These days nearly all I think about are meta-rationality, the mysterious development of behavioral modernity and Humean skepticism.
Essentially, I hate the so-called rationalism community and rationality as an ideology. Nota bene: this is not the same thing as hating rationality. Rationality is an extremely useful tool, just not if it’s misapplied. This rationalism community that I so disdain has essentially swallowed (or become) STEM culture. This was not necessary and the humanities side of the aisle was certainly not blameless in this but alas we allowed rationality to consume all other culture, even in areas in which it had no natural dominion.
I don’t wish to revert to pre-rational ways of thinking as this would be a huge mistake, but among the STEM types I’d like them to be able to recognize that their systems and “truths” are almost always just limited models that apply in certain situations and not in others, and that don’t fully delineate reality and especially what one ought to do. And that information doesn’t want anything — only humans can want.
In my early years, I was a strict logical positivist. An empiricist. If you could not prove it, why discuss it?
Then I started realizing (alas on my own, with no guideposts) that strict rationality concealed more than it revealed — I began pondering things that I’d only read in detail about years later in David Hume’s and Nancy Cartwright’s work.
There is no approved path from strict formal rationalism to a more nuanced understanding of the universe because no one wants you to tread that way. It’s got “Path Closed” and “No Entry: Dangerous Monsters” and other signs, and chains all across it. And that’s because there are in fact dangerous monsters down that path! Once you start realizing the vast seas of uncomputability, that no system can be self-consistent, that physics cannot handle composite cases, that causality is not something we can discuss meaningfully or self-consistently on several different axes, and that you simply cannot prove many things that are obviously true (thus the extreme limitations of formal methods) — well, much of the world becomes shaky beneath one’s feet and it’s easy to sink into the mire.
So, once you arrive here, you are flailing about, with nowhere to go. You are beyond postmodernism, beyond rationality, completely off the charts.
I don’t think I am more enlightened than others, and I don’t even like using the word “enlightened” as it implies mysticism in which I am completely uninterested. But I do know there sure aren’t many people on this path and I wish there were more of them.
Some of the benefits is that it’s much harder to get hoodwinked by experts while still recognizing the usefulness of expertise. You are also nearly immune to propaganda. You can think about and consider things — many things, all at once — without becoming a true believer. And many more.
The drawbacks are that reality begins to look rather porous and provisional and you lose all certitude. That’s not a tradeoff everyone wants to make; it is in fact cognitively dangerous because as mentioned no one wants you to walk down that path. Down this way, where the monsters slumber and sometimes awaken, you become your own person with your own thoughts that do not and cannot belong to anyone else. This is not encouraged in this or any society.
