torsdag 22 april 2010

Trapped

Reading Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance makes you question things. Scientists, philosophers and mathematicians (and others) often explore concepts very difficult to imagine or visualize. We can do that because we know that as long as we stay rational and don't disobey logic we will prevail wherever we end up. Most of mathematics is impossible to visualize correctly, although we suspect it is right since we didn't break any logical rules getting there. In the end we can always fall back on rationality and reason.

But rationality and reason are clearly concepts our minds made up. Assuming that would always work is just like a bad movie where a bad guy in prison is of course is going to find a tool to break out. In real life this rarely happens. Would you assume that a moron always will reach the right conclusion just because he claims he used reason? Probably not. But the moron who used his "reason" will probably fail to identify his lack of "reason" rather than to correctly conclude that he is stupid.

If I am also stupid and my reason sucks, I am likely to fail to see this. Because of genetic pride I will rather use my poor reasoning to conclude untrue things than to rightly conclude that I am too stupid to reason.

If this is not the case then reason is objective and only truly applied if one knows how to handle it. But the moron will nevertheless believe he is worthy of this objective tool and use it happily to conclude untrue things. And if we are the moron, we, will never know.