Gurdur

Nonsense.
Human cognitive facilities form one end of a biological evolutionary continuum tree; a pigeon can count to 8, a chimpanzee can display problem-solving and logical analysis to a degree.
Humans are but a development, not a seperate thing from animals.

The only real major difference s grammatical language, and the content of that is often irrational, not rational, while the basic rules are algorithms - hardly any kind of real difference in nature from other cognitive facilities.

Codswallop.
Sex and reproduction are the ways of a sexual species' survival; reason has bugger all to do with them.
Even humane care of children has bugger all to do with reason - elephants, chimpanzees and giraffes also display social care and training of infants.

Again, greatly simplistic twaddle.
For all people, rigorous logic is something that must be learnt.

Don't know about you, but I didn't learn about sex from my parents or older people.

And chimpanzees and maque monkeys display tool-using and problem-solving behaviour which they teach to group members and infants.

phaedrus

This thread could be in the philo forum....and what knowledge.....

Demo, check the work of Daniel Kahneman, the nobel prizer winner...who changed the way we study economics and did some myth bashing in the micro area especially since economists had assumed humans were motivated by self-interest and made rational decisions.

Heuristics would suggest that we aint rational. Check out a book"Simple heuristics that make us smart " by Gigerenzer and Todd.

Related reading could be Simon's bounded rationality - it has two components, "limitations of the mind" and "structure of the environment in which it operates". The latter has been evolved into ecological rationality. Simon had also proposed the concept of satisficing which is a method for making a choice from a set of alternatives encountered sequentially when one does not know much about the possibilities ahead of time.

tronvillain

Uh, can a pigeon count to eight? Humans aren't much good above five without having learned a number system.

Gurdur

Yes. Fairly basic animal behaviourist psychology. It's part of pattern recognition.
One group even got pigeons distinguishing between teh painting styles of Mondrain and Monet.

Two different mechanisms.
One's your basic pattern recognition; one's a cognitively-developed tie-in with linguistic skills and abstraction.

Vorkosigan

Perhaps you should be asking what kind of rationality humans have, and what it is for.

Secular Pinoy

I remember a passage from Ayn Rand's The Virtue of Selfishness which makes this very same argument. Unimpressive to say the least.

tk

I second that. Why people keep claiming that humans are intrinsically `superior' to other animals is beyond me. If "reason is our way of survival", and reason is "our distinguishing characteristic from animals and machines", then how is it possible for other animals to have survived???


Back to the topic, my take is that humans aren't completely "rational" in the sense that they're capable of deriving true propositions from other true propositions without a hitch, but humans are quite adept at pattern recognition and generalization -- sometimes too adept for their own good.

idiom

Isnt it a proposition of Naturalisim that rationality doesn't exist?

Everything that happens is explainable through very simple science. What you are interpreting as rational thought or intelligence is in fact observation of natural phenomnon that was put in place years a go. An reason you spout is just a result of the chemicals in your brain, and should be ignored as a simple hallucination.

Its okay though because our misinterpretation of the evidence is a natural phenomenon in itself right?

Vorkosigan

Everything that happens is explainable through very simple science. What you are interpreting as rational thought or intelligence is in fact observation of natural phenomnon that was put in place years a go. An reason you spout is just a result of the chemicals in your brain, and should be ignored as a simple hallucination.

You need a garden to go with that strawman, idiom?

If you are seriously interested in learning about rationality, its uses and its origin, you should delve into Evolutionary Psychology. You can start with this simple Primer on Evolutionary Psychology. You can also interrogate Gurdur at length, as he knows an awful lot about topics of this nature.

Here are some books I've found useful; Gurdur has a much longer and more involved list.

The Descent of Mind : Psychological Perspectives on Hominid Evolution

Tools, Language and Cognition in Human Evolution

How the Mind Works

What Is Evolutionary Psychology : Explaining the New Science of the Mind (Darwinism Today)

The Language Instinct

The Adapted Mind : Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture

If you can stop it with the strawmen (there's no contradiction between belief in rationality and naturalism), I think Gurdur and I would be happy to talk with you. It might help, though, if you read the website I referenced above, and developed some specific questions.

Vorkosigan

Hugo Holbling

Everything except Reason being handed down from God to man alone, apparently...