Ep. 40 - Awakening from the Meaning Crisis - Wisdom and Rationality

[Music] welcome back to awakening from meeting crisis so last time I tried to make some tentative suggestions as to what this religion that's not a religion would look like and how it can make use of and be integrated with an ecology of psyche with technologies for addressing the perennial problems and a cognitive scientific worldview that can legitimate and situate that ecology of practices and then I made some suggestions as to the relationship between credo and religio in our determination of our mythos and the issue of criterion setting made again another argument for open-ended in that sense gnostic mythos talked about a mythos that always puts therefore the credo in service of the religio and that is always directed towards right top-down the propositional being ultimately grounded in in the participatory and also affording the emergence up out of the participatory through the perspective all and procedural into the the propositional I suggest in some ways in which we might set up a way of engineering credo something analogous to a wiki and create a structure that is a distributed co-op structure facilitated by things like the internet and so again remind you I was not trying to offer anything definitive or set myself up in any kind of way that is not what I want to do I want to try and help facilitate the people who are already doing this so that they have ways of talking to each other coordinating with each other and facilitating each other's development and growth I then turned towards one of the culminating things we need to do taking up one on one of the deepest relationships between meaning sort of one of the deepest relationships that meaning has which is the relationship between meaning and wisdom we need wisdom of course to - as I've argued because it's the the meta virtue for the virtues and we need that in order to give the individual pole for the relationship with the the collective creation and cultivation of the meta cycle technology for creating the ecology of psycho technology we also of course need wisdom before during and after the quest for enlightenment the quest for a systematic and reliable response to the perennial problems I then proposed to take a look at the cognitive science of wisdom and we did that by taking note of an important article that comes out sort of after the first decade and a half of the resurgence of scientific interest in wisdom and that's the article of McGee and Barber and they're doing something consonant with what we've been trying to do in this series they're trying to in a sense salvage what we can from the philosophical theories the legacy and the axle Age of wisdom and the psychological theories that were emerging at that time and then they set them into dialogue with each other a process of reflective equilibrium trying to get a convergence between them and they argue that all of these theories that philosophical and a psychologic theories converge on a feature a central feature of wisdom and then following work that I did with Leo Ferraro and 2013 we can sort of expand beyond the explicit thing to what we've also set a long side of their phrase and also directly implied by their phrase and so a central feature of wisdom is to systematic the systematically sorry the systematic seeing through the lesion and into reality at least comparatively so and this of course is insight but it is a fundamental insight is a systemic insight it is an insight not just into a particular problem but into a family of problems and the maguey and Barbara make use of a point that I made use of what I was talking about systemic insight in higher states of consciousness they make use of the work of Piaget if you remember Piaget found systematic errors and the way children are seeing the world remember things like they fail at conservation task counting numbers or pouring liquids right so you have these systemic errors which reflect a systematic way in which the children have over constrained their cognition there they have to constrain their cognition it's adaptive but they have to go through right that process of assimilation and accommodation constantly optimizing and complexify system of constraints but what we see with the children is eventually they get a systemic insight and we've all done it we go through qualitative change qualitative development there's an actual change in our competence because it's not an insight into this problem or this instance where I'm failing to conserve or this instance or this instance where I'm Vigo egocentric or this instance but it's a insight into failures of conservation as a kind of error failures of egocentrism as a kind of error and having a insight that is not just at the level of framing but at the level of trans framing because it not only is reframing the problem it is transforming my concept my competence so it is a trans framing insight it is a systemic insight because what it gives you with sensibility transcendence that's literally what's happening to the children their sensibility is going through a form of transcendence that's exactly what development is and they use that as a way of explaining what they need of course without realizing it they're making use of one of the paradigmatic metaphors for talking about wisdom which is as the child is to the adult right the adult is to the sage just like the adult has had systemic transfer aiming gone through development so that in a in a way compared to the child they much more systematically see through illusion and into what's real the sage right similarly in comparison to an adult right sees systematically through in a trance framing fashion illusion and end to reality so this is a core constitutive feature of what it is to be wise and you can see something and this is not something the McGeehan barber say okay but you can see how this is automatically I would argue I would argue they're not but I would argue this is automatically you know connected to the project of enlightenment in some very important fashion all right what are a couple other important things that may and barber talked about they talked about that with and this is the beginning of the important distinction between wisdom and knowledge that we've been sort of also making use of throughout the course that wisdom is not about what you know wisdom has to do with how you know it and there's two senses of how that want to explicate that they leave rather implicit right there's how you know it is how you have come to know it what's the processing involved as opposed to the product so wisdom has a lot more to do with the process than with the product knowledge is Right often the product I know like this is what I know and I know this and this and this but wisdom is how am i knowing how am i knowing right so definitely that and that's going to be pivotal because and that's going to immediately link wisdom to rationality because one of the key features of rationality I'd mentioned this before we're going to come back to this the work of Stanovich is a rational person is not only fixated on the products of their cognition they pay attention to and find value the processing of their cognition that's what it is to be rational right so that's one aspect of what they mean by the how and then there's another aspect of how you know and that has to do and this goes to a point made by Keeks between descriptive john cakes excellent philosopher does work on wisdom right but peaks makes a distinction between descriptive knowledge and interpretive knowledge I often prefer to use the word knowing rather than knowledge but that that's his way of talking about so again this is grasping the facts where is interpretive knowledge this points towards an aspect of wisdom that we're gonna have to come back to this has to do with understanding this is to grasp of the significance of what you know and of course relevance realization is being invoked they're grasping the significance right connecting to their relevance realization but we're so Brass understanding is grasping the significance so part of what we're talking about with wisdom and we're talking about the how rather than the what you know we're talking about the process rather than the product and we're talking not about right the the description of the facts right but we're talking about you grasping understanding by grasping the significance of the facts that you have so wisdom has to do with these things it has deep connections to understanding again which has to do with the relevance realization it has to do with the process rather than the product right and that is all tied into this right this systemic transfer aiming realization of what's real they then point to one other important feature of wisdom may point out there's a perspectival participatory aspect to wisdom they talk about a what's called a pragmatic self-contradiction a pragmatic self-contradiction is not a contradiction in what you state it's a contradiction in how in in the perspective from which you make the statement and the identity the degree of identity you have in making the statement let me give you a non controversial example okay so I am asleep there is nothing logically wrong with that if I'm pointing to the fact of John being asleep you can there's there's no there's no conceptual contradiction in John being asleep this is a pragmatic self contradiction because uttering it means I have a uh Turing it from the perspective of somebody who is awake because I have to be awake in order to say it and of course there's a sense in which I'm not just pointing out of fact I'm actually pointing to myself with it and that's that's of course the degree to which I'm actually I'm participating in the fact that's being disclosed now that that's very different by the way from lucidity in Dreaming where people can realize in a dream that oh I'm dreaming right because you can realize you're dreaming and remain in the dream there is nothing pragmatically self contradictory about that now they point out and think of you can just here are Socrates in this they point out that this I am wise carries with it a sense a very strong intuition of a pragmatic self-contradiction to state that you are wise seems to be an indication that you are in a perspective and you have an identity that is precisely not that of being wise and of course this is part of the socratic you know I know what I don't know idea this is part of again or how I've argued and this is why ah right ah as the this this two-faced thing between horror and wonder right and that what it does is it brings out and I again I'm using this in the original meaning of the word not what we mean by it now right humiliation the inculcation of humility right and so what that tells us right away right is that wisdom has has this perspectival and participatory aspects to it such that right it's not a matter of making even having true beliefs there's a matter of what perspective can you take what perspectives what identities are you assuming and assigning so the participatory in the perspectival are also very central to with them and that of course makes sense again with wisdom having to do with much more with the how than the what and of course this is also perspectival and participatory because I'm seeing through a miss framing and I'm going through trans framing I'm actually right going through developmental change my world is opening it up and I and in a coordinated resonant manner I'm opening up to it and opening up through it which is of course what Wonder and awe are all about okay so that gives us some very important things to take note of and I've already indicated a connection to Stanovich with the idea of paying attention to process rather than product and we can strengthen that connection by noting that at the core of wisdom is the capacity for overcoming self-deception now a state of itch himself has published about at least overcoming foolishness and therefore at least by implication what it is to become wise but he normally talks about this ability to systematically overcome self-deception over and with another term and this is the term rationality and throughout I've been proposing to you that part of what we need to do to rehabilitate wisdom is we also need in a coordinated fashion to rehabilitate what it means to be rational rational does not cannot be reduced to cannot be equated to a facility with syllogistic reasoning ok rationality cannot be reduced to logic so let's broaden the notion right away and make it connect to what we're talking about which is what we mean by rationality is a capacity capacity to overcome self-deception in a reliable manner so what I'm going to mean by rationality is a lot reliably and systematically what I mean by those in a sec overcoming self-deception and this is also in a lot of the work on rationality especially by people like Stanovich and also affording flourishing which is afforded by some process of optimization of the cognitive processing okay what I mean by reliably it can't operate according to a standard of perfection completion right certainty reliably does mean though that it is a high probability of functioning successfully systematically means it's not operational just in this one domain so let's compare being let's compare rationality with expertise okay I can become an expert and let's say tennis I'm not this tennis won and I believe my dysgraphia is bad today let's whatever may be its two ends I can become an expert in this okay we have to be careful because we equivocate on this term there is one in which we can into something that we can study and one in which this is just a synonym for being good at something okay I'm not using it in that sense okay I'm using it in the sense in which it makes sense to say somebody is an expert in tennis they have acquired a high proficiency in the set of skills such that they have an authority about tennis playing okay that's what we mean you can become a legal expert etc okay so that the person there is two ends in tennis my brain is settling down okay or in the law for example to become a legal expert so what happens in expertise is precisely this you find right a domain a bounded domain that has a reliable set of very complex very difficult but nevertheless reliable set of well-defined right or at least well definable for you eventually set of patterns and problems you know it's expertise precise because it doesn't transfer my expertise in tennis won't transfer even the things that are close in fact it will interfere with when I try to play squash my expertise in golf will interfere when I try to play hockey okay that's not only does it not transfer right it will often interfere in transfer it even to things that are relevant ly similar to your area of expertise now this is a way again in which we have to we have to pay more attention in ways in which we can ourselves because we often confuse right because we we don't pay careful attention to how we're using similarity we often confuse people's expertise what do I mean by that so here's somebody who's an expert for example in a particular domain maybe in physics they have expertise there and of course physics is about knowledge and about getting at what's real and so that seems to be similar to you know philosophy right and so presumably somebody in physics can therefore just transfer their expertise to philosophy and just make pronouncements about philosophy and metaphysics perhaps pronouncing that philosophy is dead or useless or some such thing which of course itself is a philosophical statement and pragmatically self contradictory and if we don't pay attention to this fact about expertise we may fail to see that the similarity between physics and philosophy may actually be good reason for believing that these people are the worst people to listen to for philosophical advice because their expertise in physics may be in fact interfering with expertise in philosophy for example of these philosophy just the way that expertise in tennis actually interferes with you trying to play squash okay so expertise is is not systematic it is limited in its domain rationality is supposed to apply within it's supposed to be apt within each domain and apply across many domains somebody right is rational if they can note self-deception when they're doing right their daily life where they're doing their professional work where they're engaged in friendship where they're engaged in rational sorry romantic relationships okay so and this is an important thing to remember rationality is in this sense a domain general notion as opposed to a context specific expertise tends to be a domain specific now of course this is a continuum the more systematic somebody is the more rational we can claim there to be somebody might be very rational in a couple of domains and the irrational and others so on balance they're not that rational of a person all right and of course I'm not claiming that everybody is rational in the domain general way I'm claiming that that is the achievement that we are aspiring to so rationality is to reliably and systematically overcome self-deception also affording flourishing optimization so you get you optimize a set of procedures for achieving the goals you want but and standard doesn't talk enough about this other people talk about this when they talk like Agnes color when she talks about aspirational rationally part of it is also as you start to optimize your cognition it will also tend to shift and change the goals you are pursuing so the goals also tend to come under revision as we pursue this reliable and systematic overcoming of self-deception and the attempt to optimize our functioning so that we can afford flourishing ok so given that that's what we're talking about we can then take a look at stander work and other people's work and the way to do this is to situate it within the cognitive science of rationality and that is to take a look at the rationality debate okay so the rationality debate was driven by a whole bunch of experimental results that seem to show that human beings are irrational okay and how that works is I mean this is I'm not going to go into this in great lengths and I recommend you read Stanovich is work I'm just going to show you a couple of examples of the kind of experiments you do and then show you the features of them so you give people certain problems to solve and then you will you'll note certain things about how they solve them so here's one problem right so here's a right here's a pond of water right and I'm covering it right there's lily pads growing on it starts with one lily pad and every day the lily pads double right so on day day one there's one day two there's two and so for every day the lily pads are doubling and then I tell you on day 20 the surface of the pond is completely covered on what day was the pawn half covered and people say oh on the tenth day halfway through it's half covered no right on day 19 the pond is half covered because on day 19 I'm one I'm halfway right oh look you have to ask yourself right on day 19 I was halfway above towards being right full because doubling of half is what gets me full so it's on day 19 that the pawn what's half covered by the lily pads now what's interesting here is notice how the Machine there's machinery like your insight machine er there's machinery that's making you leap to a conclusion it sound it feels like an insight but it's actually causing you to miss sleep it's it's and we talked about this you're jumping to a conclusion that's actually incorrect now please note that how that adaptive machinery that often causes you right to have an insight is actually thwarting you in an important way so you people reliably fail on this kind of thing right this kind of task or you can give people this kind of task you can get them to you give a preliminary test and you find propositions that they strongly agree with or strongly disagree well let's say that some persons strongly believes be well you know I'm not taking stand here on this particular issue right they may but you know they strongly believe that abortion is wrong or they strongly believe that capital punishment is wrong now what you do is you give them two situations you give them a good in the sense of a logically valid argument that leads to not B that means not just but not in here and you give them a bad a very poorly constructed argument that leads to B and you ask them take a look at this and tell me which one of these is a good argument and notice notice what I said earlier how this points to what standard which argues that part of rationality is your ability to remove your fixation on the product of your cognition that's like being locked in the nine dot problem right and be able to direct your attention and care about the processing for its own sake this is critical detachment and what you find reliably for many people is people will say oh well this is the good argument this is the good argument they'll fail a critical detachment now here's the thing I'll give you a couple more of these but notice when I showed you the right answer in the pawned example you went oh yes of course of course so you acknowledge the principle you should be using but you don't actually reliably apply it so you know what the right reasoning principle is but you don't reliably apply you know you know that I should be able to independently evaluate an argument with independent of what it leads to because if I can't do that then there is no rationality possible because if you can't independently evaluate the argument then you can't use the argument to evaluate the conclusion and therefore I could never persuade you by argument so you know that you should evaluate the argument independently from the conclusion but we reliably fail to do that do you see what the pattern is we know what the principle is we acquiesce in it when it is stated to us but in experiment after experiment we reliably fail to do it let me give you one more example there are so many of these look up the conjunction fallacy look up confirmation bias look up the waste and selection task some of you can read some of my work elsewhere I'll give you one more example of this just because it's again so interesting about this right so here's a principle we all acquiescent I believe because whenever you ask people they say yes yes of course that's the rule we should be using here's the rule so I've got some evidence and the evidence is the basis for my belief right and then if the evidence is undermined I should change my belief right of course right now of course we have disputes about what counts as evidence bla bla bla but that principle right right if the evidence for my belief changes I should change my belief now the problem of course with testing that experimentally is your beliefs are based upon all kinds of background evidence and information you've got so testing it in a experimental situation is sometimes difficult but this is what they did in an experiment right so what you do is you you try and create a belief just in the experimental situation so you're trying to create a new belief in the person right in that experiment and so the experiment is actually the place in which you're providing the evidence so what did they do is they brought a bunch of people in and they they told them about this important skill that they wanted to see if they possessed which is the ability to detect authentic suicide notes many of us have no experience with this and so that's why it's plausible right that this is going to be a situation in which a new belief is going to emerge so the idea is I'm going to give you a bunch of notes and you have to be able to tell me which ones are authentic and which ones are fraudulent and this of course is a very valuable skill because it can help you know with first intervenors it can help prevent real suicide it can help us determine people who are just faking it or etc etc and so what you do is you give people a bunch of notes and they or they make their judgments I think this is real no I think this is fraudulent and then you of course give them feedback oh yes that's that's right or that's incorrect right and then what happens is right you later reveal to people the following thing that's happened people were randomly assigned to group a randomly assigned to group B if they were in Group A they were told they were very good at this task if they were in Group B they were told they were very bad at this task of course there's going to be a group C which is the control group and it's just going to be neutral and you're gonna use them as a control and I'm not going to go into that because that's just a good experimental design right and so these people come to believe again on the basis of the evidence in the experiment that they're good these people come to believe they're bad and now this is what you now do once you get them to reliably evaluate like the self about and say yeah I'm good look I keep doing well on this no no I'm bad at this I keep doing bad on then you say aha then you debrief them right and you show them that they were right they were only getting the feedback completely randomly you show them two things all of the notes are fakes all of the notes are fakes none of them are real and you were given the feedback only on the arbitrary write this on the arbitrary factor the completely random factor that you were just assigned to Group A or Group B what that means right is the belief that you are good at this or bad at this should be completely undermined because the evidence for it that these are real suicide some of these are real suicide notes and that I'm getting the feedback based on my performance has been completely undermined right and now you give people a bunch of distractor task so they're doing other things right and then you come back and ask them okay but how do you think you would do on this in real life these people reliably port I'll be bad at it oh no these people I'll be good at this or you ask them how would you do on a tasks vary in Allegan this how you'd be able to distinguish between fraudulent and legitimate marriage proposals right something like that and these people say oh I'll be really good at it these people say I'll be really bad at it this is known as belief for severance belief perseverance that people maintain the belief even though the only evidence for it has been completely directly undermined in front of them so once again what do we see here people acquiesce in a principle they say yes this is the principle notice to my language I should use I acknowledge and accept that I should use the principle that if the evidence is undermined I should revise the belief and yet they reliably do not do that so again and again again you get all these experiments and there is a lot of them I've just given you three example and there are like there's like 15 kinds of experiments you can run and you know tens sometimes hundreds of versions of these experiments right so people acknowledge the principle and then they reliably fail to engage in it so they suffer notice my language here from systemic illusion systemic self-deception all right so a bunch of psychologists call you scientists and philosophers we're coming to the conclusion that well that must human beings are just irrational right they're just irrational and so this idea that we've carried throughout all of our history from you know Aristotle on that human beings are the rational the irrational animals that's ultimately flawed we're not human beings are not rational no no that's very problematic right because think about what that means if you if you were convinced that that was deeply correct that human beings are not rational then you'd have a very tough time justifying democracy because if human beings are reliably irrational democracy is a very bad idea you should you should have the few people who are reliably rational and let them rule for example I'm not saying this I'm not advocating this I'm trying to show you the consequences you know our legal system is also based on the idea that people are fundamentally reasonable reliably rational but if that's not the case can we hold people responsible for their actions I mean the way they're connecting evidence to believe to action is seriously you know problematic morality depends and this is something that Kant famously argued for morality depends on rationality people can only be held moral if they can also be deemed rational right if you if you keep doing the right thing because of Locke right or because of coercion we don't think you moral we think it but if you do the right thing because you have reasoned it out and come to conclusion that that is the right thing to do right then of course we do deem you moral so as you can imagine right a debate arose and this is a very good thing for science right see notice what's going on here with rationality rationality is isn't just a fact out in the world like whether or not the earth is round right rationality ultimately goes because it is so deeply tied to prospective and participatory knowing it goes deeply to who and what I am and that has implications for what kind of political citizenship I can have what kind of moral status I can have what kind of legal status I can have even your judgments for example if I'm mature or immature are going to be vectored through how well you are self how how you how you assess how rational I am rationality is a deeply existential thing so a debate ensued around wet this boy they're not we should interpret the experiments or what they are and they're robust and reliable they are not suffering the replication crisis these experiments so these experiments are robust and reliable but there's a debate about and there's always another always should be a debate innocence or in science about how you interpret your experiments should we interpret these experiments to mean that human beings are fundamentally irrational now a debate ensued and that debate is very important and I want to go through this debate why are we doing this well first of all I'm trying to show you the deep connections between wisdom and rationality and I'm trying to show you the existential and political and moral import of rationality and I'm also trying to get you to consider expanding and revising the notion of rationality in a way that will help us to come back and deepen our understanding of wisdom why are we trying to understand wisdom because wisdom is deeply associated with meaning and wisdom is deeply needed for addressing the project sort for for cultivating enlightenment for the project of enlightenment and addressing the perennial problems and also for the project of addressing the historical forces that have driven the meaning crisis okay so the rationality debate the first major response is by Cohen Cohen makes a very important argument it's in an argument that we have we need to go carefully through and see again there's what I mean there has been so much the work put into the notion of rationality we should not take the right self-proclaimed promoters of rationality on YouTube to be clear examples of what rationale is okay we have to do this more carefully cautiously reflectively paying much more attention to the scientific evidence the empirical evidence and the debate so Cohen argued that there's a problem with concluding that human beings are fundamentally irrational and his argument comes down to a couple of very key points so let me use this word cuz okay Cohen says okay to be rational is to acknowledge and to follow a set of right standards and we noted that that we can only attribute irrationality to someone something if it acknowledges the standards and then fails to meet them to say that this book is irrational makes no sense because it does not acknowledge the authority of those standards so the fact that it fails to meets those standards is no reason for calling it irrational the book is a rational okay so Cohen stops right there and he says well let's slow down let's ask ourselves where do we get these the way he asked this is how do we come up with our normative theory normative not meaning statistically normal normal here but normative meaning the the theory about of the standards to which we should hold ourselves accountable when we're reasoning so where does our normative theory come from right and then he makes use of an argument that goes back to Plato and you can it goes all the way through the Conte and it's like well there's a there's a deep sense in which reason has to be autonomous let's say I believed that my standards were given to me by some divine being right in the sense that right it is commanded of me there are some Moses of rationality and the thee comes back or she comes back with the commandments for how was supposed to reason so if we follow these just because we are commanded to do so that is ultimately not a rational act that is just to give into authority to give in to fear and we would be doing the same thing regardless of what those standards were right if we follow the standards because we acknowledge that they're good and right that means we already possess the standards this is an old argument that goes back to Plato it's in the Euthyphro dialogue right we're right normativity has to be really deeply autonomous if something is only good because the gods say it then the gods aren't good in saying it look if God says to you do X and X isn't independently good to do then God's saying do X does not make God good because it would only make God good to say doing acts if doing X was independently good and if we only do something because we're commanded to do it not because we independently accept that it is the good or the right thing to do then we are also acting arbitrarily and not acting in a good manner so right we have to possess the standards this is an argument right you know crucial and conch rash reason is ultimately autonomous not in the sense of people misunderstand it that it's like a god or that right it has right absolute for it's that reason has to be the source of the very norms that constitute and govern reason because that's how reason operates okay so we have to be the standard there's another way of seeing this odd implies can giving you two separate arguments for this idea odd implies can if I lay a standard upon you you ought to do this then you have to be able to do it it makes no sense to apply a standard to you that you do not have the competence to fulfill okay you ought to always say what is only certain and perfectly true and if you don't you are failing you're immoral in some fashion but that's of course impossible you can't lay on anybody the obligation to speak all and only what is true because everybody has false beliefs most of our beliefs are false and nobody can act comprehensively according to standards of certainty if I lay that standard on you it's a mistake because you don't have the competence to fulfill those standards okay so and there's just so much argument that converges on this right that's point okay we are the source of the standards that's of course why you so readily acquiesce in them but then of course you should immediately say right but what the experiments show is yes people acknowledge the standard but they fail to satisfy them well then Cohen does something very interesting he says well we have to be careful people make two kinds of mistakes right and what we have to do is we have to make a distinction between competence and performance so let me give you an example this goes back to Chomsky and we talked about it when we talked about systemic error let's do it again just to bring it back into the argument okay competence is what you're capable of doing performance is what you've actually done you have a competence that greatly exceeds what you've got really don't you have a competence to speak so many sentences that you will never speak right right so it is false that I have held my breath underwater for 17 days while listening to Beethoven's 5th Symphony with a company of super-intelligent starfish that since happens to be true by the way the fact that I uttered it is bizarre I probably would never have uttered it in my life right so but you have the call I have the competence to generate it and you have the competence to understand it so competence is what you're capable of doing performance of what you actually do now the thing is in between your competence and your performance right there are all the implementation processes remember this so I have the competence to speak English but I mean if I'm extremely tired the implementation process is did the English in me doesn't it comes out garbled why I start slurring my speech or right perhaps if I was very drunk or something now you don't think that when I'm very drunk or very tired that I've lost the competence you just think rightly by the way that there's something interference in too with the implementation processes alright but if I get in a car accident and my brain is damaged and I I'm slurring my speech all the time and you go oh no John's lost English it's a different thing all right now Coen does something really clever here he says how do we come up with this well we have to be the source of it and it has to be something that we can hold ourselves to odd implies can okay so where do we come up with these standards well what we do this is how we come up with all of our normative theories what we do is we look at our performance and we try to subtract from our performance all of the errors in it that are due to implementation implementation errors or as if they're often called performance errors errors and how I'm implementing my competence and so what I do is by this process of systematic idealization I try to come up with an account of what my competence looks like completely free of performance errors so why would I have to have in my head so that I could reliably speak and understand English all the time in a perfect manner now of course all the time I'm speaking because of implementation processes there are performance errors you times stammer I sometimes stutter there's gaps I speak elliptically notice they're just what I okay those are performance errors and you read through those right so what we do is we take our performance we put it through a process of idealization we try and subtract all the performance errors that come from the implementation and then we get a purified account right of our competence an idealized account in that sense and then it sits purified of distortion by performance errors and then that is the standard to which we hold ourselves that's how we come up with a normative theory that shows how we can be the source and how we're alternately capable of it but how we can have nevertheless a lot of the time fail to meet it so what he argues brilliantly but we're gonna see there's going to be problems with it he argues that all of the errors in these experiments have to be performance errors that all of the mistakes that people are making are like the slips of tongue that pervade my speech their performance errors because why people have to be the source of the standards and they have to be able of meeting those standards so we must have at the level of our competence all of the rational standards we must be at the level of our competence rational beings and the the only Mazzoli reason we're making those mistakes is performance errors which means that human beings are not fundamentally irrational after all they are rational now what I want to show you next time is what's right about that argument and what's deeply wrong about that argument how Stanovich and the work of Stanovich and rest right reply to this argument in a really brilliant way and what it's going to show us again about the nature of human rationality human rationality is much more comprehensive than facility with civility syllogistic logic right it is the reliable and systematic overcoming of self-deception and that right right has to do with us not just right sort of up sort of theoretically and that's it has to do with us existentially and therefore this notion of rationality deeply overlaps with and I am going to argue is a component of what it is to be a wise person to be able to systematically see through self-deception and into reality in such a way that like rationality with wisdom we can actually afford meaning in life thank you very much for your time and attention [Music] you [Music] you you

Channel: John Vervaeke

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Keywords: psychology, philosophy, religion, meaning, meaning in life, meaning crisis, personality, meaning of life, U of T, university of toronto, john vervaeke, vervaeke, lecture, existentialism, continental, analytical, consciousness, cognitive science, insight, mental health

Id: udlkps-81JM

Length: 55min 26sec (3326 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 18 2019