570. Irrationality and non-rationality

There is some confusion around the notion of rationality. Rationality is following reason. Reason occupies only a relatively small portion of the brain. The rest is dedicated to mostly subconscious emotions, impulses, moves, balance, routines, digestion, and reflexes.

 Irrationality is going against reason, logic and facts. Examples are fake news and conspiracy theories, because they go against facts and logic, or knowingly going towards one’s own destruction. There may be a glimmer of rationality, but it is overwhelmed by emotions.

 Non-rationality is not against but beside reason, in subjectively triggering action that, often in combination with reason enables life. Examples are fear and flight, love, and hatred. Making a choice, say in buying a house, is fed by rational considerations, concerning the state and location of the house, neighbours, noise, plus non-rational, emotion, intuition, motives from previous experience, and taste.

 This constellation of reason and emotions developed. in evolution, helping the human being to survive. This yields a further notion, of adaptiveness, aiding survival in evolution. Irrationality seldom aids survival, but non-rationality often does, even if it is automatic. Routines enable us to direct rationality to novel conditions, as thinking about your children when driving a car. When an accident is imminent, the emotion of fear catapults one back into conscious thinking. However, the imminent collapse of nature and climate does not trigger a rational response, in blatant irrationality. Even irrationalities can contribute to survival, such as taking a wild risk in innovation.

 Economists make the mistake of calling adaptiveness rational, with the idiotic conclusion that everything that exists is rational, since it has survived. Adaptation  may be rational in its consequences, but not in its intentions. Conversely, what was adaptive in past evolution my not be adaptive now.

 Previously in this blog, I have  used the example of language and thinking. In the past, when the human being was a hunter-gatherer, the priority was to correctly identify things moving in time and space, such as an approaching  predator, or a prey moving away, an enemy, the trajectory of a spear, the location of shelter or a lost child. Our thought may have developed to deal with that, while in current evolution we have to deal more with abstractions, such as justice, democracy, love, debate, happiness, meaning, which are not things moving in time and space, The meaning of a word changes from one sentence to another. It is as if an approaching leopard changes into a rhinoceros