonnegotiable. As soon as you show up to discuss the question of what we should live for (or any other question), as long as you insist that your answers, whatever they are, are reasonable or justified or true and that therefore other people ought to believe them too, then you have committed yourself to reason, and to holding your beliefs accountable to objective standards.

The indispensability of reason does not imply that individual people are always rational or are unswayed by passion and illusion. It only means that people are capable of reason, and that a community of people who choose to perfect this faculty and to exercise it openly and fairly can collectively reason their way to sounder conclusions in the long run.

It begins with skepticism.147 The history of human folly, and our own susceptibility to illusions and fallacies, tell us that men and women are fallible. One therefore ought to seek good reasons for believing something.

Kahan concludes that we are all actors in a Tragedy of the Belief Commons: what's rational for every individual to believe (based on esteem) can be irrational for the society as a whole to act upon (based on reality).17

one can imagine a leader who has a changing willingness to suffer a cost over time, increasing as the conflict proceeds and his resolve toughens. His motto would be: "We fight on so that our boys shall not have died in vain." This mindset, known as loss aversion, the sunk-cost fallacy, and throwing good money after bad, is patently irrational, but it is surprisingly pervasive in human decision-making.

A major theme of this book is that none of us, thinking alone, is rational enough to consistently come to sound conclusions: rationality emerges from a community of reasoners who spot each other's fallacies.

Finally, an intensifying application of knowledge and rationality to human affairs - the escalator of reason - can force people to recognize the futility of cycles of violence, to ramp down the privileging of their own interests over others', and to re-frame violence as a problem to be solved rather than a contest to be won.

If you extol reason, then what matters is the integrity of the thoughts, not the personalities of the thinkers.

What they argued was that we ought to be rational, by learning to repress the fallacies and dogmas that so readily seduce us, and that we can be rational, collectively if not individually, by implementing institutions and adhering to norms that constrain our faculties, including free speech, logical analysis, and empirical testing. And if you disagree, then why should we accept your claim that humans are incapable of rationality?

A quantitative mindset, despite its nerdy aura, is in fact the morally enlightened one, because it treats every human life as having equal value rather than privileging the people who are closest to us or most photogenic