I can’t remember what I had for breakfast on Saturday. Memory doesn’t work that way. If I try to remember what I had for breakfast, I usually start by listing recognizable breakfast foods, or in my case, restaurants that serve breakfast, until I create an association that instantiates a recall.
Nor can I remember the emotions I had the first time I danced socially at Dick Chaplin Studios when I was seven years old and dancing with a girl for the first time. Memory doesn’t work that way either. I can remember vaguely how I felt in those days but not how I felt that particular afternoon, though I’m sure I must have been nauseated, this is only a supposition.
Memory is not the only thing that is untrustworthy and unreliable. Our senses fail us also. Optical, aural … even olfactory illusions abound. They make us believe something that is often not true. They aren’t just in those spiffy-if-a-litte-ridiculous magic-eye pictures, but they occur in the natural world, too. Mirages and conundrums of light and heat and air and water present their mysteries to us.
And thus we cannot trust our ability to see and hear and feel and remember the world around us. Our senses challenged by not only illusion but haphazardness, our memories impaired not only by time and intensity but by emotion and suggestibility. We are after all, human animals.
Our conscious mind or perhaps more aptly, our functional brain, deals with these impairments in quite incredible ways. How? It makes stuff up. It fills in the blank. It completes the picture. It associates. As we grow up, we learn about the many illusions and the many holes being filled in. We learn not to trust our senses. We learn that our memory is imperfect. And unless we suffer delusionally or narcissistically in our infallibility, we learn to doubt.
Doubting ourselves increases our fear of the world. The uncertainty created by our doubts in our sensing the world and remembering what we sensed feeds into our emotional reaction to the world around us. Imagine early man, evolving, we were selecting for higher capacities for information processing. Selection increased our ability to process and describe and to be aware of our experience. As the awareness of our weaknesses increased, we needed an adaptive way to manage fear in order to be effective. Here I would like to suggest that an ability to reason would be a positive adaptation that would be a powerful selective force. Why? Because reason allows for abstractions and abstractions allow for knowledge that is independent of sensation and memory. Abstractions such as perfect equilateral triangles of Pythagorus’s imagination need nothing in the real world to instantiate them. They are pure and in them we can feel perfectly confident. We can dispel all doubts about them through mathematical rigor and manipulation of argument ad infinitum.
Reason and hence Rationalism instills us with confidence where Empiricism and our senses cries for mother to wrap her arms around us and make everything okay.
I’ve always wanted to believe that the Empiricists were right and that Knowledge only comes from our senses. It just so happens that our particular version of Empirical Truth is so imperfect and shot through with holes it makes us cringe! So when the Rationalist comes along arguing that Reason is the source of Knowledge (which amounts to make-believe!), we are compelled by their argument’s power to comfort our unconscious minds.
I really have nothing intelligent to say about evolution, to be sure. It is a complicated topic. I can lay that part of the argument aside and still be left with something interesting to say about Rationalism based on this line of thinking: If nothing else, Rationalism inserts itself warmly into a cognitive frame perturbed by our lack of confidence in our ability to sense the world accurately.