Am I right that both systems are internally consistent?
Reason has an elephant in the room: as soon as you define truth as a correspondence to reality, you place it outside empiricism, because degrees of correspondence can’t be measured. This has led to a split between different styles of reasoning—reason is more than one thing—the empirical instrumentalist style, and the aprioristic style (rationalism as traditionally defined). There should not just be two self-consistent systems, becasue there could be any number.
Eventually, natural selection would mean that feeling-based systems (or the species/civilizations that least evolve away from feeling towards thinking) die out as their form of truth-seeking has less relevance for fitness due to being more detached from actual reality.
Why didn’t that happen a long time ago? The empirical, pragmatic approach is good enough for purposes of survival. You don’t need to know ultimate metaphysical truths in order to survive. If you eat a plant, and it makes you sick, don’t eat it again...But you don’t need to know what a plant is ontologically. Our ancestors survived, so they must have been doing that.
So maybe there aren’t two isolated bubbles. Maybe it’s like a bell curve, where most people are in a big bulge in the middle, using a mixture of unambitious, pragmatic reasoning, and non extreme intuition. Then the extreme rationalists are one tail, and the full on mystics are another.
The ‘rational system’ is actually a sub-system of the feeling system because you’ll only find it compelling if its core assumptions feel true—e.g. taking empirical evidence and reason as the axioms of truth-seeking feels true because we have been (implicitly) taught to do so by growing up in a specific bubble of society (through upbringing, formal education, exposure to academia/rationality).
Yes, there’s another elephant, which is whether it is even possible for extreme rationalists to eschew intuitions entirely.
Issues that are sufficiently deep, or which cut across cultural boundaries run into a problem where, not only do parties disagree about the object level issue, they also disagree about underlying questions of what constitutes truth, proof, evidence, etc. “Satan created the fossils to mislead people” is an example of one side rejecting the other sides evidence as even being evidence . Its a silly example, but there are much more robust ones.
Aumanns theorem explicitly assumes that two debaters agree on their priors, including what evidence is. The Bay Area rationalist version implicitly assumes it. Real life is not so convenient.
Can’t you just agree on an epistemology, and then resolve the object level issue? No, because it takes an epistemology to come to conclusions about epistemology. Two parties with epistemological differences at the object level will also have them at the meta level.
Once this problem, sometimes called “the epistemological circle” or “problem of the criterion” is understood, it will be seen that the ability to agree or settle issues is the exception, not the norm. The tendency to agree , where it is apparent, does not show that anyone has escaped the epistemological circle, since it can also be explained by culture giving people shared beliefs. Only the convergence of agents who are out of contact with each other is strong evidence for objectivism.
Philosophers appeal to intuitions because they can’t see how to avoid them...whatever a line of thought grounds out in, is definitionally an intuition. It is not a case of using
intuitions when there are better alternatives, epistemologically speaking. And the critics of their use of intuitions tend to be people who haven’t seen the problem of unfounded foundations because they have never thought deeply enough, not people who have solved the problem of finding sub-foundations for your foundational assumptions
Scientists are typically taught that the basic principles maths, logic and empiricism are their foundations, and take that uncritically, without digging deeper. Empiricism is presented as a black box that produces the goods...somehow. Their subculture encourages use of basic principles to move forward, not a turn backwards to critically reflect on the validity of basic principles. That does not mean the foundational principles are not “there”. Considering the foundational principles of science is a major part of philosophy of science, and philosophy of science is a philosophy-like enterprise, not a science-like enterprise, in the sense it consists of problems that have been open for a long time, and which do not have straightforward empirical solutions.
Because our intuitions have been shaped by Darwinian forces to, as you say, work great in the ancestral environment and still work well enough in today’s society.
What happens if we consider the long-term future, though? Structuring society or civilizations in a way that is ‘moral’ in any common sense of the word is meaningful only from the intuition perspective. E.g. a society that aims to abolish suffering and maximize good qualia does so because it feels right/meaningful/good to do so but you cannot prove by reason alone that this is objectively good/meaningful.
Now contrast this to a hypothetical society whose decision-making is based on the tail end of ‘reason’. They would realize that our subjective moral intuitions have been shaped by evolutionary Darwinian forces, i.e. to maximize reproductive fitness and that there might not be any objective ‘morality’ to be located on the territory of reality that they are mapping. They might start reasoning about possible ways to structure society and progress civilization and see that if they keep the Darwinian way of optimizing for fitness (rather than for morality or good qualia), they will in expectation continue to exist longer than any civilization optimizing for anything else. Thus they would on average outlive other civilizations/societies.
This assumes that it is even possible to effectively optimize fitness through deliberate consideration and ‘do the work for evolution’ without the invisible hand of natural selection. However, even if it is not possible to do this in a deliberate, planned way, natural selection would lead to the same outcome. (of societies with the largest fitness rather than the largest amount of happy people/morality surviving the longest)
Reason has an elephant in the room: as soon as you define truth as a correspondence to reality, you place it outside empiricism, because degrees of correspondence can’t be measured. This has led to a split between different styles of reasoning—reason is more than one thing—the empirical instrumentalist style, and the aprioristic style (rationalism as traditionally defined). There should not just be two self-consistent systems, becasue there could be any number.
Why didn’t that happen a long time ago? The empirical, pragmatic approach is good enough for purposes of survival. You don’t need to know ultimate metaphysical truths in order to survive. If you eat a plant, and it makes you sick, don’t eat it again...But you don’t need to know what a plant is ontologically. Our ancestors survived, so they must have been doing that.
So maybe there aren’t two isolated bubbles. Maybe it’s like a bell curve, where most people are in a big bulge in the middle, using a mixture of unambitious, pragmatic reasoning, and non extreme intuition. Then the extreme rationalists are one tail, and the full on mystics are another.
Yes, there’s another elephant, which is whether it is even possible for extreme rationalists to eschew intuitions entirely.
Issues that are sufficiently deep, or which cut across cultural boundaries run into a problem where, not only do parties disagree about the object level issue, they also disagree about underlying questions of what constitutes truth, proof, evidence, etc. “Satan created the fossils to mislead people” is an example of one side rejecting the other sides evidence as even being evidence . Its a silly example, but there are much more robust ones.
Aumanns theorem explicitly assumes that two debaters agree on their priors, including what evidence is. The Bay Area rationalist version implicitly assumes it. Real life is not so convenient.
Can’t you just agree on an epistemology, and then resolve the object level issue? No, because it takes an epistemology to come to conclusions about epistemology. Two parties with epistemological differences at the object level will also have them at the meta level.
Once this problem, sometimes called “the epistemological circle” or “problem of the criterion” is understood, it will be seen that the ability to agree or settle issues is the exception, not the norm. The tendency to agree , where it is apparent, does not show that anyone has escaped the epistemological circle, since it can also be explained by culture giving people shared beliefs. Only the convergence of agents who are out of contact with each other is strong evidence for objectivism.
Philosophers appeal to intuitions because they can’t see how to avoid them...whatever a line of thought grounds out in, is definitionally an intuition. It is not a case of using intuitions when there are better alternatives, epistemologically speaking. And the critics of their use of intuitions tend to be people who haven’t seen the problem of unfounded foundations because they have never thought deeply enough, not people who have solved the problem of finding sub-foundations for your foundational assumptions
Scientists are typically taught that the basic principles maths, logic and empiricism are their foundations, and take that uncritically, without digging deeper. Empiricism is presented as a black box that produces the goods...somehow. Their subculture encourages use of basic principles to move forward, not a turn backwards to critically reflect on the validity of basic principles. That does not mean the foundational principles are not “there”. Considering the foundational principles of science is a major part of philosophy of science, and philosophy of science is a philosophy-like enterprise, not a science-like enterprise, in the sense it consists of problems that have been open for a long time, and which do not have straightforward empirical solutions.
Because our intuitions have been shaped by Darwinian forces to, as you say, work great in the ancestral environment and still work well enough in today’s society.
What happens if we consider the long-term future, though?
Structuring society or civilizations in a way that is ‘moral’ in any common sense of the word is meaningful only from the intuition perspective. E.g. a society that aims to abolish suffering and maximize good qualia does so because it feels right/meaningful/good to do so but you cannot prove by reason alone that this is objectively good/meaningful.
Now contrast this to a hypothetical society whose decision-making is based on the tail end of ‘reason’. They would realize that our subjective moral intuitions have been shaped by evolutionary Darwinian forces, i.e. to maximize reproductive fitness and that there might not be any objective ‘morality’ to be located on the territory of reality that they are mapping. They might start reasoning about possible ways to structure society and progress civilization and see that if they keep the Darwinian way of optimizing for fitness (rather than for morality or good qualia), they will in expectation continue to exist longer than any civilization optimizing for anything else.
Thus they would on average outlive other civilizations/societies.
This assumes that it is even possible to effectively optimize fitness through deliberate consideration and ‘do the work for evolution’ without the invisible hand of natural selection. However, even if it is not possible to do this in a deliberate, planned way, natural selection would lead to the same outcome. (of societies with the largest fitness rather than the largest amount of happy people/morality surviving the longest)