It’s Irrational to be Too Rational

A significant part of my agenda is that what passes for received wisdom as “western rationality” is in fact degenerately irrational, damaging to humanity and the planet and as such, that received wisdom is a kind of collective “mental illness” of society. (The way we communicate and share truths and arguments is co-evolved with that psychological disorder, and the sheer pace and scale of 21st century communications is exacerbating the problem.)

It does mean that from time to time actual recognised mental disorders of individuals become topics of interest. Autism / Asperger’s being one candidate. Today the idea of Capgras Delusion being a form of reason where Bayesian analysis is in overdrive.

Capgras Delusion – is a psychiatric disorder in which a person holds a delusion that a friend, spouse, parent, or other close family member (or pet) has been replaced by an identical impostor.

So, we have that link from Chris and a couple I Googled.

https://philpapers.org/rec/PARBMD

https://academic.oup.com/bjps/article-abstract/67/1/271/2473133/Bayesian-Models-Delusional-Beliefs-and-Epistemic

Being too-good at Bayesian reasoning. Love the (oft recurring) inference that too-rational = irrational (hence Autism, Brunsson etc.)

And, Evidentialism – fetishising evidence is also recurrent, though as IEP’s definition suggests and I’ve said before, the -ism itself is trivially “about” evidence, no actual thesis for it, it merely moves the question along to what “meaningfully” counts as evidence. (All evidence points back to Dennett’s “greedy reductionism”.)

Fascinating. I’ll be back!

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