Computers are not rational; feeling beings are

While the 17th century mathematician, scientist, and philosopher René Descartes is well-known for his infamous "I think, therefore I am" declaration of conscious autonomy, a good case can be made that "We feel, therefore we are," can serve as a defining description of human beings. The life-mind sciences have now demonstrated definitively that 99% of human cognition is non-conceptual: it is qualitative, tangible, somatic, aesthetic, spontaneous, and sensuous. It is literally impossible to live without feeling. Feeling -- in the broadest, most inclusive sense of the word -- is the basis of all human experiencing, of which conceptual intellect and abstract reasoning (such as what featured in Descartes's phenomenological treatise) are only specific, functional components of a multidimensional cognitive repertoire largely characterized by felt qualities that arise within our direct, experiential engagement with the dynamic environments in which we move, breathe, and have our being.

Yes...turns out, the idiosyncratic and experimental styles of inquiry and self-reflection characteristic of a few privileged European scholars from hundreds of years ago do not, in fact, accurately reflect human nature as such. In a delicious irony, it is the modern and contemporary sciences themselves -- of which Descartes and his kin are said to be the "fathers" (but who were the mothers?) -- that have revealed that what characterizes human experience, including cognitive experience and function, is feeling far more than conceptual-analytic-abstract thinking. In fact, as the pioneering pragmatic psychologist John Dewey detailed over 100 years ago, (conceptual) thinking is actually a functional outgrowth of feeling. Feeling is primary and ultimate; thinking is an instrumental, derivative process guided by and serving the multidimensional functions of feeling.

(For any logical positivist types out there, who may be bothered by this statement and are currently formulating all sorts of clever counterarguments against the primacy of feeling in human cognition, notice what you're feeling that prompted you to begin thinking how you can conceptually-analytically undermine that idea. Yeah - case in point. If you happen not to be feeling anything at all, you are a robot, and this is entirely irrelevant to you.)

Throughout the 20th century, this conflation of conceptual-abstract thinking with human cognitive experience was accelerated dramatically with the rapid rise of electronic and digital computer technologies. Today, as you very well likely know, most people living in industrialized societies interact with -- or, are at least in the vicinity of -- machines and/or computers on a near-constant basis. As I'll detail in a later post, cognition is an ecological-relational phenomenon, so what we interact with has a profound impact on how we cognize generally. Given that most people today interact at least as much with machines, computers, digital devices, and virtual media environments than with living beings and natural environments, it follows that, collectively, contemporary human cognition has taken on many of the functions and forms characteristic of machines and computers.

There's nothing inherently wrong with thinking analytically or computationally; that is not my claim here. What's problematic about this sudden infiltration of human experience by inanimate technologies is that it has taken us away from robust, dynamic, and intelligent feeling, which is what constitutes the vast majority of human cognition. Our thinking is only as good as our sensing, and the reality today is that hundreds of millions of people have dramatically impaired abilities to sense and feel through their somatic mind (what the obsolete modern paradigm calls the "physical body"). Optimal human cognition -- which is to say, our intelligence -- arises from a proper and dynamic ratio of thinking to feeling. As Dewey says,

Apart from language, from imputed and inferred meaning, we continually engage in an immense multitude of immediate organic selections, rejections, welcomings, expulsions, appropriations, withdrawals, shrinkings, expansions, elations and dejections, attacks, wardings off, of the most minute, vibratingly delicate nature. We are not aware of the qualities of many or most of these acts; we do not objectively distinguish and identify them. Yet they exist as feeling qualities, and have an enormous directive effect on our behavior.

...In a thoroughly normal organism, these 'feelings' have an efficiency of operation which it is impossible for thought to match. Even our most highly intellectualized operations depend upon them as a 'fringe' by which to guide our inferential movements. They give us our sense of rightness and wrongness, of what to select and emphasize and follow up, and what to drop, slur over and ignore, among the multitude of inchoate meanings that are presenting themselves. They give us premonitions of approach to acceptable meanings, and warnings of getting off the track. Formulated discourse is mainly but a selected statement of what we wish to retain among all these incipient starts, following ups and breakings off.

...These qualities are the stuff of 'intuitions' and in actuality the difference between an 'intuitive' and an analytic person is at most a matter of degree, of relative emphasis. The 'reasoning' person is one who makes his 'intuitions' more articulate, more deliverable in speech, as explicit sequence of initial premises, jointures, and conclusions." (from Experience and Nature [1925] p. 227)

In this excerpt, Dewey is describing the fundamentally qualitative nature of human cognition, where "qualitative" refers to the many, complex aspects of non-conceptual cognition, sensed directly through the living body (the "organic selections, rejections, welcomings, expulsions, appropriations," etc. that Dewey describes). He concludes his thought by claiming that intuition and reasoning are not two separate, distinct "things" as much as they are descriptive terms highlighting continuous aspects of a unified cognitive experience of the world.

So, what makes a person rational?

There are literally thousands of scholarly publications debating every conceivable aspect of what can be considered in a definition of "rational" or "rationality." I have no desire to engage those debates; I've read a lot of them, and none were all that intriguing or convincing, to be honest. In fact, many of them struck me as particularly irrational!

Instead, here's a non-convoluted, non-technical, non-traditional approach to "rationality" viewed from the perspective of the new paradigm of deep life-mind continuity and embodied cognition: a rational person is one who is thoroughly acquainted with their multidimensional, somatic sensing of a situation, and who critically uses that sensing to inform any number of conceptual, abstract, analytic cognitive processes related to whatever task or question is at hand. In other words, to be rational is to critically and creatively combine intuitive and analytic dimensions of cognition, continuously moving back and forth along the wide spectrum from direct sensory experience to the most lofty, technical discourse.

The core of rational, after all, is "ratio." Thousands of robust scientific studies conducted by researchers from dozens of different fields, disciplines, and specialties have shown that the entirety of our experiencing -- and not just abstract, conceptual linguaform thought -- contributes to everything we refer to as "cognition." So, to be rational cannot mean to shun, neglect, or repress feeling in favor of an exclusive reliance on linear, abstract analysis. This is, technically and literally speaking, irrational. This is what computers and machines do, because they cannot feel (despite baseless and sensationalized claims that AI technologies have developed feelings or emotional awareness). Computers and machines are purely logical, but not rational in this sense of living cognition/intelligence.

Living rationality entails a complex and dynamic interplay among the many dimensions of cognition, which includes direct physical sensation; proprioception; interoception; memory; affect; emotion; imagination; perception; communication (verbal and otherwise); abstraction; linear analysis; and a host of non-linear feedback mechanisms that mediate and influence all of these experiences. To be truly and literally rational, cognitively speaking, is to live within, and make use of, the ordered chaos of the whirlwind of all these dimensions of cognitive experience operating simultaneously, in ratios befitting whatever needs or interests are relevant to any given person or group in a given situation.

This situational variability is crucial. For example, I do not bring the same cognitive posture to a musical concert that I bring to reading a research article in neuroscience, and each of those experiences requires a different posture than what I bring to gardening, or hiking in the mountains, or driving in rush hour traffic. Each of these situations demands a unique combination of cognitive functions and perspectives. Humans can seamlessly move from one such situation to another (assuming their natural cognitive abilities are at least relatively developed and not significantly impaired for any number of reasons) and behave-function reasonably, effectively, and respectfully, relative to the unique interactive parameters of each situation. A robot could not do this, let alone step into any number of the millions of other unique situations humans experience on a daily basis. And while this is really a topic for another post, the bottom line is that computers and machines must be programmed to perform their functions, where that programming is situation- and task-specific. Living beings are in no way whatsoever programmed. This is simply a bad metaphor for trying to describe living cognition and intelligence. Despite all the talk about genetic "code," the phenomenon of cognition among living beings is fundamentally and comprehensively different than anything running on literal symbolic code (as are all computers, machines, and AI technologies). (For details on all this, see the Resources page with links to books and articles that address all this in much, much more detail than you probably ever want.)

In the end, the upshot is simple: pure logic is for non-living machines and computers, but true cognitive rationality is for living beings. And, the basis and bulk of cognition is complex, dynamic, multidimensional feeling experience. As pioneering biologists/neurophysiologists/neuroscientists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela say, as they introduce their own description of these phenomena:

nothing we are going to say will be understood in a really effective way unless the reader feels personally involved and has a direct experience that goes beyond all mere description." (from The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding, [1992] p. 18)

Likewise, John Dewey (who was one of the first modern theorists to develop a robust theory of autopoiesis and embodied cognition, 50 years before it was formalized and systematized by Maturana and Varela) offers the same admonition in an essay describing what he calls "Qualitative Thought:"

The foregoing remarks are intended to suggest the significance to be attached to the term 'qualitative thought.' But as statements they are propositions and hence symbolic. Their meaning can be apprehended only by going beyond them, by using them as clues to call up qualitative situations. When an experience of the latter is had and they are re-lived, the realities corresponding to the propositions laid down may be had." ("Qualitative Thought," 1931)

To "assess" the ideas in this post, then, try feeling into the implications of the concepts, in real-world situations in real time, rather than merely thinking about them. That, per logic, is the only rational way to assess the hypothesis that rationality is much more than abstract analysis.

Enjoy!
:)