Rationalism and Empiricism

Commentte, all ye who entter here, and do so on all ye postts ye finde.

I seem to have a knack for pretentious titles. I blame the TOK classes I took because they gave me jargon to use instead of trying to describe the words. Rationalism is the ideology that the world should be described by reason, and similarly empiricism believes it should be described through observation. Like most ideological bookends, everyone's beliefs fall somewhere in between, since no one rejects all observation and likewise no one can escape logical thinking. Our brain uses both rational and observational processes, so neither one can be discarded.

My personal beliefs are hard to place because although I highly value reason, as a scientist I also find observation very important. I cannot say which way I lean, so I'll just describe my philosophy. Like many atheists, if not all, I am a functionalist, i.e. the world is described physically and there is no mind-body dualism. (This is the gist of functionalism as I understand it. It's also called materialism, I think, but with different implications than the consumerism-related materialisms. Erk, too many isms.)

I do not believe in a separate "mind" or "soul" or other non-physical representation of ourselves, so all our experiences are defined by sensory input and the brain. Our behavior results from evolutionary processes, which is why I've been trying to describe morality so that it has a natural origin. Many people believe that existence cannot be adequately described by physical objects, but the reason people think so is because consciousness is so far removed from its physical origins. We are all 100 trillion little cellular robots, in the words of philosopher Daniel Dennett.* Our reality results ultimately from physical processes, and so reality can only be defined by observation. I am therefore, ultimately, an empiricist.

However the world can be approximated mathematically with fancy formulae, and since mathematics is based purely on logical consequences of given axioms, the world can be described logically. The world is still empirical, rather than rational, because even the best formulas result in approximations within a certain margin of error, but in the sense that the result always falls within the margin of error for good approximates, the math is still valid.

I'm also, in a paradoxically rather emotional way, quite rational (there's no reason why I require reasons.) I'm not as logical as many others, for example my roommate Himanshu makes conscious decisions is worth befriending, but I am certainly more rational than the norm. I love science because it is explanatory and it brings order to chaos (as well as chaos to the occasional seemingly ordinary phenomenon,) and I'm generally stable emotionally, being able to rationalize away most of my worries and be happy most of the time, but unlike Himanshu I respect my emotions as well. My respect probably results from the fact that when my rational, explanatory, stabilizing method breaks down, I become highly emotional indeed. You've witnessed this happening if you've ever seen me irritated or angry without any obvious reason to be. Seeing me truly angry is apparently an unpleasant experience, and I'm not proud of these occurrences, and I'm trying to keep a better hold of myself when I am emotional. At least you know what causes these outbursts now.

In employing Occam's Razor I require neither God nor souls, only what I can observe, and interestingly Occam's Razor is reason applied to observation. Succinctly, my beliefs reduce to rational explanations for an empirically derived reality.

*- If this post is at all interesting, or if you like optical illusions, I would suggest watching this presentation by the above-named philosopher.
**- I consider logic to be only "deductive" when discussing rationalism because inductive logic combines empiricism with deductive logic. Inductive logic is where predictions are made based on evidence, i.e If A and B and C and D etc. then Z, where A, B, C and D are observations and Z is an explanatory conclusion.)