EY: Has it not occurred to you that maybe, what you took to be extreme aptitude at rationalization is in fact a foil that you set up so that your actual rationalization process could continue? Because I’m pretty sure that it has. Continued, that is.
In fact, to continue my general thread of questioning the existence of intelligence, I’m not sure that there is any mode of human reasoning besides 1) rationalization and 2) deduction according to rules in a formal system. Probably, what we call rationalization is also the same process that tells you that if you find a nibbled wheel of cheese, there might be a mouse in your kitchen. It’s just a fill-in-the-blanks madlibs-like game, that happens to give the right answer a very respectable fraction of the time.
Which is to say that, if you’re not using any kind of formal mathematical argument, you’re rationalizing. And come to think of it, this meshes nicely with the earlier example of Einstein finding relativity by pure thought. It’s true that he didn’t conduct any physical experiments, but we might say that he conducted mathematical experiments to find a self-consistent mathematical system to represent his idea. If he hadn’t found such a system, he would presumably have discarded his idea, and so in effect, what he was doing was not pure rationalization.
EY: Has it not occurred to you that maybe, what you took to be extreme aptitude at rationalization is in fact a foil that you set up so that your actual rationalization process could continue? Because I’m pretty sure that it has. Continued, that is.
In fact, to continue my general thread of questioning the existence of intelligence, I’m not sure that there is any mode of human reasoning besides 1) rationalization and 2) deduction according to rules in a formal system. Probably, what we call rationalization is also the same process that tells you that if you find a nibbled wheel of cheese, there might be a mouse in your kitchen. It’s just a fill-in-the-blanks madlibs-like game, that happens to give the right answer a very respectable fraction of the time.
Which is to say that, if you’re not using any kind of formal mathematical argument, you’re rationalizing. And come to think of it, this meshes nicely with the earlier example of Einstein finding relativity by pure thought. It’s true that he didn’t conduct any physical experiments, but we might say that he conducted mathematical experiments to find a self-consistent mathematical system to represent his idea. If he hadn’t found such a system, he would presumably have discarded his idea, and so in effect, what he was doing was not pure rationalization.