Problems with the Classical Conception of Rationality (John Searle)
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 13 ธ.ค. 2021
- John Searle discusses the standard conception of rationality and some of the problems and paradoxes that it gives rise to, including the impossibility of Akrasia (i.e. weakness of will), the impossibility of self-deception, the irrationality of voting, that there must be some odds at which you would bet your life against 25 cents, as well as the conception of explanation which requires that all explanations to be deterministic. Note, his alternative conception isn't given here, but only problems for the standard account. This comes from lectures on the philosophy of society given at Berkeley in 2010. This is a version of an upload from the previous channel, albeit with improved audio.
#Philosophy #Searle
Is there a second video? The video ended like a car hitting a wall.
The immediate gratification wins out over the theoretical variant or alternative, which lies in the undetermined future; in other words, far enough away, that we stand a reasonable chance of rendering today's error relatively insignificant in the larger scheme of things. We believe that we can have our cake and obtain another form of gratification later, too. It's easy to write off the day, even justifiable, from the perspective of our energy budget, to not throw good money after bad. Tomorrow, a clean slate awaits us.
Thanks for posting this! Do you have the source for this? I take it this is from a lecture he's giving to students, do you know where I can find this lecture series, and which lecture this is from within that series? I'd be much obliged if you could point me in the right direction. Cheers!
(great channel btw, you're doing yeoman's work!)
From the description, it’s from his Philosophy of Society lecture series.
but which lecture within the series is the question, there are many lectures in it@@Chris.4345
1 goal-orientation, 2 good/proficient logic necessary to achieve it (useful result activity), 3 to couche illogic in life we accept doctrine of Akrasia call it decreptitude of morality - Searle refutes these
Wow! Thanks!
In conversation with Lady Frisbee or Sir John, ..
21:23 He never drove his child to the doctor's in a car rather than getting the doctor to do a house call? The arguments all seem to be based on the economists' notion of perfect information on which agents act rationally. In this case it's the value of 25 cents, amongst other things like the knowledge of symptoms and diseases and whatnot. I think he says as much at 46:31 The actual environment that determines our beliefs and desires is not fixed, as he says: we don't come to a decision with a pre-determined set of beliefs and desires. It's the social/political sphere in which we live that determines our beliefs and desires, and also what constitutes a means to achieve an end. Maybe having another glass of wine with Lady Frisbee and Sir John will come in handy when we're running for President one day, ... I think Aristotle gets around this problem with a single unconditional desire for humanity as a whole, which is happiness, and then the means to that becomes excellence in humanity, so to maximise utility we learn as much as we can all the time.
I once knew a woman who lived in a village in Bolivia and she told me that she elected not to spend money she had on cancer treatment, which she believed she needed to live, so that her children would not be poor. In that same village I lived with another family who let their children go hungry in the rain rather than spend their savings on food during a week when the weather was bad. We all spent a week hungry huddled around a fire in the kitchen. That may have been only because I was there, however. If they had been on their own they may have acted differently.
This happened three years after he gave this lecture, by the way.
@Bagpuss Bagpuss Read what I wrote.
"On the west coast it's all phenomenal"
Seems to me that the critical omission is some concept of ignorance and the unconscious.
Most decisions are not consciously considered at all, but where you do act consciously and yet ‘irrationally’, you do in fact make a prior decision, something along the lines of ‘oh to hell with it’.
You *decide* to abandon a certain line of reasoning, you might even say you decide to render some problem unconscious, and let your impulses resolve things.
This is only difficult to accept if you have a lofty view of ‘decisions’ where they are all explicit and conscious in relation to articulate beliefs, consistent or otherwise.
But if you take a more animal view of people, then that analytic faculty looks more like an expensive luxury machine that is expensive and exhausting to run, such that where the decision is conflicting, but not of tangible importance, we will happily resolve it by impulse, non-rationally.
The contention is really then that there are no cases of strictly irrational behaviours, but rather that we have something like DEFCON levels of decision making, where things encountered as e.g. complex and novel, inspire our full conscious attention, but as we find ways to fit the problem into tried and tested mental categories we de-escalate to and and some critical moments go ‘ah to hell with it’, and make the final decision without full consciousness.
The ostensible reasons in our own heads could then be thought of as merely the last conscious category we applied to the issue, but not necessarily, if even at all likely, the final word that passed on the matter in our unconscious.
At some point the baton was passed to our more entrenched bodily intuitions and the conscious mind’s job ended, so we simultaneously ‘don’t know’ why we decided X yet, semiconsciously or unconsciously, in fact had our reasons.
@Bagpuss Bagpuss I’m saying it seems like an omission from both sides of the argument.
The people modelling human behaviour as purely rational, seem to not consider that a person at a given crossroads might lack sufficient information to judge, such that e.g. someone could drive to the airport simply having not considered the 25c life risk calculation, rather having a degree of tunnel-vision for a narrower desire, such that as far as they are concerned they are neither risking their life nor banking it on a given amount of money.
Searle on the other hand, seems to be agonising over the fact that we ‘know’ we shouldn’t drink more wine, yet for some reason take more wine, and seems to just reject the possibility that we a) do not fully consciously grasp the health implications of excessive drinking, and b) have a hierarchy of rationales, of which the most conscious and theoretical is often the weakest.
I don’t claim to know definitively that this is how the general human mind works, but it appears true on personal reflection.
I know beer is bad for me, and when I take it anyway it is either a lapse in this judgment according to my personal theory of beer’s nature and my nature, or else a sacrificing of this judgement to a higher priority, e.g. having fun, but above all it is a semi-conscious judgement that I can only articulate in retrospect, assuming I’m bothered to think back.
I can quite easily proceed in ignorance of my precise reasons for most things I do in life.
It is actually effortful to articulate them out of their usual inchoate state, and it is only palpably difficult and complex decisions that cause me conscious concern, in which case ignorance is an overwhelming factor, and I’d wager almost nobody actually makes a precise cost-benefit analysis, certainly not with mathematical rigour.
Ignorance plays a large role in both cases, if not the dominant role.
What’s really hard to imagine is the event of making a purely rational decision based on perfectly lucid understanding, not the possibility of making an irrational judgement based on shaky ideas.
Yeap. Probably, I should be the one in charge
Rationality="Actions that are rational are caused by beliefs and desires"..."maximizing the probability of satisfying your desires given your beliefs" (e.g. in buying a car).
Under this kind of pragmatism Robespierre's guillotine use was correct; not to mention the use of concentration camps, gulags...
*nordic gamer meme*
Yes.
@@exalted_kitharode 🤣
You're conflating ethics with rationality
@@jamesbarlow6423 it's hard to argue that concentration camps weren't effective tools, given the beliefs of the Nazi party. They were rational steps given the beliefs they are based on. The ethical standing of concentration camps is an entirely different matter from it's rational standing. If you don't like a subset of your population does purging them on an industrial scale leave you with less of them in your population? Obviously. It's still extremely unethical though.
The problem is thinking that man is essentially rational, when the fact is that man is only accidentally rational. In other words, rationality is not itself an end for man, but merely a means he sometimes chooses to use in attempt to satisfy some of his desires. Man is easily distracted and bored, often indifferent to reason, and ultimately chooses not based on rationality, but upon his strongest interest or desire at any one time. This is why it actually takes an effort to think things out, make plans, follow-through on plans, and choose in accordance with a rational plan. This is by no means natural. What is natural is to follow desire and instinct. Rationality comes upon the scene late and is treated with suspicion, jealousy, and distrust by the instincts and desires. One must really have in oneseof a very strong desire for rationality itself in order to obey it consistently, otherwise, it will be easily overcome by the strongest interest, passion, desire, or instinct. This is what I mean by saying rationality is accidental in man. It has no inherent power of its own, but must actually be desired (the dream called 'the love of wisdom') in order to be obeyed consistently. So, that the real power of rationality comes from a desire for it, which in man is merely accidental -- as obviously not every man loves wisdom nor consistently obeys reason. Not even among the so-called 'lovers of wisdom' (philosophers) is reason consistently obeyed -- as Searle makes clear by his own desires to surf the net and drink more wine than he should. Suffice to say, human beings are not Vulcans, much less computers. So, again, rationality is an accident in man -- yet it is a happy one. For without any rationality, nor any desire for it, man would soon perish from the planet. It must be, and it clearly is, the case, that without the evolution of his rational ability and his occasional desire for it, his instincts and others desires left completely to their own devices would render man in the long-run incapable of successfully competing in the state of nature against stronger, faster, fiercer animals, and of enduring a frequently hostile and/or indifferent environment. So, in that sense, rationality is essential to man -- that is, essential to his survival and keeping him from becoming EXTINCT.
Nowdays he only repets a lecture he has given for twenty years. So boring.