Primer on Rationality

Welcome to my blog. First, let me thank you for taking the time to read what I have to say. There is not and has never been anything more important that the moments of our lives and how we choose to fill them. Since this is the first posting here, I'm going to expand on that concept and hope that it can give some insight into why I would choose to spend these moments of my life writing.

One of the big questions is "what is most important in life?". Like most of the other big questions, any answer given is pure speculation on anyone's part. To understand why this question doesn't need answering, you need to take a step back in the process. What we do with our lives is less meaningful than our ability to do anything at all. Every action of every person on Earth will inevitably come to affect the course of history. When you have a bagel for breakfast, you are choosing to eat a bagel rather than eat a waffle. You are also choosing to eat a bagel rather than take a knife from the kitchen, walk out onto the street and start stabbing people indiscriminately. When we think of important or history-making acts, we think of the stabbings more than the bagels. "Man decides not to stab stranger" is not going to make the evening news. In the greatest scheme of things however, that bagel is just as meaningful.

Every action we take (or choose not to take) is at the same time vitally important to the future of the world and also completely inconsequential. It is this paradox that is the foundation not just of modern thought but of thought itself. When humans first began to evolve from animals, consciousness could be much more easily discerned from actions not taken than those which were. When a prehistoric creature decided not to follow its instinctual path - as eons of evolution had set for it - that is when the first breakthrough of thought and reason was made. In the ages that followed, the great advancements in civilization were made from expansions on this concept. When we chose not to be cold, we made fire. When we chose not to kill each other and take each others property, we developed community as we know it. These practices are not wholly the domain of humans, of course. Wolf packs defend each other and respect the territory that others have claimed for themselves (for the most part). Humans, however, evolved to be able to make choices about each moment in our lives in the face of conflicting instincts. Humans became capable of leaps of clarity in thought. Some people argue that science began in Greece during the Bronze Age. Some place the origins of science even later than that. In my mind, science began the first time a human realized that something was possible despite all evidence to the contrary - and then made it happen.

We are left with a world where the choices we make can have enormous repercussions throughout the world. Some may lament that the acts of few can have such a great effect on the world when those few choose a course of action that society defines as "evil". I believe that we cannot be so limited in our willingness to celebrate humanity's greatest asset. Though some people do terrible things, some also do wondrous things. The human capacity to make these choices in the first place is the greatest strength in our species. It may be the source of our eventual extinction, but it is surely the only source of our eventual survival.