an essay of Rationalism
It's not unusual that someone accuses me from time to time of being too rational, square-headed or logical-minded. And that's fine. They are probably not wrong, as compared to your typical person I probably overuse analysis and technical jargon, and tend to overthink virtually everything that crosses my path. But I sense a lack of depth in those definitions, as I imagine they perceive that behind my antics there is some kind of monolithic, almost algorithmic computer-like processing unit that calculates my decisions and words. Mostly the fact that I try to explain everything in logical ways is a product of constant introspection, conceptualization and general reverse engineering of my own subconscious motivations and actions, and not a description of the actual thought process and/or intention that actually takes place in my brain. A process a posteriori, not descriptive of a method with intent but a try to make sense of it, to offer the closest possible thing to an explanation. It's an effort, and a monumental one at that, at trying to be understood by others and understand myself. It's not even the only one I do, for I have spend a major portion of the last ten years trying to do the same through essays, narrative, music and photograph. To name some. It's an effort that I would dare to say is not so different from everyone else's, if not in form in spirit, as pure reason and logic are not the only source of truth.
Then why? Why those analytic and seemingly endless rationalizations and logic-sounding definite statements? Why the deep rooted skepticism, adherence to scientific knowledge, dismissal of entire fields of knowledge, people and "traditional wisdom"? Why am I drawn to that kind of structured discourse and though? The explanation could fill entire pages and late night conversations, but I like to summarize it in one simple phrase:
It works.
This type of thinking is just good at problem solving, specially when the problems you are trying to solve or figure out are reductionable or emergent from a set of rigid rules. Which is exactly the type of problems I faced during my formative years and shape they way I am now. Let's roll back a couple of decades to see what I mean by that.
I was a smart kid. At least I was whatever adults considered as "smart" at that age. I was good at school, liked doing math, reading books theoretically too advanced from my age and routinely beat chess players multiple of times my age. All those things have something in common: they benefit from analytical thinking. Maybe doing those things developed them, maybe I had a natural predisposition to them, it doesn't really matter. So, when my way of thinking seemed to work and gave me a fundamental advantage over virtually everything I did, I started using it for everything, naturally. I couldn't explain, for the life of me, how other people found it difficult, and even less could I explain why people acted the way they acted or though irrational things, as it was totally obvious to me when something was just plain wrong. And it had to be, because if my analytical thinking led me to the opposite conclusion and my way of thinking just fucking worked, then they were wrong. In my world, rationality was not only opposite to irrationality, but also to everything that was superficial. The people and authors that impressed me all had scientific minds, and when I stumbled upon something that was different, I could only see superstition and not only pseudoscience, but a distinct absence to any alternative way of validating or rejecting ideas. An endemic absence of rigorousness and depth which only cure was, again, the total embrace of hard cold logic.
All that accompanied me for a long time, some aspects of it still remaining. Slowly, without even knowing what that meant, I developed a sort of Rationalism™ that I used for everything. But eventually, gradually, some problems started to emerge. I have already stated their source: logical thinking works very well for reductionable problems or those that emerge from a strict set of rules (if simple enough) but they proved increasingly useless when dealing with more complex ones, ultimately resulting in contradictions or just reach out of my grasp. But I guess I was convinced those were temporal setbacks, symptoms that I needed to perfect my base logical facts and improve the depth of my reasoning; that with perfect method and basic truths I could eventually solve whatever was in front of me. And here I have to pause and apology, because I'm going to have to mention Rene Descartes.
Unbeknownst to me, there used to be a french dude that tried to do exactly that. That rascal got ahead of me, I was going to solve the universe all on my own but apparently someone stole the glory. I found it by coincidence, I don't remember if it was from a book or reading Wikipedia pages, it was a long time ago, I was thirteen.
I didn't even read his book, but I instantly knew what the guy was talking about. I understood nothing of all the math and formal logic paraphernalia (remember, thirteen) and though it was useless to what it already appeared to me as self-evident. I am, more often than not, only interested in the conceptual side of things and make my own of them, just assume I know what they are talking about, and move one (which, now that I write it, should have been a sign I was not that rational and thorough as I though, after all). Eventually, to my dismay, I read what the conclusions of using his method were: god exists. It couldn't be. I though god didn't exist and that was the sort of nonsense people that couldn't play chess well and, therefore, didn't know how to think, believed in. Obviously, the guy didn't use the method well; he believed that beforehand and just cheated his way into creating a system only objective in the surface that gave the desired outcome. What a foreshadowing for what was to come. Since that day I hated Descartes, whom I considered a traitor, but some of his stuff was still quite good, and directly or by accident I started to use some of his method into my own (that was not that defined at-all, despite my confidence) and moved on with my life, embracing the official self-definition of a rationalist for a certain amount of time. I embarked in a life-long trip of finding or constructing a set of philosophical principles or system or structure that could answer everything.
Although to be honest didn't even though about the whole thing directly very much, it was more of a sort of "frame" that a direct ideology, a hobby more than an obsession. I was pretty casual about it. During most of my time I was mostly more occupied with basketball (I left chess), video games and girls. But the results of that thinking and the way I framed my though affected not only my worldview but also the way I did everything; from making an omelette, to solving a puzzle to my interactions with other people. In an unrecognized effort, my instincts and fairly good intuition filled the gaps of what I couldn't explain or manufacture (the sames I was trying to sort of get rid of) giving me the impression that the whole thing worked better that it should.
None of it thwarted my social life. Yes, I was repellent to grown-ups, but I saw the majority of them, represented by my high-school teachers, as incompetent, irrational and stupid anyway (I regret nothing). Maybe it was because I found myself in the middle of an usual social group of really smart and individual outcasts, a troupe of people I have always felt better with than with the supposed other smart kids that excelled at academia. Meanwhile I was getting good at that whole thinking thing, albeit with next to no progress in my side project of unifying human knowledge. Some cracks were surging under the surface, seemingly smart details that would eventually snowball into an avalanche, akin to the process in which classical physics was at first challenged by small inconsistencies in fringe cases and experiments that ended up crashing the whole thing. After all, this is the problem with rigid logical systems, you only need one contradiction to invoke their principle of explosion; a problem that all rigid dualism tend to inherit: from good and evil to true and false. Those things, however, didn't happen at once and that downfall was not immediate, but rather a process, and this whole explanation up this this point is not either a lineal process, even if it seems to because of the constraints of narrative structure. I will try my best to explain each one.
At that time I was quite a lot into internet forums. The internet as a whole was a much different place than it is now, and even if I also did the mainstream stuff of the time I got the majority of my kicks from random browsing into small obscure communities and blogs. One of those was an intellectual philosophical board in Spanish, that curated an even smaller community of rationalists. I remember clearly one of those posts, about a guy that successfully has isolated himself from music, arguing that it tainted his pure rational thinking, liberating himself further from the emotional constraints that it invoked, detailing his journey of months. I was quite shocked. I understood then how emotionalism could interfere with pure reasoning, and the majority of people I knew that were idiots were dominated by their basic and easily explained prejudices, so overall the idea wasn't that far-fetched. But music? Really? I closed my computer, didn't answer anything (once a lurker always a lurker) and retired into contemplation. I wasn't going to quit music. Art was the main catalyst and inspiration of some of my more precious ideas and moments, how could it be bad? Even if that was the price and it really worked, I was not sure if I wanted to pay.
Once I started writing or communicating my ideas and thoughts, it started to be self-evident that they weren't that deep and cohesive. It's an interesting phenomena, in which they can be all perfect and profound as you want as long as you never directly express them, making people that talk seem idiots and people who don't convince themselves they know much more than they actually do. Properly lied down, the deepest and more foundational ideals of the majority of us have the width of a couple of nonsensical paragraphs. As much as I though I did, I didn't have a way to really test ideas, as my own internal reasoning was faulty and, as a general norm, I didn't trust others superficial opinions in important things. Maybe the whole problem could be also just the fact that I wasn't very good at the process of "writing" itself, which was true, but somehow I felt that wasn't the only thing happening there.
As I knew more and more diverse people, some inconsistencies emerged. Most people were still idiots and incapable of playing chess, that didn't change, but among some of the people I knew, there was an abundance of elements I have always though as symptomatic or derived from sheer stupidity. A variety of, not only ideas but language in which they expressed complicated ideas, lifestyles and actions my frame lacked the proper power to fully grasp. Things I rejected by principle, like traditions or spiritual though started to make sense when you moved thinking from a purely individual phenomenon to a group or society wide interlinked process; not objective at all but the process of evolutionary conditioning and cultural conditioning. And I was not free from that.
The more I tried to deep dive into any particular subject, specially those related to psychology, the more I encountered the exponential problem. Simple statements spiraled out of control when you tried to atomize them in order to draw logical conclusions from them, dissipated as cloud of gas in front of me or got lost as handfuls of sand. The complexity and intersectionality of knowledge was too much, is still to much, for an algorithmic system of evaluation. That's something that can be obvious to most people, but it wasn't to me, as it contradicted basically everything I learned to do over the years. If I had an exam about whatever, I read the textbook, conceptualized the basic elements that lied therein and combined them using basic logic in the exam. If I wanted to get better at a strategy game, I read everything, deduce the basic strategic principles and tried to apply them. Even when I didn't have complete information, I could navigate my way through the life of a teenager doing that pretty well. But with so complex subjects, that was just impossible. There was the intuition of a fractal depth of knowledge, the intuition that pure though was impossible because I couldn't atomize a single phrase. How could I reject what wasn't pure though? Did such a thing even exist? What didn't, in some way or form, taint the preconceptions that lied deep down my own preconceptions? What were the unknown unknowns and how could I possibly design a system of knowledge that included what I didn't know? I could go on and on about this, and probably deserves its own nightmare fueled essay, but for the sake of narrative consistency I will just go on.
At some point I crossed paths with a book named "Godel, Escher, Bach". I have always loved Bach, ignored Escher as a gimmick and was recently interested in Godel. If I needed formal confirmation of my doubts about logical structures and math, I had found it. It was a slow burn. I used to talked about the subject with a fellow physics student in collage years later, quite surprised the rest of students could continue with their studies and life as if nothing had happened when to us they should be running around striping math textbooks and screaming in flames. Good times. Everything I learned about chaos and emergence had a similar effect on me, almost of awe and wonder. Reading about Conway's Game of Life reminded me of looking at the starry night as a kid. The universe was just too big. More prosaic were my worries about real life problems, but they showed similar impenetrability by my usual methods. I wasn't getting what I wanted, and my way of thinking started to became not only inconsistent itself but a liability in real life.
My attempts at deconstructing my worldview, ideas, personality and behavior didn't lead to more concreteness, but to even more abstract and deeply down internalized social and cultural foundations most of the time. Even when changing vocabulary and base ideas with time, I always ended up with the same or very similar conclusions, and that had two explanations: either I'm always right because I'm a beast or those lead to loops and are lied down by those abstract foundations I'm unable to even identify and understand fully, as they are part of the same vocabulary and though form I use to conceptualize ideas. Even to me it was obvious the latter was true. Knowledge came in knowledge-forms, self-servicing clutters of ideas, and trying to prove them from inside themselves was pointless. Ideas don't survive because they are good, or true. They do because they generate positive individual-group interactions and produce stable societies. Whether they are more or less well formed and superficially void of contradictions is just an indication of their capacity to do so or predict future outcomes. An almost indicator of well-being and reproduciblility in an evolutionary landscape, monkey generated, of them.
Well before all that, we had a compulsory lecture in high-school that, by principle, I didn't read. But the teacher made to mistake to interpret the bootlickers praise of the book and theme as genuine interest, and invited the author to come over. He was an old local man, I didn't like him or his writing very much, but I have always respected authors so I gave a listen to the introduction or lecture he gave to the class. At some point, he mentioned that when he was young he was impressed by philosophy and grand philosophical structures, but that as time went on, he became disillusioned of them and focus on language and juvenile narrative instead. "What a loser." I though. How could be the boring nuts and bolt of language more important in understanding the world that great philosophical schemes? But that stuck with me for some reason. It intrigued me. At some point in the future, I noticed that statements were in fact self-obvious because of language construction and not because they were objectively truth, and I found myself thinking about that old writer again. Maybe he was on something there. I put my linguist hat and started to think about language itself, not as a construction make of though but as though itself, ideas being though-forms and their architecture, form, structure being their key feature and not their definition in a dictionary. Definition was a huge deal for me, and I could argue with anybody about everything just pointing at faults within the constructions of their ideas based on stone written definitions, proving myself right about anything I wanted to prove right. It's a surprise I didn't like the dialectics more, giving that I was essentially one of them at the time. Maybe I saw their faults and my ego deprived me to see me as one of them. During a couple of brief and painful days I found myself agreeing with Plato and starting to see a resemblance with my newly formed "though-forms" with his "pure ideas", but chance made me end up finding Wittgenstein and I was cured.
Also, it turns out the processes that make you get what you want are not necessarily, if hardly ever, the ones that are better at deciding what the hell do you want. I started to see an intricate tool where I once saw both anvil and hammer.
There were other factors and reasons in my departure with rationalism, like the parallel process of the crumbling of similar subjects like morality, the lack of a theory of mind, the false dichotomy of form and structure, paradoxes and self-referential though, just to name a few. The grand collapse came gradually, in slow-motion, but it wasn't an external force that fueled it. Emotion, irrationality and subjectivity didn't come knowing at my door. My true self didn't emerge from anywhere. I did it by my own means. Analytical thinking led me to the impossibility of a system based on only analytical thinking. The perfecting, the limit seeking and response driven nature of it. Reason proved itself incomplete. After all, even if this is the only way to have true knowledge (whatever the hell that means) that's not necessarily my goal in life. I'm not a computer searching for explanations, but the emergent property of a pink blob searching for meaning.
So there I was, without a base to my structure.
But the thing was, it didn't really collapse.
Sure there was stuff to be done and rethinked, but it was all still there. I figured out all those connections and logical connections that tied ideas in my frame were not dependent of its base, but constrained by it. They were still useful, and more useful even the methods and mechanics I had developed to think them in the first place. They formed a constellation of networks, that those connections, and not their perceived nucleus, were the ideas themselves. And those could be compared between them, drawn patters applicable to everything, generalized, iterated, rotated, permutable. I was not ready for it.
Temporarily, I substituted my crumbling atomic rationalism for a sort of combination of aphorisms and utilitarian idealism (although I didn't even try to justify my aphoristic idealism as a construction from smaller axioms like Descartes did). Probably I was influenced by Nietzsche, and that went on for a while. Right and wrong didn't exist, so I was free to do whatever I wanted and anything to be good or bad, true or false by my own will. So I would just cut out the middle man, don't feel obligated to give myself reasons for everything, as there was no underlying objectivity below anything and that's what everyone did anyways. I rejected not only rationality but the entire concept that a sort of system or combinations of beliefs was the true source of behavior. Not constrained by rational morality or traditionalism I crowned myself master of the universe, capable of creating truth at my own free will. That was fun. I covered the blanks with the fervent idealism of virtue I mentioned before. I used to believe in stuff, like democracy and whatever. But slowly, the totality of the implications of the grand collapse of rationality made obvious that I was not, in fact, master of anything because I didn't know what anything was, not even myself; the product of an environment more than an unbreakable will. So eventually the fight turned back to the world and turned inwards.
At some point, when I was already a young adult and after some gathering of pieces and reconstruction, the process reached a certain critical mass, and from a great extinction event came a sort of Cambrian explosion. I didn't know much, but for some reason ideas were pouring out of my mind. I could recontextualize almost everything in a seemingly infinite possible combination of ways, I could suddenly understand what the fuck were people talking about when using esoteric and abstract language, and I embraced whole the world that was just discovered to me. A sort of surrealism emerged, a universe of thought-forms spelled in metaphoric, allegorical and abstract language, drawing fine-tuned logical connections between them and forming greater structures. An idea was not only, or if, right and wrong, but was the result that made to the world once applied. A system, non-reducible, incomprehensive, not tied to hard dualism that was useful to understand the world without understanding it and that somehow included good-old chess playing, was able to cope with the exponential problem and still thinks astrology is a scam. I can't even grasp it's surface, and I don't delude myself into thinking I can (well, neural networks help). Nothing I could've imagined. It's far from perfect, and has his defects and is ever growing but there it is. This whole process hasn't ended, and I doubt it will ever will. Now I see dualities neither as set in stone or completely useless, but as flickering sides of a same coin. Embracing intuition, symbolism and mythical imagination without being lost in them or deluded by their non-existent purity. After all, I have already made this mistake once, and I'm not going to just change it for the opposite one. How this fragile system of checks and balances is capable of producing answers and solutions to problems is beyond me. This explanation is a gross simplification, and doesn't even being to describe the complex succession of psychological events and transformation that occurred along the way or the totality of my thinking, as am I still struggling with some aspects of it's always incomplete nature and uncertainty, sometimes finding myself trying to scratch the ground searching something useful under my ruins.
I didn't invent this thing. I don't even have much control over it, I just kind of optimize or train it. The thing is, it was already there. My thinking based on logic was only a construct emergent from the whole thing or the processing of a part of it, not an outside invention. What we perceive as bias and fallacies are not bugs or delusions of rational thinking, but evidence that actual though processes are based on a deeper level made of associations and pattern recognition. The impossibility of pure though is not a bug but a feature. The contradictions and hypocrisies at the hearth of every belief system and structure are not due to their imperfection, nor necessarily the product of idiocy or evilness of their practitioners but foundational lies of a deeper game. One you don't even have to be conscious of in order to play in, and in fact, usually works better if you are not. This was that thinking was about all along, I just realized it, accepted it, and now I try to work with it with the tools I have developed in trying to make it make sense, even if I was wrong in my assumptions.
So, when from time to time someone says to me I'm too logical or close-minded I can't help but think "oh boy, we've come a long way", smile and remember how I also simplify people given the impossibility of knowledge, and how all objects paint flat shadows to the ground.
