Excellent analysis (ironically) and breakdown of the mechanisms involved, and the control elements of a rational indoctrination.
As I've often written and spoken about: the yang/left brain/"masculine" qualities of execution or linear analysis etc are meant to follow the yin receptivities of intuition and Whole Mind (Spirit) wisdom and direct knowing. This is what Einstein and, for millennia, Eastern philosophy, are pointing to.
Once this is realized and embodied individually, one experiences less suffering and more ease, usually.
This is why I continue to speak about it - because this individual awakening IS inseparable from a collective movement. As we know, the external peace sought is parallel to our own peace.
This is such a beautiful topic.
I've long said regarding business consultation: all business (when you really dig in) is emotional. This is how we can assist open-minded leaders - through this understanding. Go to the emotional body of the exec or organization, and there you see the roots of the matter at hand.
You got it right- I am consciously using logic to bring down rationality off the pedestal. 😍. Thank you for all your great inisghts. I loved that article where you explain that intuition, wisdom, direct knowing comes first. It's a profound truth we've lost along the way. Thank you for your comment and all you do!
Coming back to the use of words: Does the term ‘irrational’ carry too much baggage of the dismissive, derogatory kind? It might be a little better to return to ‘Intuitive’ — denoting beliefs held without recourse to ‘evidence’. And it can be shown that the effort to completely trace the evidence for the premises of arguments and their successor issue arguents et;c ends up at premises deemed acceptable (self-evident) without further evidence, which is the definition of intuitive; while the laudable effort to justify reliance on intuition consists of arguments the arguer suggest should be acceptable to the listener — ‘reasoning’, still a form of ‘rationality’? So the quarrel comes full circle, Is it not necessary, — to the extent collective action is seen as needed — to just accept all arguments and let the participants in an organized discourse sort out what is acceptable and what’s not — again, in degrees — in each specific planning situation. But separating content from judgment. From what little I know about the specific AI-‘thinking’ process, AI can do ‘probability’ forecasts e.g. of the sequence of effects of plan actions and/or non-actions (based on data from the past); but the ‘goodness’ judgments must be reserved for humans. I don’t know to what extent today’s AI models do what I envisioned in a course on question-answering systems some 50+ years ago: Given a data set of all human instrumental technoloogy A—> B causal ‘ technoloogy’ knowledge, could new potential technology be ‘created’ simply by exploring new combinations of items in that data base? What additional data would be needed to enable the machine to judge an outcome as good or bad? My reaction to that question (I never learned how to program those things) was that we need a better organized discourse in which humans enter the missing perts: judgments. My speculation papers and posts on that are on Acdemia .edu, Researchgate, my ‘Abbeboulah.com Wordpress page and my Substack platform; I have not succeeded in starting a useful discussion about this important topic.
My sense is that the controversies about rational versus irrational, objective versus subjective, facts versus — what? — are ‘wrong question’ quarrels. They depend on the various definitions one chooses, and most tend to end up in paradoxical such as ‘if being rational means basing one’s positions / conclusions on (logical) reasons — arguments whose supporting premises are based on other logical arguments whose premises are based on …. and so on, there is no end to the attempt of being rational — unless you accept premises that are ‘self-evident’ (to what ‘self’?) and do not require further explanation or evidence — which is the definition of ’irrationality’ (beliefs without evidence).
I have been looking at the kinds of statements we use in discussions about what we ought to do about ‘problems’ — understood as discrepancies between what we see as what IS (or will be) the case and what we feel OUGHT to be or become the case, and HOW that might be achieved. I have suggested that we those statements ‘planning arguments’: we use them all the time as the ‘pros and cons’ about proposed HOW suggestions (PLANS), though they are not properly deductive arguments in the view of formal logic.
These arguments can be stated in a common pattern (of which there are several variants due to negation of one or more premises) :
PLAN A ought to be adopted (‘conclusion?) because
1) PLAN A will result in outcome B, given conditions C; (— a ‘factual-instrumental’ claim)
and
2) Outcome B OUGHT to be pursued; (a deontic (Ought-) claim)
and
3) Conditions C are (or will be) present. (a Factual claim)
What we can see in this pattern is that
- All the claims are about the future and thus not ‘true’ yet, (however based on past or current ‘facts’)
- The pattern is not formally, deductively, ‘valid’ (in the sense that one must accept the conclusion if all premises are ‘true’;
- No PLAN ever rests on one single ‘clinching’ argument but as rthe above colloquial meme acknowledges , many ‘pros and cons’;
- Even the premises 1 and 3 that we may loosely consider ‘factual’ are only ‘probable’ in the furture;
- premise 2 (the ‘ought’ -premise) cannot properly be called true or ‘probable’ but at best ‘plausible’
- So any attempt to evaluate the merit (‘weight’) of such arguments must be in terms of ‘degrees’, that is expressed on some agreed-upon (‘quantitative’) scale.
- Premise 2 can contain claims of ‘ought’s that can be derived from previously accepted norms, laws, standards, but also, and more importantly so, on visions, ideals, possibilities. dreams.
I have suggested to use ‘plausible’ for all these claims, for simplicty, with a common scale such as +1 (meaning ‘totally plausible’) to -1 (totally implausible’) with a neutral middle point zero (‘don’t know’). plus a ‘weighing’ scale for the deontic premise 2 (e.g. 0 to +1 such that all weights in th pro/con list of deonitc clims add up to 1. This acknowledges that we are making decisions based on our different opinions, NOT on the TRUTH, which we don’t know no matter how much we try to ‘predict’ the future.
We owe it to each other to explain our basis for proposing, supporting, or opposing plan proposals. Whether we call that process ‘reasoning’, ‘rationality’ or something else, we might be able to agree on some basic rules:
We have a right to our personal opinions and basis of judgments, even about plans that have outcomes for more than our individual selves. So we may have the right to support or oppose a plan based on those judgments. But if we attempt to convince others to join our opinions, we must agree to offer explanations for our the basis of our judgment. And if differences of judgment persist, we must find common agreements for dealing with those disagreements and reaching collective decisisons: these agreements will involve acceptances of responsibility for the risk of failure of plans, and fashioning commonly acceptable provisions for the allocation of outcome benefits and costs. Can we call this process ‘reasoning’? Insistence on personal intuition as the justification for adopting plans in the face of others’ opposing intuiton of expression of judgment looks insufficient, unreasonable, ‘Irrational’? These words don’t adequately reflect the mutual responsibility of explanation nor ‘due consideration’ we should give our plans. But: Resorting to coercion and violence to ensure ‘acceptance of plans felt to be disadvantageous to some affected parties is an acknowledgement of incompetence or lack of willingness or ability for that process. What should we call it?
I agree that debates over "rational vs. irrational" or "objective vs. subjective" miss the point when applied to real-world decision-making. If I understand correctly, you discuss the collective decision making as a combination of individual ones which, yes, inherently rely on a mix of uncertain facts, values, and visions — none of which can claim ultimate truth. According to me, a collective decision is not a mix or negotiations between individual ones. Good collective decisions, instead of chasing perfect rationality and stonger arguments, are about engaging in a shared process. In other words, they are done in connection, and require openess of heart and mind, and care. When done like that, the results greatly surpass the sum of the individual decisions and intelligences. I've seen that plenty of times.
At the same time, I have no illusions that we are are very far from being able to apply such processes to big collective decisions. I also know that the majority of people do not consciously fully see how their own thinking impacts their lives and the collective one. Hence, we often see resort to force and a failure of collective dialogue and imagination.
Therefore, for me it boils down to raising individual awareness. That in itself leads to engaging differently in collective processes as well.
I state at the beginning of my book on Living Systems - that it came as a meditation rising through me because of the way I associate with life, throughout it the conversation is talking like you here about why we are held away from all that we know to be perfectly intuitively true and that is to fit into a system outside of who we are. Our sacredness, oneness, intuitive sensed beings inherently know how to create and function in this world - we are just so far removed from it we don't remember. Yes to this Natalia and thank you for writing this ...
Yes, more and more people are starting to feel this and yet, predominantly as a society we remain stuck in the old. Part of the work we are called in to do is to dismantle the old stories that do not serve us anymore, or maybe they never served us that well. Mostly, we hold on to them out of habit and inertia. "Being rational" is one of many such stories. Thank you for reading and for your own work!
I whole heartedly agree with you, Natalia. Nothing really good happens without irrationality aka vision, intuition, feeling, and joyful acceptance of that and relegation of rationality to its useful but limited sphere. Patriarchy and capitalism are inseparable bedfellows, therefore women bear the brunt of insistence on rationality as witnessed in the attempts at diminishing women when we are 'emotional' when we don't know why but we just know, and so on. Brava Natalia! I'm off to finish some extremely irrational paintings, with floating leaves, fantasy flowers, ridiculous vessels and a lot of gold. Viva !
Thank you for so clearly delineating the impact of our traditional education system! This is wonderful food for thought and a great lens to view our decision- making process through. I look forward to seeing where rationality binds me. I love your writing!
Well well..... you rationally broke it down!!! lol. You always spell it out rationally! I like your ending about the system of education built to create rational beings. For me all of this society is just social conditioning. Art for me can't be rational. Rational is like control for me.... doesn't exist in our world. It is a false thing which just causes major problems just like rational. For me rational has been abolished. Another winner for you. lets spread this around as much as possible.
I agree, Theresa. It's not either or, and I did not mean it like that. It is indeed both/and. My intent was to raise awareness that believing solely in rationality alone brought us where we are today, and will not brings us where we dream to be tomorrow.
Excellent analysis (ironically) and breakdown of the mechanisms involved, and the control elements of a rational indoctrination.
As I've often written and spoken about: the yang/left brain/"masculine" qualities of execution or linear analysis etc are meant to follow the yin receptivities of intuition and Whole Mind (Spirit) wisdom and direct knowing. This is what Einstein and, for millennia, Eastern philosophy, are pointing to.
Once this is realized and embodied individually, one experiences less suffering and more ease, usually.
This is why I continue to speak about it - because this individual awakening IS inseparable from a collective movement. As we know, the external peace sought is parallel to our own peace.
This is such a beautiful topic.
I've long said regarding business consultation: all business (when you really dig in) is emotional. This is how we can assist open-minded leaders - through this understanding. Go to the emotional body of the exec or organization, and there you see the roots of the matter at hand.
Just like we do in systemic constellation!
Thank you, Natalia.
You got it right- I am consciously using logic to bring down rationality off the pedestal. 😍. Thank you for all your great inisghts. I loved that article where you explain that intuition, wisdom, direct knowing comes first. It's a profound truth we've lost along the way. Thank you for your comment and all you do!
Coming back to the use of words: Does the term ‘irrational’ carry too much baggage of the dismissive, derogatory kind? It might be a little better to return to ‘Intuitive’ — denoting beliefs held without recourse to ‘evidence’. And it can be shown that the effort to completely trace the evidence for the premises of arguments and their successor issue arguents et;c ends up at premises deemed acceptable (self-evident) without further evidence, which is the definition of intuitive; while the laudable effort to justify reliance on intuition consists of arguments the arguer suggest should be acceptable to the listener — ‘reasoning’, still a form of ‘rationality’? So the quarrel comes full circle, Is it not necessary, — to the extent collective action is seen as needed — to just accept all arguments and let the participants in an organized discourse sort out what is acceptable and what’s not — again, in degrees — in each specific planning situation. But separating content from judgment. From what little I know about the specific AI-‘thinking’ process, AI can do ‘probability’ forecasts e.g. of the sequence of effects of plan actions and/or non-actions (based on data from the past); but the ‘goodness’ judgments must be reserved for humans. I don’t know to what extent today’s AI models do what I envisioned in a course on question-answering systems some 50+ years ago: Given a data set of all human instrumental technoloogy A—> B causal ‘ technoloogy’ knowledge, could new potential technology be ‘created’ simply by exploring new combinations of items in that data base? What additional data would be needed to enable the machine to judge an outcome as good or bad? My reaction to that question (I never learned how to program those things) was that we need a better organized discourse in which humans enter the missing perts: judgments. My speculation papers and posts on that are on Acdemia .edu, Researchgate, my ‘Abbeboulah.com Wordpress page and my Substack platform; I have not succeeded in starting a useful discussion about this important topic.
My sense is that the controversies about rational versus irrational, objective versus subjective, facts versus — what? — are ‘wrong question’ quarrels. They depend on the various definitions one chooses, and most tend to end up in paradoxical such as ‘if being rational means basing one’s positions / conclusions on (logical) reasons — arguments whose supporting premises are based on other logical arguments whose premises are based on …. and so on, there is no end to the attempt of being rational — unless you accept premises that are ‘self-evident’ (to what ‘self’?) and do not require further explanation or evidence — which is the definition of ’irrationality’ (beliefs without evidence).
I have been looking at the kinds of statements we use in discussions about what we ought to do about ‘problems’ — understood as discrepancies between what we see as what IS (or will be) the case and what we feel OUGHT to be or become the case, and HOW that might be achieved. I have suggested that we those statements ‘planning arguments’: we use them all the time as the ‘pros and cons’ about proposed HOW suggestions (PLANS), though they are not properly deductive arguments in the view of formal logic.
These arguments can be stated in a common pattern (of which there are several variants due to negation of one or more premises) :
PLAN A ought to be adopted (‘conclusion?) because
1) PLAN A will result in outcome B, given conditions C; (— a ‘factual-instrumental’ claim)
and
2) Outcome B OUGHT to be pursued; (a deontic (Ought-) claim)
and
3) Conditions C are (or will be) present. (a Factual claim)
What we can see in this pattern is that
- All the claims are about the future and thus not ‘true’ yet, (however based on past or current ‘facts’)
- The pattern is not formally, deductively, ‘valid’ (in the sense that one must accept the conclusion if all premises are ‘true’;
- No PLAN ever rests on one single ‘clinching’ argument but as rthe above colloquial meme acknowledges , many ‘pros and cons’;
- Even the premises 1 and 3 that we may loosely consider ‘factual’ are only ‘probable’ in the furture;
- premise 2 (the ‘ought’ -premise) cannot properly be called true or ‘probable’ but at best ‘plausible’
- So any attempt to evaluate the merit (‘weight’) of such arguments must be in terms of ‘degrees’, that is expressed on some agreed-upon (‘quantitative’) scale.
- Premise 2 can contain claims of ‘ought’s that can be derived from previously accepted norms, laws, standards, but also, and more importantly so, on visions, ideals, possibilities. dreams.
I have suggested to use ‘plausible’ for all these claims, for simplicty, with a common scale such as +1 (meaning ‘totally plausible’) to -1 (totally implausible’) with a neutral middle point zero (‘don’t know’). plus a ‘weighing’ scale for the deontic premise 2 (e.g. 0 to +1 such that all weights in th pro/con list of deonitc clims add up to 1. This acknowledges that we are making decisions based on our different opinions, NOT on the TRUTH, which we don’t know no matter how much we try to ‘predict’ the future.
We owe it to each other to explain our basis for proposing, supporting, or opposing plan proposals. Whether we call that process ‘reasoning’, ‘rationality’ or something else, we might be able to agree on some basic rules:
We have a right to our personal opinions and basis of judgments, even about plans that have outcomes for more than our individual selves. So we may have the right to support or oppose a plan based on those judgments. But if we attempt to convince others to join our opinions, we must agree to offer explanations for our the basis of our judgment. And if differences of judgment persist, we must find common agreements for dealing with those disagreements and reaching collective decisisons: these agreements will involve acceptances of responsibility for the risk of failure of plans, and fashioning commonly acceptable provisions for the allocation of outcome benefits and costs. Can we call this process ‘reasoning’? Insistence on personal intuition as the justification for adopting plans in the face of others’ opposing intuiton of expression of judgment looks insufficient, unreasonable, ‘Irrational’? These words don’t adequately reflect the mutual responsibility of explanation nor ‘due consideration’ we should give our plans. But: Resorting to coercion and violence to ensure ‘acceptance of plans felt to be disadvantageous to some affected parties is an acknowledgement of incompetence or lack of willingness or ability for that process. What should we call it?
I agree that debates over "rational vs. irrational" or "objective vs. subjective" miss the point when applied to real-world decision-making. If I understand correctly, you discuss the collective decision making as a combination of individual ones which, yes, inherently rely on a mix of uncertain facts, values, and visions — none of which can claim ultimate truth. According to me, a collective decision is not a mix or negotiations between individual ones. Good collective decisions, instead of chasing perfect rationality and stonger arguments, are about engaging in a shared process. In other words, they are done in connection, and require openess of heart and mind, and care. When done like that, the results greatly surpass the sum of the individual decisions and intelligences. I've seen that plenty of times.
At the same time, I have no illusions that we are are very far from being able to apply such processes to big collective decisions. I also know that the majority of people do not consciously fully see how their own thinking impacts their lives and the collective one. Hence, we often see resort to force and a failure of collective dialogue and imagination.
Therefore, for me it boils down to raising individual awareness. That in itself leads to engaging differently in collective processes as well.
Thank you, Natalia. Perfect timing .
Good to know 🤗😉
I state at the beginning of my book on Living Systems - that it came as a meditation rising through me because of the way I associate with life, throughout it the conversation is talking like you here about why we are held away from all that we know to be perfectly intuitively true and that is to fit into a system outside of who we are. Our sacredness, oneness, intuitive sensed beings inherently know how to create and function in this world - we are just so far removed from it we don't remember. Yes to this Natalia and thank you for writing this ...
Yes, more and more people are starting to feel this and yet, predominantly as a society we remain stuck in the old. Part of the work we are called in to do is to dismantle the old stories that do not serve us anymore, or maybe they never served us that well. Mostly, we hold on to them out of habit and inertia. "Being rational" is one of many such stories. Thank you for reading and for your own work!
I whole heartedly agree with you, Natalia. Nothing really good happens without irrationality aka vision, intuition, feeling, and joyful acceptance of that and relegation of rationality to its useful but limited sphere. Patriarchy and capitalism are inseparable bedfellows, therefore women bear the brunt of insistence on rationality as witnessed in the attempts at diminishing women when we are 'emotional' when we don't know why but we just know, and so on. Brava Natalia! I'm off to finish some extremely irrational paintings, with floating leaves, fantasy flowers, ridiculous vessels and a lot of gold. Viva !
Have fun, Karen! Thank you for reading! I am glad it resonates!
Thank you for so clearly delineating the impact of our traditional education system! This is wonderful food for thought and a great lens to view our decision- making process through. I look forward to seeing where rationality binds me. I love your writing!
Thank you, Heidi! Much appreciated! 🙏
Well well..... you rationally broke it down!!! lol. You always spell it out rationally! I like your ending about the system of education built to create rational beings. For me all of this society is just social conditioning. Art for me can't be rational. Rational is like control for me.... doesn't exist in our world. It is a false thing which just causes major problems just like rational. For me rational has been abolished. Another winner for you. lets spread this around as much as possible.
Thank you so much for reading and sharing! Life is art so rationally speaking , it is irrational. 🤣
I agree, Theresa. It's not either or, and I did not mean it like that. It is indeed both/and. My intent was to raise awareness that believing solely in rationality alone brought us where we are today, and will not brings us where we dream to be tomorrow.