Still, I think it’s useful to ask if the whole person, with all the their motivation systems, is rational. Asking if a person’s subsystems are rational seems relevant when you are figuring out to focus your training efforts on those systems most holding the person back.
A blind reflex may not itself be rational or irrational, but I can train my reflexes, and make rational choices about what I want to train my reflexes to do. Of course, I can only train reflexes to follow simple heuristics far short of computing a rational decision, and that is an “unfair” limit on my rationality, but that doesn’t mean that a system that makes better choices isn’t more rational than me.
The cogsci notion of rationality is indeed a personal rather than a subpersonal one. I’m not trying to describe subprocesses as rational or irrational, though. I’m describing the whole person as rational or irrational, but rationality is an ideal standard for choices, not actions, and reflexes are not “choices.” In any case, I can’t find a sentence in your latest comment that I disagree with.
Still, I think it’s useful to ask if the whole person, with all the their motivation systems, is rational. Asking if a person’s subsystems are rational seems relevant when you are figuring out to focus your training efforts on those systems most holding the person back.
A blind reflex may not itself be rational or irrational, but I can train my reflexes, and make rational choices about what I want to train my reflexes to do. Of course, I can only train reflexes to follow simple heuristics far short of computing a rational decision, and that is an “unfair” limit on my rationality, but that doesn’t mean that a system that makes better choices isn’t more rational than me.
The cogsci notion of rationality is indeed a personal rather than a subpersonal one. I’m not trying to describe subprocesses as rational or irrational, though. I’m describing the whole person as rational or irrational, but rationality is an ideal standard for choices, not actions, and reflexes are not “choices.” In any case, I can’t find a sentence in your latest comment that I disagree with.