Fiver-rah's Journal: Rationality

What is rationality? A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away I thought that rationality was just another way to evaluate and sift reality, and there were many others that were preferable--or at least, just as good.

Since then, I've gotten a lot smarter, a lot more educated, and a lot more intelligent. I've become an avowedly rational person. It's difficult not to do so when you spend years in mathematical/scientific training. Rationality quickly takes over your ways of thinking simply because rationality *works*. I am no longer as gullible as I once was. And yet the weirdest thing happened to me today which made me realize that I am not, in fact, as rational as I believed.

My flatmates and I are considering moving. Just considering, really; we're on a month-to-month lease, and we like our current place. But we think it might be nice to have a yard and my one roommate needs to get knee surgery sometime in the next six months or so, and would like to not have to go up stairs. On general arguments of propinquity and serendipity, we went to see a house today. We spent time outside it earlier. It's very very cute, and it has great gardening space which gets sun almost all day long. It met all our stated criteria for a cool place to live. It was priced reasonably. I really liked the outdoors space.

Rationally, there was nothing wrong with the interior either. I know that this is a great deal, a good place to live and all that stuff. And yet the moment I walked in the door I wanted to leave. I didn't like it. I didn't like it at all. There was nothing wrong with the house, except it felt all wrong.

And as soon as we walked out, my housemates and I extolled its virtues, half heartedly, and then Kim and I exchanged glances and we both said, "I can't live there; it feels bad."

Now, how's that for rational? And yet now that I think about it, I do this kind of stuff all the time. There are some people who I meet and I instantly like them. And I'm never wrong. My best friend (and my other housemate, Lucas) I met and I liked instantly. He didn't like me right off, so I spent the first few months of our acquaintance teasing him until he figured out that I was really cool and decided to be friends with me. And I was right; he was cool and it was more than worth it. There's other people who I meet who make me feel weird and uncomfortable. Is it a bad thing to make snap judgements? Are my judgements always "right" through some sort of placebo effect, or even through sheer dogged stubbornness on my part?

Or is there some rational explanation for what appears to be irrationality on my part? What is the true worth of rationality, and should there be bounds to its applications?

it's all rational

[denshi]

"It was a place he'd known before; not everyone could take him there, and somehow he always managed to forget it. Something he'd found and lost so many times. It belonged, he knew-- he remembered-- as she pulled him down, to the meat, the flesh the cowboys mocked. It was a vast things, beyond knowing, a sea of information coded in spiral and pheromone, infite intricacy that only the body, in its strong blind way, could ever read." -- Neuromancer, William Gibson

I like to think of instinct as a totally rational behaviour, but one which manipulates data unavailable to the conscious mind, or at the least the conscious mind lacks the proper operators.

Jung and I are just tight.

I also think of enormous Sunday brunches as totally rational behaviour, and those I do have skills for, so I must now go and affect such.

Re:it's all rational

[Fiver-rah]

This seems a little overly simplistic to me. Let me clarify. It's pretty clear to me--and Jung, and bunches of other people--that most behavior, and most of what we call instinct, has a rational basis. But saying that instinct has a rational basis is by no means the same thing as saying that acting off of instinct is a rational thing to do. We develop a subconscious set of correlations which we use to obtain judgements. In some cases, these are simply observational; fire is correlated with pain, Mom is correlated with hugs and food. Sometimes they can be pretty elaborate or abstract. But these sets of correlations comprise, at least in part, instinct.

If you had a psychic microscope you could take a person and untangle all these correlations, and get some kind of an idea what their "instinct" looks like. You'd find a lot of common threads (like, when the horror movie music starts, don't go in the grave yard). People that seem to have "good" instincts will probably have extremely flexible yet not overly-broad correlations, probably multi-point.

The problem with all this is that you never know what you're accessing when you arrive at these judgements. If your correlations are shit in the first place, the answer "instinct" gives you is going to be wrong, and the rational thing to do is to purposefully defy instinct until you've developed enough experience to retrain your correlations.

A cliched example of a shitty subconscious correlation might be something like "Blacks are lazy" or "Men are pigs". The problem with instinct is that it is very often difficult if not impossible to unwind the tangle of judgement associated with it. It could be I didn't like the house because subconsciously I recognized the hint of a smell that reminded me of the times pipes have burst in houses I'm living in, in which case instinct has served me well. It may be I didn't like the house because when I first walked in, the pattern on the wall temporarily resolved into something which reminded me of the face of someone I didn't like, in which case instinct has been totally useless. The problem is that I don't know, and I can't check my assumptions.

Now, with something like a house, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to check my assumptions. The impact of me ignoring instinct is potentially too large, and the benefits in this case are too small. It's just a house.

But let's say I decide I don't like a person when I first meet them, and act accordingly. I could be missing a great friend or a great opportunity. Or I could turn into the kind of person I really don't like. You know, the kind that says, "I voted for Bush because I just felt like he was the better candidate." And you say, "In what way?" and they respond, "Oh, I just felt that way, you know." You have to question your assumptions on some level. Conversely, you can't question all your assumptions (or at least, you have to start with some basic premises, and you just hope that you're sitting on some reasonably good turtles).

Finally, if you trust instinct too much, you're creating the potential for self-fulfilling prophecies. Let's say you meet someone and you instinctively think, "I don't like her" for whatever reason. Well, then you're going to act as if you don't like her. Your subconscious body language will give you away. This leads to you reinforcing stereotypes--you don't get along with person X because you had an instinctual dislike for reason Y. Therefore, reason Y is a good reason to dislike people. So instinct can become a rut, a trap.

Like all tools, instinct can be as dangerous as it is useful. I think my question goes more like this. When is it fair to trust instinct? To what extent should one do so? When is "That's just the way I feel," a fair response, and when is it you crapping out and not wanting to examine your responses?

Human Animal

[gmhowell]

I agree with your description of instinct. If it weren't helpful for survival, it wouldn't be there.

The trick with humans is that we are rational animals. Talk about using tools, opposable thumbs, etc. What really makes the difference is rationality. But rationality can only be 100% effective if the human is concious of all necessary data. Which means that sometimes you have to ignore rationality (or set it aside) and make a decision based on instinct. And vice versa.

The latter is easy to show: instinct says man can't fly. It says that throwing an airfoil shapped object means nothing, it will drop to the ground. Thanks to the rational aspects of the mind, you can ignore that while sitting on a 747, and not go crazy.

Showing how it is entirely rational to act based on instinct rather than the best rational process available is much harder. My assumption would be that instinct works best on unknown/unknowable information. Like originally hinted at, there was a 'creepy feeling'. Smell is a good guess. Very accurate receptors that link quite tightly with the memory cores in the brain. So you 'smelled' some rot, some animal urine, some blood, some natural gas, whatever. But it was at a threshold too low to give rise to full on 'panic mode'. It merely triggered some 'warning mode'. With enough time, it is almost 100% that the cause of the apprehension would appear. But why bother? There are other places to live.

The other thing is that shelter is pretty low on the old hierarchy of need. Looking at that hierarchy, the lower you go, the more 'instinct' can provide the basics. And, IMO, the more instinct and 'feelings' become a relevant factor.

Man is a rational animal. But man is an animal. To ignore the animalistic parts can be as foolhardy as ignoring the rational parts.

Pattern language

[turg]

I don't think the explanation has to be rational, but the fact that you don't know what is the explanation does not mean that it's not rational.

There's a book called A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction by Christopher Alexander et al. that I find fascinating

While the book is about architecture and city planning, it's a good thought-provoker for anyone who designs anything. It's about how things affect people. Design problems that make the space less useable can make it feel oppressive even if you don't consciously identify the problem. Not something you'd read straight through, necessarily. It's like an 1200-page encyclopedia listing the various patterns and what they communicate.

Giving up on rationality...

[daoine]

I think there's a couple levels of rationality -- there seems to be a difference between the subconscious "If I run out into the highway, I'll die, so I won't even let the conscious entertain the thought" and the conscious "Well, in choosing a college I want X, Y, and Z -- since college A provides the best of all those qualities, rationally, that's where I should go."

While I'm pretty sure I function at a rational level in the subconscious, I've thrown out rationalizing my choices at a conscious level. People find that very frustrating, actually...when asked why I went to the undergrad of my choice, my answer is that 'it felt right at the time' -- I can't honestly give a better answer. Why did I give up a music scholarship to go to an expensive school to become an engineer? Who knows? I sure as hell don't - but it was the path I chose all the same.

I found that I don't like the answers I come up with when I look at the 'rationality' of the situation. I like the answers when I go with my gut feeling, and I don't feel the need to pretend that I actually thought through my choices anymore -- because I never really did. I'm really with you on the "it doesn't feel right" choices; that's how I make most of my decisions.

I don't think this necessarily means that my thoughts aren't rational -- they just don't follow what we think of as conscious rationality today. I don't weigh the pros and cons of choices. I don't even necessarily consider all the choices. And I'm quite sure that if I am doing any of the forementioned things, it's not at a conscious level.

'Conscious' really starts to look wrong after you've typed it a lot...

Patterns

[baby_head_rush]

This happens to me a lot also. You just get a gut feeling that something's not right with a person, place, or object.
I believe we keep little details of past experiences stored back in our subconscious that form patterns. Sometimes they fit together in a pattern that we associate with "bad" things.
I guess that's instinct?