The primary reality that provides for the ability to reason is intelligent causality!
As a result of our own experience we can distinguish between planned and unplanned events. SETI, for example, is based on our ability to detect rational activity.
It is not a question of wanting anything but understanding that physical causality is not an adequate source - nor the sole function - of rationality.
But you don’t actually have a basis for assuming that physical causality is not an adequate source or function of rationality, since we don’t have a complete understanding of physical causality.
We have direct experience of intelligent causality and can distinguish it from physical causality.
Rationality is the ability to comprehend - amongst other things - concepts, goals, values, emotions, principles and non-causal relationships.
A concept is simply a mental construct of a collection of physical phenomena - such as love, justice, spirituality, even rationality itself.
Please explain how truth, purpose and justice can be explained as collections of physical phenomena…
Goals, values, emotions and principles are part of the fabric of causal relationships. What do you suppose constitute non-causal relationships?
Personal relationships are one example. Purposeful activity is non-causal from a physical viewpoint.
Computers cannot be rational because they don’t know what they are doing!
So what? They operate on the basis of cause and effect, and just because they don’t do so consciously does not mean they operate in a non-rational manner.
They act logically but - like an insane person - they don’t understand what they are doing.
It is impossible for a computer to ascribe anything to anything unless it is programmed by a person with insight and understanding.
Computers are programmed to produce defined outputs from defined (name removed by moderator)uts - in other words, to operate in a purely rational manner. If they produce unexpected outputs, that is usually an indication of malfunction.
Personal activity is far more than the production of outputs from (name removed by moderator)uts because it is intuitive, creative, flexible and innovative. The occupational hazard of a programmer is to interpret everything in terms of computer functions…
A prisoner but not a person who has never committed a crime!
Don’t you think it would be a good thing if we could predict the circumstances in which certain people were likely to commit crimes, and put measures in place to avoid such circumstances, or alleviate the effects of exposure to such circumstances? Being able to predict people’s behaviour may ultimately obviate the need for prisons altogether - assuming we can also divert the very human (and often irrational) desire for retribution.
Would you really imprison people just because you
think they are likely to commit crimes?
“often” gives the game away! Why not “always”?
Sometimes causal factors are equally influential. We are not yet in a position where we can precisely predict which causal factors will exercise the most influence upon a person’s actions.
How can you be so sure we shall ever be in that position?
Scientism is irrational! Hitler and Stalin treated people like cogs in the state machine in accordance with their respective ideologies of Nazism (Nietzsche’s Superman) and (Marx’s Dialectical Materialism).
But this was not “scientism” in the sense that you seem to perceive it, in the sense of seeking scientific explanations for all observed phenomena - this was ideological extremism, of the same kind that led the Inquisition to persecute heretics. If the regimes of Hitler and Stalin had been motivated by scientific principles, they would have been more interested in describing the world as it actually is, rather than fabricating pseudo-scientific excuses (particularly in the case of Hitler’s Reich) for destroying certain branches of humanity.
Scientists are not infallible neither were Hitler or Stalin. Skinner’s behavourism has fallen into disrepute like Nazism and Stalinism. Science is not devoid of fanatics like those who performed hundreds of leucotomies and lobotomies. I worked in a psychiatric unit for two years and witnessed how persons were irrevocably harmed:
In 1948 Norbert Wiener, the author of Cybernetics: Or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, said: “Prefrontal lobotomy… has recently been having a certain vogue, probably not unconnected with the fact that it makes the custodial care of many patients easier. Let me remark in passing that killing them makes their custodial care still easier.”
wikipedia
That sums it up perfectly. Man’s inhumanity to man established on a strictly scientific basis - and the prediction of criminal behaviour falls into the same category…
Straight from the horse’s mouth. (It spits out hogwash!)
