You forgot to ask: what can we gain from irrationality?
Also, if you’re willing to admit you don’t understand consciousness without also claiming it must be some ineffable eternal mystery, you’re already using an important rationalist skill.
As an avid irrationalist and Sith-in-training, I’ll take a stab at your question. Irrationality offers all the things rationality does not: creativity, a sense of “magic”, ecstasy, revelation, cosmic awe, passion and pure psychic power. Who has historically had more influence on human civilization, the irrationalist prophets or the rationalist philosophers? Until there is a rationalist whose power can compare to a Moses, Jesus, Mohammed or even Hitler, I will continue to be skeptical of rationalism. Faith in reason is simply another form of religion, which, taken to its logical conclusion, seems to result in human beings being replaced by machines. Rationalism is a kind of psychological Skynet which seeks to terminate all competing belief systems and reduce the landscape of ideas to logical paperclips. Singularitarians who fear a universe reduced to paperclips are really just projecting the barren state of their own inner landscapes onto the world!
“Irrationality offers all the things rationality does not: creativity, a sense of “magic”, ecstasy, revelation, cosmic awe, passion and pure psychic power”
i think you misunderstand what we mean by rationality. If we wanted these things, which most of us do, then it’d be rational to be irrational. using the words that way is just silly.
You forgot to ask: what can we gain from irrationality?
Also, if you’re willing to admit you don’t understand consciousness without also claiming it must be some ineffable eternal mystery, you’re already using an important rationalist skill.
As an avid irrationalist and Sith-in-training, I’ll take a stab at your question. Irrationality offers all the things rationality does not: creativity, a sense of “magic”, ecstasy, revelation, cosmic awe, passion and pure psychic power. Who has historically had more influence on human civilization, the irrationalist prophets or the rationalist philosophers? Until there is a rationalist whose power can compare to a Moses, Jesus, Mohammed or even Hitler, I will continue to be skeptical of rationalism. Faith in reason is simply another form of religion, which, taken to its logical conclusion, seems to result in human beings being replaced by machines. Rationalism is a kind of psychological Skynet which seeks to terminate all competing belief systems and reduce the landscape of ideas to logical paperclips. Singularitarians who fear a universe reduced to paperclips are really just projecting the barren state of their own inner landscapes onto the world!
“Irrationality offers all the things rationality does not: creativity, a sense of “magic”, ecstasy, revelation, cosmic awe, passion and pure psychic power”
i think you misunderstand what we mean by rationality. If we wanted these things, which most of us do, then it’d be rational to be irrational. using the words that way is just silly.
I like that comment. so downvoted.