The Value of Reason (Essay)
One of my primary goals in life is to see reality more clearly. I realize that I will never actually see reality the way it is. I am just a human using very limited sensory organs to view the world, and I am and will always be oblivious to much of the nature of the universe. That’s okay. Luckily, there are about seven billion other people who share my physical limitations and who are products of the same evolutionary process. That means that getting closer to the reality available through the human perspective is still important. By seeing reality more clearly, I can better understand cause and effect. I can better predict the results of my actions, making my interactions with others more skillful. I can identify patterns and avoid triggers that produce negative outcomes. I can promote influences that foster positive outcomes. Within my own life, seeing the world clearly has obvious benefits.
More importantly, I think a driving goal of everyone should be to see the world clearly. Now I understand that it may seem that projecting my value onto seven billion people is pretty egotistical, but I have a good reason for this goal: the importance of reason. By reason I mean rationality, logic, and critical thinking. While these values are often praised, they are still not valued highly enough. First, some definition is in order.
By my definition, reason is the process of checking assumptions and intuitions against reality. As a process, it is invaluable. We all have intuitions, which can be defined as the way our minds think the world is. My intuition is that if I stop eating than I will get hungry. I can test this intuition with a simple experiment: not eating. Then I can see that my intuition matches reality when I get hungry. The reason I have this intuition is because of hundreds of similar experiments in my life that let to the same outcome. Reason is the process of using experiments and observations of cause and effect to better match your intuitions with reality. This process is incredibly important because our intuitions are often wrong. Worse than that, we are liable to get attached to our intuitions, no matter how far from reality they are.
Reality is a chaotic and unpredictable place, but humans hate chaos and unpredictability. We want things to make sense and we want to understand the world, so therefore we want to trust our intuitions. We desperately want to believe that we understand what is going on and what is likely to happen next. This desire for security and aversion to anxiety leads us to blind ourselves to evidence that contradicts our intuitions. Put another way, this fear of the unknown makes us unreasonable.
When we see something that goes against our view of the world, the process of reason would have us compare this new data point with our other experiences in the past, integrate it into our worldview, and maybe change the way we think about the world. However, we are far more likely to act irrationally when confronted in this way. We hold on to our view of the world, and we discount the evidence that contradicts it. It is scary to be wrong. It is scary to see that you were viewing the world incorrectly, and it makes you doubt what you “know” in other areas. So we protect ourselves from this anxiety, we make irrational justifications or assumptions to make our intuition fit. And we do this all without ever realizing it.
For example, let’s say someone strongly believes in the importance of capitalism, or more specifically the importance of free, unregulated markets. Their reluctance to let that sacred belief go may keep them from accepting the incontrovertible evidence of man-made climate change. They ignore the evidence, or produce conspiracy theories to counter the facts, or whatever it takes to maintain their view of reality. Admitting that climate change is a problem might mean that regulations will need to be instituted to combat it, and this would interfere with their belief in the primacy of free markets.
Psychological defense mechanisms will blind someone from reality to help them maintain their security, their intuition. The important thing to realize is this process happens to all of us on some scale, every single day. It will almost always happen subconsciously, beneath our awareness.
This phenomenon can obviously be detrimental to individuals, because if you think the world works in a way that it really does not, you are at risk of being blindsided and unprepared to deal with reality. However, I think the real problem with false intuitions is on the larger scale. False intuitions lead to everyone on Earth living in different “realities”. Humans share a similar enough view of reality for societies to function extraordinarily well all things considered, but the failures that come from our inconsistencies are catastrophic. Wars, bigotry, climate change, suicide, terrorism… While the factors that contribute to all of these phenomenon are incredibly complex, the broad statement of “failing to see reality clearly” is applicable to a significant degree.
Religious beliefs often disregard evidence about the nature of reality, such as the age of the earth or the supremacy of the known laws of physics. Because you have people all over the world rejecting reality in different ways, you have a world of fragmented groups who all believe they see the Truth, and that much of the rest of the world is wrong. How can people work together when they can’t even agree about basic facts such as how old the earth is, or the causal relationships between actions? The short answer is that they cannot, at least not well. There is an abundance of war, violence, hatred, and isolationism in our history and our present to make that conclusion clear.
The same can be said of other beliefs that become enshrined in someone’s identity, and in turn shape their intuitions. For example. when people believe that the labels of nationality, political ideology, race, or gender are of the utmost importance. By seeing everything through the lens of your constructed “identity” as an American, or a woman, or a Republican, you skew the data instead of evaluating it objectively. This filter of identity gets in the way of people seeing the world clearly. Identity politics are a serious threat in the world today because people band together over a certain similarity, they unite around a shared intuition, and then use their identity as a shield to avoid adapting their intuitions to reality. They get caught in the trap of tribalism, and only listen to those who have the same identity as they do and share the same intuitions. They fall victim to the trap of tribalism, an unfortunate product of evolution that makes us hate and fear those who are unlike us. They reject any ideas that come from someone they see as Other, while bolstering their own confidence with support from members of their own tribe. Like the example of climate change before illustrates: when an idea takes hold and resists error-correction by evidence, the results can be devastating.
Reason is by definition the solution to the problems we face, because it is the process of reforming ideas to better fit reality. It only works when people can relinquish attachment to their ideas. When they can accept evidence that contradicts their views, and when they are brave enough to embrace the uncertainty of the unknown. When people can give up the beliefs that give them security in exchange for a view of reality the way it is, humanity can slowly converge toward a common view of reality, and all the peace, prosperity, and cooperation that entails. Reason is a value that needs to be accepted as invaluable, and a passion for seeing reality more clearly should be instilled in us all.
If we lived in a world where values were completely aligned, where everyone agreed that if A happens, B will follow, conflict would totally cease. However, that is not the goal. Total convergence would be counterproductive, because there is much we don’t know, and much we can’t know. If we had total convergence, we would be converged around a lie, and we would certainly not be seeing reality clearly. And if every member of society saw the same lie, we may never be able to hear the idea that could free us from that prison. Convergence will always be a process, one where we will never reach a finish line. The human race, because of our evolutionary constraints, is almost certainly precluded from seeing reality the way it is. It is important that we accept that. It is a dangerous fallacy to believe that a process that cannot come to completion is not valuable. Let us arbitrarily say that humanity is at 50% convergence right now, that if you averaged everyone’s view of the world about 50% of it would overlap. Think of all of the conflict and hatred between groups that the 50% of disagreement entails. Think of all the false intuition and tribalism that has people ignore the common humanity they share with others, and instead focus on race, religion, or nationality. The difference between 50% and 60% convergence in this context is huge. It’s the suffering of millions. The difference between 50% and 90% is a world we could scarcely imagine.
We could try to reach convergence through different mechanisms. We could try to making everyone Christian, or Muslim. We could make up an imaginary foe to take the place of Other, and have humanity unite to battle an invisible alien threat. But those ideas do not map onto reality, so it would be an eternal uphill struggle as the evidence of the world gets in the way of these false beliefs. It would be nearly impossible for everyone to agree on one unchanging ideology that contradicts what they see with their own eyes, where B does not reliably follow A. This is why no one religion has ever gained global domination. There is no way to arrive at a religious doctrine from observing the world. Religions only maintain themselves by being passed on to the next generation, by being placed into people’s intuition and then protected from the process of reason by the mechanisms discussed before. Through tribalism, through fear of the unknown, through the avoidance of anxiety.
The only constant in life that we can all aim for is reality. Reason is the value that can unite us, because it is the only value that every person can come to and utilize on their own. The process of reason, of using your senses to gather evidence then testing your intuition against reality, is so innate that we do it thousands of times each day without even realizing it. People can unite around the goal of seeing reality clearly, and reason is the process that leads us to reality. We all have reality staring us in the face, unavoidable, omnipresent, just waiting to be realized. The only thing getting in our way of reality is ourselves.
