Light leaves the Sun and strikes your shoelaces and bounces off; some photons enter the pupils of your eyes and strike your retina; the energy of the photons triggers neural impulses; the neural impulses are transmitted to the visual-processing areas of the brain; and there the optical information is processed and reconstructed into a 3D model that is recognized as an untied shoelace; and so you believe that your shoelaces are untied.
Here is the secret of deliberate rationality—this whole entanglement process is not magic, and you can understand it.
But if we were minds in a vat, or cogs in the Matrix, we would still be able to reason rationally and make intelligent predictions about the world we see. And test them, and improve our predictions and discard the ones that are wrong. We can be rational about the real world, even if the real world is an illusion.
So I don’t see how we can found rationality on our understanding of the world (a world we only understand through reason). In this argument, where is the egg that was not born of a chicken?
Light leaves the Sun and strikes your shoelaces and bounces off; some photons enter the pupils of your eyes and strike your retina; the energy of the photons triggers neural impulses; the neural impulses are transmitted to the visual-processing areas of the brain; and there the optical information is processed and reconstructed into a 3D model that is recognized as an untied shoelace; and so you believe that your shoelaces are untied.
Here is the secret of deliberate rationality—this whole entanglement process is not magic, and you can understand it.
But if we were minds in a vat, or cogs in the Matrix, we would still be able to reason rationally and make intelligent predictions about the world we see. And test them, and improve our predictions and discard the ones that are wrong. We can be rational about the real world, even if the real world is an illusion.
So I don’t see how we can found rationality on our understanding of the world (a world we only understand through reason). In this argument, where is the egg that was not born of a chicken?