Reason is the faculty that identifies and integrates the material provided by man’s senses. It is a faculty that man has to exercise by choice. Thinking is not an automatic function. In any hour and issue of his life, man is free to think or to evade that effort. Thinking requires a state of full, focused awareness. The act of focusing one’s consciousness is volitional. Man can focus his mind to a full, active, purposefully directed awareness of reality—or he can unfocus it and let himself drift in a semiconscious daze, merely reacting to any chance stimulus of the immediate moment, at the mercy of his undirected sensory-perceptual mechanism and of any random, associational connections it might happen to make.
This view is much too binary. There are a myriad variety of choices of what to focus on, what aspect of it to focus on,
and how much effort to apply to the focus. Someone can be purposefully aware of a very specific task, say a high
speed race, with the bulk of their thinking down at the level of pattern matching. Someone can do highly abstract
symbolic manipulations while half asleep and still recognize when they bump into the right set of manipulations to
solve the problem.
“This means the application of reason to every aspect of one’s life and concerns. It means choosing and validation one’s opinions, one’s decision, one’s work, one’s love, in accordance with the normal requirements of a cognitive process, the requirements of logic, objectivity, integration. Put negatively, the virtue means never placing any consideration above one’s perception of reality. This includes never attempting to get away with a contradiction, a mystic fantasy, or an indulgence in context-dropping.”—Leonard Peikoff
Ayn Rand
It’s too bad this has already dropped off the front page. Someone should request sticky threads here, although I don’t care enough.
This view is much too binary. There are a myriad variety of choices of what to focus on, what aspect of it to focus on, and how much effort to apply to the focus. Someone can be purposefully aware of a very specific task, say a high speed race, with the bulk of their thinking down at the level of pattern matching. Someone can do highly abstract symbolic manipulations while half asleep and still recognize when they bump into the right set of manipulations to solve the problem.
“This means the application of reason to every aspect of one’s life and concerns. It means choosing and validation one’s opinions, one’s decision, one’s work, one’s love, in accordance with the normal requirements of a cognitive process, the requirements of logic, objectivity, integration. Put negatively, the virtue means never placing any consideration above one’s perception of reality. This includes never attempting to get away with a contradiction, a mystic fantasy, or an indulgence in context-dropping.”—Leonard Peikoff
wtf