| | I'm a scientist. I'm all for using logic, reason, and the (above all else) the evidence of my senses to form my world view.
This, however:
Quote:
It means a commitment to the principle that all of one's convictions, values, goals, desires and actions must be based on, derived from, chosen and validated by a process of thought.*
[*From the opening quote of the Rationality article on importanceofphilosophy.com by Ayn Rand, which states:
"The virtue of Rationality means the recognition and acceptance of reason as one's only source of knowledge, one's only judge of values and one's only guide to action. ... It means a commitment to the principle that all of one's convictions, values, goals, desires and actions must be based on, derived from, chosen and validated by a process of thought."
Ayn Rand]
is more than a bit silly. Values, convictions, and desires can be rationallized or studied rationally (with questionable success to date), but aren't fundamentally rational.
Beyond that, I think there is room for mystical experience. I'm not so proud as to believe that I can figure out what the world is all about in my lifetime, or to believe that I have access to a truely objective world view.
Beyond that, many of the concepts we deal with in day-to-day life are arbitrarily defined, or unclearly defined. In many cases, it is hard to apply logic because the law of identity relies on the belief that our concepts actually correlate to objectively real objects - which is frequently not the case.
Two examples are the the unclear boundry and the ineffable.
In biology, organisms are perpetually reclassified because their relations are not clearly known or - in many cases - not fundamentally liable to a heirarchical or ancestral classification because of the various methods of genetic recombination. Or again, we may look at organisms as seperate which can be confusing from a metabolic standpoint when resources are shared between them - as in mycorrhizal fungi and trees. This last point also brings up the question of physicall seperation. Mycorrhizae frequently physically penetrate the cells of plants - ie., there's fungus in a plant cell. Although most plants can survive without fungus, some - such as orchids - cannot. And again, there are other endosymbionts - including chloroplasts and mitochondria - that have different heredities than the surrounding organism.
An interesting - and widely appreciated - boundry question is that of abortion. Assuming we all agree that murder is wrong, there becomes a quesiton of when a foetus becoms a human, or gains whatever it is that makes killing people wrong. This basically comes down to a question of boundry: at what point in the incremental development of a human does a person become a person?
Basically, this means there are certain arguments - which frequently occur in day to day life - that aren't liable to logic because their terms are either flawed or unclear.
Logic is also generally not useful when attempting to communicate the ineffable. Certain concepts are inherently hard to define or consider logically despite wide acceptance of their importance. These include love and mystical experience.
In any case, I think the ability to think and reason is great, but it doesn't define who we are as people, nor does it wholly define how we (in either an empirical or normative sense) relate to the world.
Please, if there are any confusions or misinterpreations that is evident in my post, feel free to make them explicit and demonstrate them to me - I am not attached to my transitory perspectives.
Thank you.
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