UNREASONABLY HUMAN
‘We are rational beings.’ It’s in the very name of our species: Homo sapiens, meaning 'wise man'.
Reason, whether you’re reading essays from the Enlightenment or watching political debates- is always regarded as the essential, supreme human faculty; it is referred to as our mind’s powerful, unique ability to overthrow emotions, bias and find truth in a world of constant deception.
But what if reason, the way we imagine it, does not exist.
By all means, this does not diminish the existence of logic in any sense. Logic is something real, consistent and formal.
It’s crucial to differentiate between the two: reason and logic, as they are often erroneously overlapped. Logic is a rigid, symbolic system, founded by rules and boundaries. It concerns the structure of one’s arguments and determines the resolution of their consequences. For example, if we can say ‘All dogs are animals’ and ‘Daisy is my dog’ then we can connect the two claims and conclude that Daisy (the one I am referring to here) is an animal as well. It is very strict and irreversible. It doesn’t consider the way you feel about dogs; it only focuses on if your claims and premises follow into your conclusion.
Reason, contrastingly, is what we do with logic. It is the human ability to process thoughts, to make judgements and decisions- ideally, objectively. Humanity, since Plato’s first essays, until today, likes to believe that reason is the ‘one and only’ characteristic of our species that can filter experience, emotion and any false bias, so that truth can be attained. But this idea is extremely flawed, as we can never truly ignore the psychological, social and cultural frameworks which we perceive the world through.
Our thoughts don’t, and will never be able to, exist in vacuum. Every word, every belief, every argument we present is inevitably linked to our senses and experience, no matter how hard we try to separate ourselves from them. The best substantiation of this lies in modern psychology, specifically through heuristics: mental shortcuts your brain uses to make decisions quickly. After decades of research, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman showed that our brains can never be labelled as holding this objective capacity. To explain this further, when we judge the danger of a situation -say, when you fear an airplane crash more than a driving accident- we steer away from statistical evidence and instead rely on the frequency of examples we can think of. If we’ve recently read an article reporting a plane crash or seen some footage on TV, we’re likely to hyperbolise the risk of flying, thus fearing it more, although driving is- in reality- much riskier. This is called the availability heuristic. A similar example is the phenomenon of confirmation bias, which leads humans to search for and retain information that supports and buttresses pre-existing beliefs, whilst ignoring and subconsciously refuting contradictory evidence. And yet, we may still call ourselves ‘objective’ and ‘rational’, when all we’re doing is applying feelings of familiarity and preference bias to our arguments.
Another way to disprove the existence of this ‘rational’ capacity is by observing its inconsistent nature across regions and history. People in Ancient Greece considered it reasonable to sacrifice animals or even humans to thank Gods. Today, this sounds absurd and would serve you a minimum of 10 years behind bars. In Asian countries, saving money is considered the rational choice, as it avoids the shame that lies with debt, and ensures independence and a life lead by discipline. In contrast, Western capitalist regions like the United States deem acts of spending and investment as rational, as they contribute to nation-wide economy and ensure successful growth. Both examples clearly depict reason’s malleability: it changes based on various factors that differ greatly across cultures, contexts and perspectives. So, if reason were this universal, objective, all-powerful trait we see it as, such contradictions should not appear.
Even fields like science and mathematics, which are often used to substantiate rational arguments, contradict this belief. In the words of philosopher Thomas Kuhn, scientific advancements often reject rationalist thought and are “more about the collapse of what once felt like common sense”. Scientific research and development are not shaped by the data itself, but the people discovering it and interpreting it. Science evolves through contradictions, vulnerable to error and context-based deception: it always relies on the scientist, an individual inextricably tied to social bias. As for mathematics -a rationalist’s best friend- it paradoxically reveals the limitations of reason in its very nature. Widely used concepts such as infinity and imaginary or irrational numbers epitomise uncertainty. The entity π never ends, and relies on approximation when applied to problems, lying far out of our comprehension’s grasp. Even mathematics, the strongest evidence of reason, serves as proof that not all which we call “rational” thought can be attained!
Finally, modern neuroscience destroys the last remnants of this belief that reason is our essential faculty. Emotion and reason, once considered two completely different, non-overlapping entities, are now proven to be intertwined. Without the normal function of the emotional centres of our brains (specifically the amygdala, hippocampus and ventromedial prefrontal cortex/vmPFC) we are incapable of making even the simplest of decisions. For example, patients with a damaged vmPFC, lose their ability to decipher and weigh consequences or act in accordance with their best interest, although technically they still hold this so-called ‘rational’ ability. This connection proves how emotion is not a mere obstacle of rational thinking- but is fundamental to its very function!
So, why all this arguing?
It’s not to promote irrationality and reject rationality as a whole. It’s to reveal the false ideal that we can make perfectly objective choices, completely independent of our experiences and senses. We are a complex, multi-faceted species which can never be defined by such an absolute claim. We are full of contradicting exceptions, products of our experiences, driven by emotions and influenced by societies. Our real essence, in my opinion, lies in these imperfections. The uncomfortable warmth of nostalgia, the rewarding complexity of friendship, the illogical haze of love: that is what really shapes us.
What if the most ‘irrational’ parts of us are, in reality, our greatest strengths?