Comment by gimboarretino on 26/02/2025 at 11:23 UTC

1 upvotes, 2 direct replies (showing 2)

View submission: /r/philosophy Open Discussion Thread | February 24, 2025

The ontological misuse of logic in strongly rationalistic worldviews (e.g., the eliminativist worldview) is the most dangerous trap in the history of human thought.

What does it mean to be rational, to use logic to decipher reality? It means you want to obey the rules of being a rational observer, a rational agent, a rational thinker, to use a set of rules to systematically analyze, draw inferences, and form coherent, justified beliefs.

Let's say you conclude that by following reason, the logical interpretation of reality is an eliminativist one, where only atoms exist, their position and velocity evolving according to the laws of physics. That's it.

But you can always ask… okay, but why should we be rational in the first place? Why should we use logic to decode/interpret reality? The obvious answer is: because we observe that people who follow these principles are more successful in life, tend to have better predictive power, understand phenomena better, invent and discover and do amazing stuff etc.

This is why we say, "there are good reasons to do what they do—to be rational agents and thinkers."

But this statement (which, to be clear, I 100% subscribe to) presupposes the acknowledgement of the existence of conscious entities, or at least thinking/computing entities, observers, and empirical experience—rational observers who behave and reason according to the dictates of logic, succeed in thier tasks, and observer that observe this very phenomena.

*So you can't turn it around and say**, "Ok, cool, ***so now we are going to start with logic axiomatically***, this is the way to be rational" ***and then go backward to show that this is how the world must be*** (no observers and thinkers, just atoms and laws).

This is a circular trap, a trap into which countless philosophers and scientists and people have fallen and continue to fall.

You are always bound to presuppose observers and agents and ***everything had constituted the conditions that convinced you in the first place to think that using logic to decipher reality was a good thing,*** a useful tool with which to proceed.

You are always bound, at least, to this fundamental empirical experience.

Replies

Comment by Hot_Experience_8410 at 27/02/2025 at 02:33 UTC

1 upvotes, 1 direct replies

I thought the comment title covered it in its entirety.

Comment by Unlikely-Bluejay540 at 26/02/2025 at 22:29 UTC

1 upvotes, 1 direct replies

I'm sort of wrestling with a kind of hyper-nihilism based on a rationalist viewpoint, and I think this post helped? What I always run up against is that if this or that argument is true, if there's no self or subjectivity that isn't just atoms and even subjectively felt/perceived/"created" meaning is invalid, now what? How do we live with that information?