Justin E. H. Smith of Concordia University hopes that artificial intelligence and extraterrestrial life (a “statistical near-certainty”) will help us “give up the idea of rationality as nature’s last remaining exception”:
He is unusually frank in explaining why he finds that an attractive (or even tenable) idea:
“In answering the where question of reason in this maximally broad way, we are able to preserve the naturalism that philosophy and cognitive science insist upon today, while dispensing with the human-exclusivity of reason. And all the better, since faith in the strange idea that reason appears exactly once in nature, in one particular species and nowhere else, seems, on reflection, to be itself a vestige of pre-scientific supernaturalism.”
He hopes that artificial intelligence and extraterrestrial life (a “statistical near-certainty”) will help us “give up the idea of rationality as nature’s last remaining exception.”
But what if philosophy and cognitive science are so wrong in this matter that they are leading Smith and the rest of us into absurdities? Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor comments. Denyse O’Leary, “Philosopher argues, human reason is inferior to animal reactions” at Mind Matters News
See also: The real reason why only human beings speak. (Michael Egnor) Language is a tool for abstract thinking—a necessary tool for abstraction—and humans are the only animals who think abstractly
Do big brains matter to human intelligence? We don’t know. Brain research readily dissolves into confusion at that point.
Tales of an invented god: The most important characteristic of an AI cult is that its gods (Godbots?) will be created by the AI developers and not the other way around
and
Panpsychism: You are conscious but so is your coffee mug Another approach to dethroning reason is to claim that everything is conscious, a surprisingly popular view among naturalists.
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I have myopia, hemorrhoids, scoliosis, psoriasis, arthritis and receding gum lines. I don’t feel very “exceptional”. 🙂 but I still have a full head of hair. Oh, wait. I forgot. Dandruff.
Who reads this kind of nonsense? Do you, News?
Sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo………………..They reasons reasoning is unreasonable to animal reaction using reason which is more reasonable……….. he is a Philosopher 🙁 I quit
I read a whole lot about the history of political ideas, and a campaign to force people to accept the idea that nothing actually makes objective sense would have found any number of supporters in 19th century France. But it must confuse the hell out of math majors and aerospace engineers.
And from a medical point of view, if you’re sitting across from a man in your examination room who insists it’s impossible to be “rational”, I think the doctor is gonna start making arrangements to send him to the psycho ward.
I spend a good part of most days babysitting my 4 year old grandson. It is a wonderful time, and although he may not have all his facts straight (well, there COULD BE a monster behind the chair…), he is nothing if not Rational. After all, he’s trying VERY hard to make SENSE of the world he’s still discovering. I think that’s one of the things that is hardwired into all baby humans: an urgent need to discover and understand the world. And that discovery and understanding would of course be impossible if nothing is rational.
So he takes us through his reasoning for why he thinks that all human reasoning is invalid?
But,,, But,, Oh nevermind!
Including his own rationality?
As the philosopher in the OP made clear, naturalism commits epistemological suicide when it denies the reality of reason.
Of related interest to this, C.S. Lewis, in his ‘argument from reason’, once made this interesting comment, “One absolutely central inconsistency ruins [the popular scientific philosophy]. The whole picture professes to depend on inferences from observed facts. Unless inference is valid, the whole picture disappears… unless Reason is an absolute, all is in ruins.”
“Unless Reason is an absolute, all is in ruins” is NOT a minor claim for CS Lewis to have made.
And again C.S. Lewis reiterated his claim that ‘reason must be absolute’ this way, “Reason is given before Nature and on reason our concept of Nature depends. Our acts of inference are prior to our picture of Nature almost as the telephone is prior to the friend’s voice we hear by it.”
And again “Reason is given before Nature and on reason our concept of Nature depends” is NOT a minor claim for C.S. Lewis to have made.
C.S. Lewis, through reason itself, was able to show that ‘reason must be absolute’ and that “Reason (must be) given before Nature”.
What C.S. Lewis was not able to do during his day was to show, empirically, through scientific experimentation, that “Reason (must be) given before Nature”.
In other words, C.S. Lewis, in his day, was not able to offer experimental confirmation for his philosophical claim that reason must be absolute and prior to nature.
Yet, recent advances in quantum mechanics have now empirically validated C.S. Lewis’s philosophical claim that ‘reason must be absolute’ and that “Reason (must be) given before Nature”.
In short, our ability to reason rationally presupposes our ability to make free will choices between rational options.
That is to say that our ability to reason in a coherent fashion is absolutely dependent on our having free will.
And now, as of 2018, free will has been shown to a integral part of quantum mechanics. Specifically, in 2018 Anton Zeilinger and company have pushed the ‘free will loophole’ back to 7.8 billion years ago, thereby firmly establishing the ‘common sense’ fact that the free will choices of the experimenter in the quantum experiments are truly free and are not determined by any possible causal influences from the past for at least the last 7.8 billion years, and that experimenters themselves are therefore shown to be truly free to choose whatever measurement settings in the experiments that he or she may so desire to choose so as to ‘logically’ probe whatever aspect of reality that he or she may be interested in probing.
Just how counter-intuitive this ‘free will’ aspect of quantum mechanics is to naturalistic presuppositions is touched upon by Anton Zeilinger in the following video. Specifically Zeilinger states, “what we perceive as reality now depends on our earlier decision what to measure. Which is a very, very, deep message about the nature of reality and our part in the whole universe. We are not just passive observers.”
As well, with contextuality we find that, “In the quantum world, the property that you discover through measurement is not the property that the system actually had prior to the measurement process. What you observe necessarily depends on how you carried out the observation”
Thus in conclusion. C.S. Lewis’s philosophical “argument from reason”, specifically his claim that ‘reason must be absolute’ and that “Reason (must be) given before Nature”, is now empirically validated by recent advances in quantum mechanics that have confirmed the validity of free will as being ‘prior to’ reality.
Verse and quote:
Maybe I’m unexceptional or just irrational, but it seems rather simple to me:
1. Human’s aren’t the only rational creatures. Dogs, octopuses, dolphins, crows and other higher-intelligence species can figure out puzzles involving food well enough, thereby behaving rationally to some degree. Humans just take rationality to a much higher level. Part of that is education and cultural transmission of knowledge, which other species are not as good at. So no, humans are not an exception in being rational, we are simply exceptionally rational.
2. With the data we currently have available to us, it is clear (I hope) that humans are the most rational creatures we know of, even if we often act irrationally. If someone wants to posit a hypothetical ET species that is equally or more rational, I say, “show me the evidence”. A hypothesis without evidence is just an empty proposition. And arguing a “statistical near certainty” is mere bluff without evidence.
I both agree and disagree with you I think that has more to do with your definition of rationality and intelligence, They do kind of go hand-in-hand but there is a little bit of a difference.
Animals have very different types of intelligence as well as different levels of intelligence
But without having to go into the incredible amount of differences between our intelligence and rationality and other species on this planet I say this.
Of everything that was mentioned above we are the only ones having this conversation about the intelligence of all of the creatures on the planet and their possession of rationality
And as to the fact that I do like your suggestion for anybody that says we don’t know whether or not they are having a rational discussion about whether or not we are intelligent I would simply ask you show me the evidence of this
But the argument about whether we are exceptional or not almost seems silly to me because at the end of the day no matter what your take is:
Whether we are uniquely different or we’re just differ in degrees
We are still exceptional because either we are uniquely intelligent beyond anything on this planet
Or
We are the most intelligent and rational creatures on this planet beyond anything else
Either one makes us exceptional whether you want to climb a ladder to get to our intelligence or make a jump
We are, as a species, the apex, Not just a predator but in almost every category.
Yes there are animals that can do things we can’t do naturally, but that’s the thing, there’s no species that can copy every single other species on this planet by figuring out how they do it and replicating it like we do
By degree there are a few species that do mimic
But none of them have created a jet that flies entire colonies of people around because we wanted to fly like a bird. And our fascination with a crows ability to make a single tool to pick a lock seems silly in comparison to our ability to build a robotic arm to build a car. I guess we’re just used to our ability to create things and a pass that knowledge on
What makes us so special as we are perfectly aware of what makes everything else special and anything they can do we can actually figure out how to do and even do it better.
We are dangerous species we are also capable of being the most beneficial to the entire world but we are also capable of being the most dangerous
I would really just like it if we tried to be good stewards two or one little marble in space
Which means respecting everything and taking care of it
“To our one little marble”
I used talk text To write that last message.
It’s so easy to use but it sucks so much
It goes wrong at the very beginning:
“artificial intelligence and extraterrestrial life (a “statistical near-certainty”)”
… and only gets worse after that.
But this is miserably false; the absence of life is a statistical near-certainty, and even if you accept for sake of argument the age of the universe at approximately 15 billion years (I don’t but that’s another story) and you have available every atom in the universe to randomly combine in interesting ways, you’re still an infinitesimally tiny fraction of the way through all the possible combinations, only a few dozens of which are actually useful for life as we know it.
This presumption, that there must be alien life “out there” somewhere, is based on the assumption that we evolved by random chance. But as we know, we did not, for the simple reason that evolution by random chance is not even possible. No amount of statistical legerdemain can make the impossible possible. It matters not how many particles you have available, over what period of time – the impossible never becomes possible.
Once you get over the automatic unreasoning presumption that darwinian evolution is true, then all these kinds of opening statements (in reality, claims about reality) appear starkly remarkable in their obvious falsity.
This is also remarkably stupid and self-defeating:
“will help us “give up the idea of rationality as nature’s last remaining exception”
Apart from the obvious self-contradiction of someone trying to use logic and reason to convince us that he’s not rational, I was strongly reminded of Pope’s Essay on Man:
Shall he alone, whom rational we call,
Be pleas’d with nothing, if not bless’d with all?