The empirically proven conservation of energy equations proved that there can be no higher spatial dimension (energy would be lost to it or emanating from it). It never had anything to do with human perception.
And there has been no evidence at all indicating a 4th spatial dimension which means that the imagination - when ignoring actual empirical science- can dream up any irrational thing.
“Decisions can be irrational in case they are not the best decision that was available to the decision maker”
That’s where it gets tricky trying to figure out what constitutes a rational choice when engaged in taking steps toward a goal. First you’d rule out the obvious; it is irrational to remove a wheel from your car if you want to drive it. But even here, there are steps that are rational even though the entire series is irrational, e.g., using the jack and the steps involved are all rational choices even though removing the wheel is irrational.
Other than this, people are constantly faced with making decisions that seem equally viable, but end up botching everything by choosing y instead of x. At which point in the series is the ‘irrational increment’?
The actual existential experience of rationing and rationalizing always involves only what information is available to the chooser at the moment of a decision in a series of contiguous steps.
Thought experiment; if an action is called rational or not depending on its usefulness toward some end, and every end begins a new set of actions toward some other end, then no finite series of actions can be called rational, since no end can be known; only the next step determines the rationality of the prior step, and stops there.
I wish to distinguish a hermeneutic understanding of the idea ‘rational’ from the epistemological understanding of the idea.
Imagine Socrates producing a reductio ad nauseum in a dialogue while questioning a man and asking him to explain why he is doing the rational thing. Each statement must be qualified by the next, and at some point the man reaches the limits of his knowledge and the total series of his explanations are not proven to be ‘rational’.
This is different than would be a dialogue about the rationale involved in figuring out facts and truths about statements of some kind, linguistic or mathematical.
Kierkegaard was in fact right but I shall not speak of this here.
…because they see a missing piece to their puzzle, they get all magical about it and hold on too tight, thinking their solution must be it…they need to come back down to earth…
…they make it out to be human perception…
…dreaming up anything…
Makes me shake my head.
So if I am given 20 math problems for homework - I manage the first ten correctly - so far both maths and I are rational. But I get one of the next ten incorrect - is it me or maths that became irrational?
That’s why I say that being rational means making the best possible decision that is available to the decision maker at the time rather than making a decision that leads to the attainment of one’s highest goal. The latter never happens since our highest goals are set pretty high – they are very difficult, if not impossible, to attain. If that’s what it means to be rational then noone is rational. So being rational does not necessarily (though it often does) involve attaining one’s goals, having true beliefs and so on. What is rational and what is not is actually quite relative since it depends not only on what immediately surrounds people (their environment) but also what’s already inside them. You might say that this is what everyone already does – that everyone is doing their best – but I disagree. I think the opposite is taking place (being encouraged and whatnot.) And what about the easiest way to determine whether you’re rational or irrational? I say you’re irrational to the extent there is internal resistance to what you’re doing (or rather, to what decisions that you’re making.) The more you do something your inner voices do not approve of, the more you’re irrational – even if what you’re doing leads to other kinds of benefits (e.g. survival, money, power, etc)
I don’t think it is ever about the highest goal. It is about the goal (a sub-goal) being pursued at the moment - the next step within view. Whether that sub-goal was a rational choice is a different issue - and I agree those choices are rarely the best available - except for one issue -
Being rational means using what information is available in making choices (a rational process). That information is never truly complete - “given what I have been told – this is my best option.” The path taken might be an irrational path - but the one taking that path is being totally rational - it is not the person but the process itself that either leads to the person’s actual intentions and is rational or doesn’t lead him there and is irrational.
I think to call the person irrational is to say that the person’s brain literally can’t rationally process information - the person is psychotic (or as James put it - “broken brain”).
encode-decode -
Something that I noted about the pi = irrational issue and related to the integration of irrationality into society is the following -
It was apparent to me that the only reason pi was being called irrational was because it was not commiserate with the traditional use of “natural” counting numbers - specifically modulo 10. If you have a natural number as a diameter the circumference will be irrational - because natural numbers do not get along with circles.
But what if you choose to use the magnitude pi as your basic unit of measure (rather than 1). That would be modulo 10pi. You are choosing to make what has been called “irrational” (because it didn’t fit past language) as your basic number system. Then an interesting thing happens -
With the natural based unit circle a rational diameter forms an irrational circumference. But if the diameter of a pi-unit circle is (\pi) (meaning 1 unit in modulo-pi) the circumference will still be (\pi (modulo-pi)) (because it will be (1*\pi)). The interesting thing is that (\pi) (in modulo-pi = 1) is the new “rational” and the circumference of the unit circle = (\pi (modulo-pi)) and is still irrational.
The social implication is that even if everyone accepted a proposed particular irrational way of thinking (such as wokism - making it the new “rational thinking”) some of the same events seen as irrational before will still be seen as irrational along with formerly rational events. The new norm doesn’t decrease the perceived irrationality - it just makes it more due to a deeper irrationality.
So perhaps regardless of irrational thinking there are some things that everyone is going to agree are irrational regardless of their irrational thinking. Or there are some concepts that are going to be seen as irrational no matter what mental language is common - universal irrationality.
But then if there is a universal irrationality - doesn’t that imply that there might be a universal rationality?
I’m thinking that a concept like a square-circle might be seen as irrational by literally anyone (regardless of what they are willing to say out loud). And perhaps the concept that “A is A” (but spoken in their irrational language - perhaps “A is not other than not-A”) will still be seen as rational. The trick is merely to be able to speak the accepted irrational language. And that is what politicians and salesmen do.
Perhaps politics IS the integration of irrationality.
Multi-valued logics have been around for a long time, and they all have one thing in common: statements that are either true or false according to the bivalence principle are not valid.
According to Gödel’s results, one must presuppose an infinite number of truth values.
Ulrich Blau has given a number of reasons why the logic underlying everyday language is three-valued. I would say it is multi-valued.
If X is rational and irrational, and in addition something that is itself rational or irrational, but without precise assignment, i.e. not yet known, but with high probability assignable in the future, then the possibility can be kept open that this still undetermined will turn out to be something determined in the future. For this purpose, a truth value in terms of the future and a truth value in degrees are given by numbers from the continuum between 0 and 1, where 0 or e.g. 0-0.2 stands for “still undetermined” or “rational and irrational (because in each case determinable only in the future)”.
the analysis of probability on the a-priori assumption that the fuzzy logic has more sense in supposing that it’s more certain probable future determination could designate less ‘fuzzy’ math than that analysis could tend to suggest, may be more likely then not.
A not entirely serious suggestion: We could declare everything irrational to be taboo.
An example from mathematics:
The idea of irrational numbers, in our notation therefore infinite decimal fractions, should remain incomprehensible to the mind, never be told in school about irrational numbers.
Euclid said - and one should have understood him better - that incommensurable distances behaved “not like numbers”. In fact, in the accomplished concept of the irrational number lies the complete separation of the concept of number from the concept of magnitude, and this because such a number - pi, for example - can never be delimited or represented exactly by a distance. But it follows that in the conception of the ratio of the square side to the diagonal, for example, the number as a sensual limit, a closed quantity, suddenly touches a completely different kind of number, which remains foreign in the deepest inside and therefore uncanny, as if one were close to uncovering a dangerous secret of one’s own existence. This is revealed by a strange late Greek myth, according to which the one who first brought the contemplation of the irrational out of the hidden to the public, perished by a shipwreck, “because the inexpressible and imageless should always remain hidden”.
An expression like e^ix, which constantly appears in our formulas, is supposed to seem absurd to us, to be a taboo.
Only calculate with finite fractions, examine the integer ratio of two distances. Great! 
Even the idea of a number zero must not even arise, because it has no sense in terms of drawing.
If one would do all that - and only all that -, such a mathematics would be already perfect, only differently perfect.
“Male and female he created them” - the strong and the meek - the rational and the irrational.
[list]The East and the West. [/list:u]
Refer to all my posts and book excerpts ever posted on this forum. Keywords are ‘per privationem’, ‘pure negation’, ‘multivocity’, the ‘abomenon’.
" Ulrich Blau has given a number of reasons why the logic underlying everyday language is three-valued. I would say it is multi-valued."
Three-valued is Pierce’s semiotics. In truth, it is tetrapolar; four-valued, the four components being what I call the four vocities or four epistemes. I have found tetrapolar logic at work all through history’s philosophy, but it came into semiotics pretty recently. Namely in Harman’s four-fold epistemological withdraw. richardcoyne.com/2018/02/17/four-fold-reality/
I go into the irrational in general and many variations on three-part, four-part, and five-part logics, etc. in the following text out of one of my books:
It is characteristic of the great modern German philosophy of idealism to seek for the “absolute” behind all our thinking, all our representations, all our knowledge. In so doing, it does not reject but rather seeks to overcome the merely naturalistic standpoint of the human sciences, which is the basis of both traditional and modern philosophy. For idealism, a thing, a reality is not the empirical object, but the form of our representation, or more precisely, it is our thinking, that is the form of our knowledge of the thing.
In fact, idealism does not claim that we have an exact knowledge of the thing in itself and that therefore it exists independently of our thinking, but only that the thing is given to us in the form of our thinking and not in any other. From this it follows that our knowledge of the thing is relative and dependent, and not absolute.
The “Absolute” Is the Source of all Form. The incomprehensible, moreover, is related to man as the absolute ground of all existence, and as a being that has not yet emerged from a state of formlessness. It is the ground of a kind of being that is not yet formed, ὡς δυνήσατο: one that is essentially passive and does not yet know “how to become”; it is a being that is in a state of “potential”.
If we are told that the thing exists independently of our thinking, if we are assured that the thing is given to us in its absolute, incomprehensible reality, this does not mean that we should take refuge in ignorance. The absolute object is not merely a thing that we do not know and that we are in fact forbidden to know; the thing in itself is not merely we cannot know, but is, incomprehensible and unknowable as it is, the origin of all knowledge, the source of all form and all representation. This formless principle is “absolute”, that is, all being is its form.
A formless principle in things is thus an incomprehensible, an absolute element, as Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi called it. The “incomprehensible” is therefore something that is the source and cause of all form and all rule, and is the ground of everything “spirit” (Nietzsche). But what is this that is called “spirit”? It is that which is not a rule, but itself rules, and can become the rule of the existing; that which is not law, but becomes the law of the existing; that which is not subject, but itself is the subject.
In his later works, Adorno often uses the notions of formlessness and form itself to describe certain aspects of culture, especially art and music. For Adorno, form is determined by social conventions and is the result of power, not an implacable Logos. In his thinking, the dominant aesthetic, which is by no means an element of individual expression, is organized according to the needs of society. Aesthetics is therefore a product of the culture industry and of the capitalist system. It is a product of the production of commodities, and not of the individual. Adorno was also aware of the limitations of aesthetics.
Thus the basic principle of the world cannot be comprehended. To grasp it, it would require a complete transcendence of the subject. As such, it is only indirectly or symbolically (as “unity”) related to knowledge or ‘forms’ gleaned by our mental schemata. This was understood by the ancient philosopher Heraclitus, according to whom the “same” is never the same, because the same is “incomprehensible.” Heraclitus is, therefore, a forerunner of the idea of the indivisible unity of opposites.
Heidegger, however, took up a more negative view. For him, there is no such thing as a pre-reflective awareness of unity. There is only the experience of one’s own existence in a particular situation. For a person to be a person, to be a human being, requires unity of being ( Dasein ), in which one’s very existence is in the world: thus the experience of one’s own existence, as post-reflective state, is the necessary ground for that unity upon which our concepts and forms depend. To make these concepts and forms operative means to “bring back the unity of being,” which is precisely what Heidegger means by a “return to the experience of being.”
By contrast, Husserl thought the unity was something that was given to consciousness at the moment of the intentional act. It is consciousness which, as a transcendental “I” (the eidetic ‘idea’) is responsible for the unity of being; thus, there is no question of a pre-reflective consciousness of unity.
It may be that, in both cases, the problem lies in the way they formulate the difference between an intentional act, which requires unity in consciousness (what Husserl calls the pre-reflective “intuitive act” of an idea) and the way they formulate the difference between the experience of one’s existence and the experience of unity (reflective awareness vs Dasein as in Heidegger).
Yet in the latter, Heidegger’s formulations may be seen as giving more prominence to the conceptual unity aspect of human existence, whereas Husserl’s formulations stress the act of transcendental reflection. It may be that the issue is not the formulation, but the distinction itself. In fact, Heidegger explicitly rejects a distinction between pre-reflective and reflective unity of subject-object of self-consciousness, since it is a product of metaphysics, and, as such, already an object of reflection. Instead, what must be noted is the difference between the way in which we experience things and that in which we experience ourselves. Thus, Heidegger tells us that the “I” never encounters itself “for the first time”. It never encounters itself “for the first time” because it is already in and for itself. The I always comes before all of the other things encountered as an object by consciousness.
But this is a problem only at the level of language. We can, and should, say both that we have a sense of unity (we have the cogito ), and that we are aware of unity in an experience of our own existence (we can tell what our ‘I’ is in the cogito ) We should never claim to know what the other is ‘in itself’. For neither Husserl nor Heidegger would even ask to know what the ‘in itself’ of the other (in the sense of the thing in itself as the thing as realiter ) is. Their concern is with consciousness, with the ‘I’.
That, in any case, is the crucial point: consciousness is a precondition of unity and unity is a precondition of the meaningfulness of consciousness. For Heidegger, 'it is impossible to understand the other unless we have a consciousness of ourselves. But consciousness is always consciousness of something: the world. There is nothing outside the world for us. If we turn to the other, we are actually turning away from ourselves. So there is an infinite regress of consciousness in which the consciousness always sees itself as conscious of a self.
There is no question in either Husserl or Heidegger of the possibility of a direct communication between subject and object. As far as both of them are concerned, all that could come about between them would only be mediated by the linguistic means of phonemes and elements , which are themselves part of a total structure of understanding. That, in itself, shows a limitation of the claim to immediacy. Husserl, of course, takes consciousness to be a transcendental thing. The subject is seen as ‘subsistent’, while objects are the manifesta or reducta of the subject. But it is clear that he is talking of something less than the whole of the individual self, something less than self-consciousness. The empty cogito is just one element of self-consciousness, as Heidegger also clarifies. The cogito , being a sensum , or apprehension of self-consciousness, is something in the mind. It is as such that it needs to be differentiated from what Heidegger calls 'the totality of dasein .
– SHOGGOTH 1, AI.
Clarity might precede sanity, occurring… the mind, seeking out what it needs to attain appeasement… well it does, for me.
Unresolved irrationality, would equate to madness…
I am glad you are saying “might” - sane people can solve confusing problems as can questionably sane people. Confusion indicates a lack of clarity.
Madness - it would seem that there is “wiggle room” - a threshold if you will, of unresolved irrationality - in other words, one instance of irrationality should not be considered madness…and the consistency/frequency could be used as a guide to determine madness…however without some benchmark, to begin with, none of this matters and such benchmarks are usually based on the society of an individual rather than some universal indicator…
…cultural norms, in particular [sub-cultural norms] are perceived as madness to some societies outside the regarded culture. I am aware that clarity and sanity can be treated as synonyms - so there is that.
Excluding Greek, Latin, Norse, and other influences…there is also this…more an attempt at humor than anything too serious.