Also how would one come to recognize reality’s irrationality anyway? By which I should clarify, when I say reality I mean the whole of existence, beyond everyday society which is a mush of reason, emotion, and ambiguous causation. In turn, when I’m talking about irrationality, I don’t mean emotionality or ambiguous causation, but an absence of any underlying reason or cause.
If at some point we reached out and dug deep enough into study of existence only to find that some things simply happen or emerge without any cause whatsoever…What might be the response?
In fact, reality is not apparently basically rational. Why does anything exist at all? Surely, the trivial solution would be a simpler state of affairs. Why is existence not nothing forever? Why there exists anything instead of nothing (let alone you and me, in particular) does not stand to reason.
I imagine those digging would choose to believe they haven’t dug deep enough to understand. It would also be difficult to prove things happen irrationally, and without evidence either way I would expect continued investigation into existence
I agree with this guy. There would be a percentage that would go “Oh, ok. That’s weird,” and accept it, and there would be some who build a bigger microscope or a smaller rover or something.
I’d be in the second group. I have massive hands and a lot of glass laying around.
Most humans believe in magic in some form (gods, spirits, miracles, astrology, etc) so we don’t have to guess how people would respond if they believed reality was irrational. They rationalize it endlessly and try desperately not to look at the parts that make no sense.
If at some point we reached out and dug deep enough into study of existence only to find that some things simply happen or emerge without any cause whatsoever
I don’t think that the human mind would allow that to be a conclusion. Like others have pointed out, some would ascribe the “thing” as happening from a supernatural origin, others would say we just haven’t found the reason for it.
I don’t think we have evolved to understand that something can happen without any cause.
I mean that sounds pretty close to what absurdism is getting at
It probably would be rationalized up until a loophole in the laws of physics is found, at which point its sheer incomprehensibility would corrupt our existences.
Have you seen the world? Shit’s irrational as fuck. I’ll argue here that rationality has an aspect of subjectiveness to it; It is based on your ability to understand and perceive things. There is a very very small number of things you don’t know, and a practically infinite ocean of things you will never even know to not know. Even things that behave rationally may behave irrationally under some variables you will never even fathom, and so, to you, that would just be irrational
You wanna see something rational? Read fiction. Truth is always stranger than fiction. It was Mark Twain who added that “fiction has to make sense.”
Reality already isn’t rational in the slightest, and the way humans prevent themselves from going insane is by an innate characteristic of our psychology called cognitive dissonance.
