“Rational”, the adjectival form, has horrible connotations for historical reasons, and is best avoided whenever possible. It’s also very vague and will inevitably be justifiably nit-picked and shot down.
Honestly, I have trouble understanding how Rationalism, the old version, even came into existence. What made those guys think they could write a map in the dark in their room and have it reveal some truth to them? Working that way may teach them how to compare maps and make them compatible, and make them otherwise improve their map-drawing skills, which might help a lot once they go outside, especially if they’ve been hypothesizing about unusual phenomena that the more practical, less theoretical mappers aren’t used consider or even expect. But as long as they remain shut in, what’s that knowedge worth.
Otherwise, if anyone starts mentioning the Holocaust being rational, it’s very easy to point out that the process was ridiculously suboptimal in nearly every possible way, and probably cost the Nazis the war.
I think old-school rationalism makes a lot more sense than it may at first appear. Your brain is the territory after all—in fact it’s the richest territory you’ll ever be able to explore, and you’re very intimately familiar with it, you’re intertwined with it and you have been forever. You can immediately test many hypotheses about it, you can change it this way or that, you can use it to reflect on itself and see what it says. I mean, you can feel it as you observe it. The crazy idea, that given enough time to hone yourself you might be able to bootstrap your way from such a rich local context to a much clearer understanding of the universe, doesn’t seem too crazy when put in that light.
Hm, okay, I’ll rewrite it in a way that is more optimized for clarity. You said: “What made those guys think they could write a map in the dark in their room and have it reveal some truth to them?” And I thought: Well, they’re not exactly sitting in the dark. Developmentally, an 18th century Rationalist would have had a very cultured upbringing, would have been very intelligent, would have been at least somewhat predisposed to reflection, et cetera. Evolutionarily, brains are formed with innate heuristics and categories for reasoning about the world, some very basic, and some fascinatingly complex, for example archetypes. That is a lot of information you get ‘for free’ as an 18th century Rationalist, without ever having to leave your cellar. But it’s more than that. Brains are incredibly powerful and can do many things. You can rewrite their algorithms; you can store ideas in them and come back to them later; and you can combine pieces of information already inside them in new and interesting ways, and repeat that process again and again, combinatorially; you can feel how it feels to think one way, then feel how it feels to think a different way, build up rich qualia for concepts and their manipulations and concept structures; you can develop mathematics to help you reason formally about the relations between those concepts, you can develop information theory, you can develop category theory, you can develop statistic mechanics and probability theory. “But,” you might say, “though that may be theoretically possible, it should have been obvious that pragmatically speaking it is best to go out and experiment with the world as well as moving things around in your head.” However it is important to note that the famous Rationalists came before the dawn of Newton and therefore the dawn of discoverable universals; the last famous Rationalist, and indeed the one I find most interesting, was Leibniz, whose monads are an awful lot like computer programs and whose God is an awful lot like a programmer with infinite resources. (Leibniz is often thought of as the first computer scientist. I assure you that you will find this paragraph impressive.) It’s worth noting that Leibniz was a Rationalist and a Monist, and, of course, a physicist and an engineer. It would be caricature to portray Rationalists as drawing up maps in the dark. Rather, the position they had in common was their realization of how powerful minds can become when trained, and that Reason is vitally important for understanding the world. Less Wrong is directly descended from that memetic lineage.
Oh. That’s not the standard defition of “Rationalism” I heard. You make it sound like “overhtinking stuff you know about in the dark will net you more knowledge”, while the definition I’m familiar with is “get an empty mind with no experience of anything besides itself and it will still be able to, say, come up with Math and work from there to make an awesome edifice that’s never had an ounce of sensory experience in it”, which is patently ridiculous.
I wonder now if that was a straw-man or Theme Park Version.
“Rational”, the adjectival form, has horrible connotations for historical reasons, and is best avoided whenever possible. It’s also very vague and will inevitably be justifiably nit-picked and shot down.
Honestly, I have trouble understanding how Rationalism, the old version, even came into existence. What made those guys think they could write a map in the dark in their room and have it reveal some truth to them? Working that way may teach them how to compare maps and make them compatible, and make them otherwise improve their map-drawing skills, which might help a lot once they go outside, especially if they’ve been hypothesizing about unusual phenomena that the more practical, less theoretical mappers aren’t used consider or even expect. But as long as they remain shut in, what’s that knowedge worth.
Otherwise, if anyone starts mentioning the Holocaust being rational, it’s very easy to point out that the process was ridiculously suboptimal in nearly every possible way, and probably cost the Nazis the war.
I think old-school rationalism makes a lot more sense than it may at first appear. Your brain is the territory after all—in fact it’s the richest territory you’ll ever be able to explore, and you’re very intimately familiar with it, you’re intertwined with it and you have been forever. You can immediately test many hypotheses about it, you can change it this way or that, you can use it to reflect on itself and see what it says. I mean, you can feel it as you observe it. The crazy idea, that given enough time to hone yourself you might be able to bootstrap your way from such a rich local context to a much clearer understanding of the universe, doesn’t seem too crazy when put in that light.
I notice that I am confused by what you just said.
Hm, okay, I’ll rewrite it in a way that is more optimized for clarity. You said: “What made those guys think they could write a map in the dark in their room and have it reveal some truth to them?” And I thought: Well, they’re not exactly sitting in the dark. Developmentally, an 18th century Rationalist would have had a very cultured upbringing, would have been very intelligent, would have been at least somewhat predisposed to reflection, et cetera. Evolutionarily, brains are formed with innate heuristics and categories for reasoning about the world, some very basic, and some fascinatingly complex, for example archetypes. That is a lot of information you get ‘for free’ as an 18th century Rationalist, without ever having to leave your cellar. But it’s more than that. Brains are incredibly powerful and can do many things. You can rewrite their algorithms; you can store ideas in them and come back to them later; and you can combine pieces of information already inside them in new and interesting ways, and repeat that process again and again, combinatorially; you can feel how it feels to think one way, then feel how it feels to think a different way, build up rich qualia for concepts and their manipulations and concept structures; you can develop mathematics to help you reason formally about the relations between those concepts, you can develop information theory, you can develop category theory, you can develop statistic mechanics and probability theory. “But,” you might say, “though that may be theoretically possible, it should have been obvious that pragmatically speaking it is best to go out and experiment with the world as well as moving things around in your head.” However it is important to note that the famous Rationalists came before the dawn of Newton and therefore the dawn of discoverable universals; the last famous Rationalist, and indeed the one I find most interesting, was Leibniz, whose monads are an awful lot like computer programs and whose God is an awful lot like a programmer with infinite resources. (Leibniz is often thought of as the first computer scientist. I assure you that you will find this paragraph impressive.) It’s worth noting that Leibniz was a Rationalist and a Monist, and, of course, a physicist and an engineer. It would be caricature to portray Rationalists as drawing up maps in the dark. Rather, the position they had in common was their realization of how powerful minds can become when trained, and that Reason is vitally important for understanding the world. Less Wrong is directly descended from that memetic lineage.
Oh. That’s not the standard defition of “Rationalism” I heard. You make it sound like “overhtinking stuff you know about in the dark will net you more knowledge”, while the definition I’m familiar with is “get an empty mind with no experience of anything besides itself and it will still be able to, say, come up with Math and work from there to make an awesome edifice that’s never had an ounce of sensory experience in it”, which is patently ridiculous.
I wonder now if that was a straw-man or Theme Park Version.