An old thread resurrected from the depths of the forum's archives. Anyway, giving it a second look, the notion of catch-22 popped into my. Catch-22 is a title of a book that's about a man who wants to avoid war duties by claiming to be insane (irrational) and the catch is attempting to do that is proof of his sanity (rationality), thereby making him fit for military service.

If anything, the book suggests that there are occasions when it's rational to be irrational - insanity, another word for irrationality, is a good excuse reason to avoid certain responsibilities.

I think there can be instances where you can be calculatingly irrational but ultimately I find it subjective Suppose you are down, and are faced with either completing chores or staring at Netflix for 8 hours? The rational mind says 'fold the laundry's, 'empty the dishwasher' etc. But the irrational mind says 'keep watching' and which is best is dependent on the person doing it.

I suspect these situations come up all the time (in less dramatic fashion).
One situation is rational, and the other is irrational- it serves no purpose, except for the person doing it.

I think that we try to believe that we are rational but most of us are following the prompts of our subjective wishes, which are often far from rational. If anything, we try to justify our subjective intentions in a rational way as a means of self justification.

One possible means of living more rationally could be through cognitive behavioral therapy. I have never had CBT but have read a fair amount on the topic and did find that it helped me aware of inconsistencies in logic of my own interpretations of life experiences. If nothing else it is a means of exploring the lack of logic of one's own thinking in daily life.

I think that we try to believe that we are rational but most of us are following the prompts of our subjective wishes, which are often far from rational. If anything, we try to justify our subjective intentions in a rational way as a means of self justification. — Jack Cummins

just like to introduce a third category - the non-rational. This would encompass the irrational, but since that is generally a pejorative term, I want a neutral term that would then also include neutral and positive choices and conclusions that are not arrived at rationally. IOW not arrived at through some logical, verbal process. Evolution seems to have selected for creatures (us I mean) who use a number of processes to arrive at choices and conclusions. 1) I can't see a way to avoid this, given how incredibly time consuming (and then also circular) it would be to arrive at everything using reason. 2) I think people can actually be quite good at non-rational processes. 3) Rational processes are dependent on non-rational processes. We are always deciding things like 'I have checked my reasoning enough' and 'I have a feeling I should check X again' and all sorts of time prioritization, focus prioritization, sense of the semantic scope of terms, interpretations of metaphors without analysis and more through non-reasoning 'feelings' 'intuition' 'gut senses' 'nagging doubts' 'sense of completenesses' and much more. We are mixed bags cognitively.

For nerd people like us, we use reason, or what we consider to be reason, because we were born in to brains with a built-in inclination towards such operations.

But you were born with a brain that also had the inclination towards non-rational processes. Or you'd be a complete mess.

Or you'd be a complete mess. — Coben

How did you find out? Who told!!?? :-)

Do we have reasons to satisfy requirements of rationality? In other words, is rationality normative, i.e. to do with reasons? — mrnormal5150

Why be rational? If this query is posed by way of an inquiry into other possibilities, possibilities other than rational, then, in my humble opinion, there are two three: 1. Irrational, 2. Arational, 3. Hyper-rational.

1. Irrational is simply breaking the rules of logic and critical thinking.

2. Arational is best explained with an analogy. In ethics we have the immoral (prohibited), the moral (mandatory) and the amoral (neither prohibited, nor mandatory) and that's all she wrote

3. Hyper-rational is a hypothetical state of mind that has access to new rules of logic that are, as of now, hidden from us. The key difference between rational and hyper-rational would be that the latter would be incomprehensible to the former. I suppose the sentence "there's a thin line between genius and madness" says it all.

The women you've known all, every single one, said that you thought you were more rational than you were. So, I knew you were ok, you still ran, at least in part on intuition.