Alfred001 Posted August 18, 2015 Share Posted August 18, 2015 Does anyone know of a comprehensive list somewhere online of all the (or many) known examples of limitations of reason? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Strange Posted August 18, 2015 Share Posted August 18, 2015 http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-reason/ Can anything like this be reduced to a bullet list? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Phi for All Posted August 18, 2015 Share Posted August 18, 2015 It might help to know what you're looking for in such a list. Are you trying to show that reason isn't the best tool in every situation? Perhaps you should come at this from the other direction. Can you list examples where an emotional stance is better than one arrived at by reason? I used to think emotion and reason were completely separate in their various processes, like Plato and his horses pulling in opposite directions, but I find more and more that we function best when one tempers the other, and decisions work best when a blend of reason and emotion are used. Both are connected; reason helps channel chaotic emotions, and emotions give motivation to clinical reasoning and help us prioritize what's important to us. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
StringJunky Posted August 18, 2015 Share Posted August 18, 2015 It might help to know what you're looking for in such a list. Are you trying to show that reason isn't the best tool in every situation? Perhaps you should come at this from the other direction. Can you list examples where an emotional stance is better than one arrived at by reason? I used to think emotion and reason were completely separate in their various processes, like Plato and his horses pulling in opposite directions, but I find more and more that we function best when one tempers the other, and decisions work best when a blend of reason and emotion are used. Both are connected; reason helps channel chaotic emotions, and emotions give motivation to clinical reasoning and help us prioritize what's important to us. Apart from purely intellectual endeavours, where emotional responses may not be desirable, emotions are really the drivers and raison d'etre of why people do things. Pure reason itself is as sterile as pure maths in terms of living a fullfilling existence. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Phi for All Posted August 18, 2015 Share Posted August 18, 2015 Apart from purely intellectual endeavours, where emotional responses may not be desirable, emotions are really the drivers and raison d'etre of why people do things. Pure reason itself is as sterile as pure maths in terms of living a fullfilling existence. Absolutely. Reason alone might tell me that it would be in the best interests of my survival to eliminate at least half the world's population so I'll have more resources. My emotions would never allow that. There are probably too many examples of this to list comprehensively. In just about every example I can think of, removing either emotion or reason from the process leaves you with flawed decisions. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alfred001 Posted August 19, 2015 Author Share Posted August 19, 2015 I'm thinking more about things like the traveling salesman problem. Problems that seem like they should be solvable but they're not either due to a paradox, or because it would take too long to compute (I'm interested in limits of computation, too), or something like that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Strange Posted August 19, 2015 Share Posted August 19, 2015 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_NP-complete_problems Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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