May I ask something... and please when you read this, read it twice and actually think about what I'm trying to say before allowing yourself to respond...

I think that we all have agreed that humans have rationality and irrationality. I expressed concern about trying to look at irrationality through the lenses of rationality, because the essense of the confusion of irrationality (and hence, emotions) lies within its inability to be, as Tae-Yeoun says, expressed in the medium of rationality, whether that be language or visual art or sound... And when I expressed this concern, I didn't mean to be criticizing the way we were approaching it; I simply felt that it was interesting paradox of our attempt to further our understanding. I didn't actually think that there would be any alternate way. However, after Eunice brought up the question of how else can we approach emotions or irrationality, I began thinking that maybe there actually was another way of approaching this. After all, we as humans do possess the two capacities of rationality and irrationality. Can irrationality also be a way for us to process information?
At this point, I believe that many of us would agree... yes, irrationality allows us to process information, but not in any legitimate way. After all, we react with emotions (an product of an irrational process) but does emotions can't be used for anything... can they?
I would like to ask... why is it that it is so important for us to place value upon the idea of rationality over irrationality? How come we never even challenge ourselves to perform an Emotion-experimente but we perform Thought-experimentes all the time? I realize that we as society, we as believers in the scientific method, stress logic - but the scope of logic must be limited to those of logical natures. Otherwise, we would have been able to come out with an answer for things of illogical natures by now... like God.
And yet, we - well... some of us - still believe in God - almost with the same certainity and sometimes even more so than those things that are logical true. Why? Somewhere... the irrational processes have just as much validity within our human spiritual beliefs. Emotions are an intrinsic aspect to the religious experience... so we shouldn't toss out irrationality as a ways to analyzing things.

How then... might we be able to analyze irrationality in the framework of irrationality? I'm going to propose that we toss out our logic - as difficult as that might be - and focus upon how we feel. We shouldn't try to surmise why we feel a certain way lest we know not with our brains but with our hearts why we feel a certain way. What that is going to do is give us raw data of irrational products and give us a place upon which we can try to see why we believe in things or beings like God, why we have a need for society, for each other. I don't believe the answers are as simple as evolution, because we have irrational beliefs that we need that don't fit into this scheme like God. The more abstract the irrational belief, the harder it is to draw the connections back to evolution. I'm not saying that evolution is wrong - only that we shouldn't start a discussion thinking that we already know the answer and end the discussion thinking that we have achieved all that there is to know. Once we start doing that, the evolution of human thought might as well be stagnant.

posted by Bryan Lee   [10:31 PM]

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