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Politics : View from the Center and Left
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To: Lane3 who wrote (93492)11/3/2008 10:07:30 PM
From: neolib  Read Replies (1) of 541518
 
You might make similar arguments about the emotion of love. In fact, various people have tried to do that claiming that rational thought is the REAL basis for true human love. The fallacy of that is easily seen in looking at books and movies. For each book or movie exalting emotional love, how many do you find exalting the supremacy of "rational" love? Its quite possible that any given individual, by tint of many hours worshipping various books of philosophy might convince themselves otherwise, that their real true happiness IS in fact based in formal rational thought, but the vast weight of evidence says this is not the case for our species.

My money is always on biology. There is a lot of interesting research being done in the field about how we think, and the trend is towards more understanding that much of what we claim as unique "higher" rational thought is actually instead based on a very long tail of evolutionary development. Remember that humans functioned quite well long before we developed formal rules of logic. If anything explaining formal logic is much easier than explaining the mechanisms that came before. In fact, our own creations, computers, can pretty much beat us now at all the "higher" rational thought processes. Its the instinctual intelligence side that we have pretty much drawn a total blank on in terms of understanding. The stuff we formally teach ourselves, we can formally teach computers. The stuff we innately learn, we often have no clue how to "teach" a computer.
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