Chapter II: Reason | The Philosophy Of Science by Steven Gussman [1st Edition]

        “Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it, we go nowhere.”

        – Carl Sagan^I

        Articulated reason is the use of conscious thought processes to think things through, rationally.  Thinkers such as Nobel prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues argue that to a first approximation, the human brain has two systems of thought.  System-one are our base instincts, intuitions, biases, and knee-jerk responses.  These aren't all bad and do form a foundation for articulated reason to work from—evolution by natural selection selected system-one so as to help us survive and reproduce, which often meant getting things right in a particular context, that which our ancestors faced in their pre-historic environment (the flip side is that much of reality was unimportant to our ancestors' genes, and sometimes ignorance, getting things wrong, or self-deception^II, would have served their genes better than accuracy).   Kahneman calls articulated reason system-two: here we show our work, either consciously thinking, speaking, or writing through our problems.^III  This is enabled by our neocortex: a higher level part of the brain not present in all animals' brains and nowhere as developed as it is in our case^IV; indeed, we spend a quarter of our energy on our heads, and more on cognition than many other mammals.^V  It seems to me that this brain complexity evolved (perhaps in a positive feedback loop because of homo sapiens' ability to move to new environments, and the ever changing environment of living things, especially human social interaction and communication) to solve problems on less-than-evolutionary timescales.^VI

        As long as our ancestors were human (and to a lesser degree, for some time before that), they surely always used reason to communicate as well as to make informed decisions.  Sometimes both of these took the form of myths that were not literally true (whether or not they were believed to be by their adherents).^VII  Sometimes this would have come in the form of a primitive science: over time, if a traditional society had noticed that the use of a certain plant seemed to successfully treat a particular ailment, this may be recognized, verbalized and passed on and down to others.^VIII  Further, homo sapiens' level of intelligence and communication, as well as their family and societal structure, means that we give rise to [incubate] cumulative culture: each generation (or even society) does not have to discover everything for themselves all over again—we pass down ideas to our youth as traditions and we trade ideas with other peoples.^IX  Cumulative culture allows an accumulation of large sets of ideas that could never have been created (or perhaps even comprehended) by any single person of any single society at any single time.^X  Here too, specialization becomes important: if and when human societies transition from nomadic hunter-gatherer to sedentary agricultural societies (and beyond), suddenly people are free to specialize in what they are good at and interested in, meaning someone in town might make shoes for everyone (and do a much better job of it than the average, uninterested person) whereas others will trade him for their specialized products and services.^XI

        One uses articulated reason any time they realize they're using reason at all!  Reason allows one to combine (or even override, when necessary) instinct and impulse with information one has learned during their lives, from facts to frameworks, to come to informed conclusions (this includes induction and especially deduction, but more on those in the “Logic” chapter).  Further, one may apply reason to reason: such recursive reasoning allows us to re-assess not only our conclusions, but our thought-processes, allowing our philosophies to be error-correcting (if we are so wise as to choose to).^XII

        Yet articulated reason (in this sense) is not enough on its own, as humanity's raw computing power may be used to create all manner of philosophies (and indeed, it has), only one of which can be right.  This leaves us far better off than most animals which cannot form coherent intellectual cultures (instead relying almost entirely on system-one instincts), but still leaves finding the right philosophy as a needle-in-a-haystack problem.  As mentioned previously, the rest of this book is about which philosophy is the correct one and why.

Footnotes:

0. The Philosophy Of Science table of contents can be found, here (footnotephysicist.blogspot.com/2022/04/table-of-contents-philosophy-of-science.html).

I. See Cosmos by Sagan (pp. 2).

II. Evolutionist Robert Trivers is responsible (among many other contributions) for the hypothesis of evolutionary self-deception: that, at least in some contexts, the liar may ultimately win the arm's race between adaptations to conceal and read “tells” by finally rendering the host susceptible to their own lie, as it is much harder to figure out that one is lying if they truly believe their own lie, see The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial Of Human Nature by Steven Pinker (Penguin Books) (2002 / 2016) (pp. 111, 265, 263-266, 293, 301, 472) which further cites "Foreword To The First Edition" by Robert L. Trivers (Oxford University Press) (1976) from The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins (Oxford University Press) (1976 / 1989 / 2006 / 2016) (pp. xxvi). For a comedic version of this, see the Seinfeld episode entitled “The Beard” in which the character George Costanza argues, “it's not a lie if you believe it”, or the Wikipedia entry for “The Beard” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beard).

III. For information on system-one and system-two thinking, see Misbehaving: The Making Of Behavioral Economics by Richard H. Thaler (W. W. Norton & Company) (2016) by way of Google Books' search result for “system” (https://books.google.com/books?id=xQedBAAAQBAJ&q=system#v=snippet&q=system&f=false) (note: I have not yet finished reading this book).

IV. See at least the "Biological Neocortex" chapter in How To Create A Mind by Kurzweil (pp. 75-92).

V. See “Humans Don't Use As Much Brainpower As We Like To Think” by Robin A. Smith (Duke Today) (2017) (https://today.duke.edu/2017/10/humans-dont-use-much-brainpower-we-think) which summarizes the technical paper “Scaling of Bony Canals for Encephalic Vessels in Euarchontans: Implications for the Role of the Vertebral Artery and Brain Metabolism” by Doug Boyer and Arianna Harrington (Journal of Human Evolution) (2017) (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0047248416302603?via%3Dihub) (though I have not read this original work). The piece supports that the human brain uses 25% of our energy and that, “... humans allot proportionally more energy to their brains than rodents, Old World monkeys, and great apes such as orangutans and chimpanzees,” but, as her title suggests, she also points out that pen-tailed treeshrews, ring-tailed lemurs, and quarter-pound pygmy marmosets have high brain energy allotments, similar to ours (though Boyer notes that this value can be inflated by species having a `er, and therefore less energy-consuming bodies compared to their heads, rather than by brain sophistication). For the previously stated reasons, I believe the article's headline is misleading, or at least that the most we could say is that we simply do not know until we control for the head-body ratios of different species.

VI. Psychologist Alison Gopnik has independently hypothesized similarly, see The Gardener And The Carpenter: What The New Science Of Child Development Tells Us About The Relationship Between Parents And Children by Alison Gopnik (Picador) (2017) (pp. 29, 35). Such topics will be discussed further in the “Biology” and “Psychology” chapters in the “Ontology” volume.

VII. This concept is one of clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson's focuses (see for example his debates with philosopher and neuro-scientist Sam Harris on the nature of truth, “Sam Harris & Jordan Peterson in Vancouver - Part 1 - Presented by Pangburn (CC: Arabic & Spanish)” produced by YouTube user Pangburn, Pangburn Philosophy, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jey_CzIOfYE) and has been dubbed “metaphorical truth” by evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein, see for example the following tweet of his from 2017 (https://twitter.com/bretweinstein/status/943162491940454401?lang=en).

VIII. Sagan has argued that traditional peoples' folk medicine ought to be used as hypotheses to be tested using the scientific method, see The Demon Haunted World: Science As A Candle In The Dark by Carl Sagan (Random House) (1997) (pp. 250-252, 312-317).

IX. This fact puts the lie to the pernicious and un-scientific concept of “cultural appropriation”.

X. See for example Enlightenment Now by Pinker (at least pp. 261).

XI. See Sapiens: A Brief History Of Humanity by Yuval Noah Harari (Harper Perennial) (2015) (174-175). These concepts will be explored further in the “Economics” chapter, in the “Ontology” volume.

XII. See Cosmos by Sagan and Druyan (pp. xviii, 94, 194); The Demon Haunted World by Sagan (pp. 20-22, 230, 274-275, 414, 423); Cosmos: Possible Worlds by Ann Druyan (National Geographic) (2020) (pp. 75); The Ape That Understood The Universe: How The Mind And Culture Evolve by Steve Stewart-Williams (Cambridge University Press) (2018 / 2019) (pp. 229-230, 268); Enlightenment Now by Pinker (pp. 7, 11, 26-28, 83, 127, 393, 408-409); “Recursion” by Read Montague (Edge / Harper Perennial) (2017 / 2018) (https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27035) and “Fallibilism” by Oliver Scott Curry (Edge / Harper Perennial) (2017 / 2018) (https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27192), both from This Idea Is Brilliant: Lost, Overlooked, And Underappreciated Scientific Concepts Everyone Should Know edited by John Brockman (Harper Perennial) (2018) (pp. 61-62, 82-83); “Science Advances By Funerals” by Samuel Barondes (Edge / Harper Perennial) (2014 / 2015) (https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25386) and “Planck's Cynical View Of Scientific Change” (Edge / Harper Perennial) (2014 / 2015) by Hugo Mercier (https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25332), both from This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress edited by John Brockman (Harper Perennial) (2015) (pp. 481-485); and “Science Must Destroy Religion” by Sam Harris (Edge / Harper Perennial) (2006 / 2007) (https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11122) in What Is Your Dangerous Idea: Today's Leading Thinkers On The Unthinkable edited by John Brockman (Harper Perennial) (2006 / 2007) (pp. 148-151).