If one cares about the life of the mind, it helps to have friends who listen, and to whom one listens in turn. I have many thoughtful acquaintances, but for ongoing dialogue, Heidi and Lewis are two such friends for me. And here I’m talking mainly about Lewis, because he isn’t my life partner.
We travel together, in our shared conversations, around the world and backward and forward in time – but we’re wary of the future. We share a healthy appreciation for (and occasional indulgence in) irony and absurdity. We never know where we’re going next.
Heidi, as a retired physician and pathologist (one of her tasks early on was performing autopsies) loves to talk about disease and death, and I’m okay with that, even at the dinner table. But I’m into philosophy, which is not like an obsession with organic nature. And Lewis is into ancient history – the more obscure the better, it seems. As co-founders of a nonfiction book club that’s been going for some sixteen years, the three of us have read a hundred or so of the same books, which are fodder for some of our conversation. Another term for it is lifelong learning.
Recently Lewis asked me, over breakfast, if I thought the universe was rational. It was not a bad jumping-off point, conversationally speaking. I conceded that the question is a coherent one, which is to say, I didn’t scoff or curse. Breakfast, for me, is a time of day that is full of barnyard epithets; I don’t much care for waking up, or for sunlight, but my mood improves as the day unfolds. And even though it was early, and I was in full cursing mode, I took the question of a rational universe seriously. It was the least I could do.
My reaction, however, was to counter with the question: What does it mean to say that the universe is rational? (Not being a psychoanalyst, I didn’t ask “How does an irrational universe make you feel?) If a rational universe means that there is a single mind governing it, a mind that proceeds according to its own rules and reasons, I’d say that the jury is out. In fact, it’s way out. We don’t know what if anything is up there (or down there). So, a certain agnosticism seems warranted on that score until the jury has weighed the evidence and shuffled back into the courtroom.
Meanwhile, a quantum of doubt seems justifiable. I mean, the Great Ooga-Booga (as the poet Yusef Komunyakaa has referred to the big mind) hasn’t exactly shown itself to date. And why should it change its mind and show itself now, or later?
But if you ask a (very) different question, namely, is there any rationality in the universe, then the answer is obviously yes. It’s obvious because we humans find it convenient to use the term to identify certain mental processes; and we ascribe those processes to humans, to computers and artificial intelligence (with appropriate qualifications) and, to a limited extent, to animals. Yes, there’s rationality out there, but there’s other stuff too.
What do we mean by rationality? I call it following rules and reasons. But it tends to fall into two broad, occasionally overlapping categories, one relating to thought, the other to action. Roughly speaking, in order to understand and to communicate, we think according to rules, starting with the rules that govern language itself and make communication possible. We agree conventionally on what a “p” sounds like and what the word “peace” means, and on rules of grammar that render our speech coherent. And we act according to reasons, having formulated plans to achieve ends. Not doing this at all gets us labeled as schizophrenics. But thinking also involves reasons, and acting also involves rules.
Where does that leave the universe? I’m inclined to say that rationality is an entirely human construct, a set of tools that did not exist at the Big Bang, or in fact until we evolved; and those tools greatly help us to negotiate the universe, singly and together. Some of them are general ideas – like logic and math; others just tell us that a hook and a pole are helpful if you want to catch a fish, and a getaway car is useful if you want to rob a bank.
None of this is inscribed in the universe or predates us. And we don’t always remember to use it or know how to use it. But at the same time, our thinking is framed by the universe in which we find ourselves. It has no other purpose than inhabiting that universe. In that sense, it’s a response to the specific texture of human experience, a world that includes fish, sailboats, bank robbers, mortgages, and so forth – all occasions for rationality of one kind or another.
Again, language itself is a set of rational tools for communication; and communication is never perfect, or we would share a single consciousness – a third logical (but highly improbable) option after 1) a single mind governing us all, and 2) all our minds governing themselves. Yet rationality runs deeper than language – way deeper. Consciousness itself depends on it. The ability to discern objects, motion, relationships, features, causes and effects – all conscious experience – is based on rational understanding of the world we perceive around us. Whatever we sense, we don't sense it "raw," but rather we process it in our minds so that it makes sense.
Thus, rationality of a baseline sort is necessary, or we couldn’t experience consciousness; we rationally sort experience to make a minimum of sense out of it. It’s also often overrated; we think of it as an end in itself, and it’s really only a means to other human ends (which have to be rationally conceived and pursued). Rationality per se aligns with clarity and efficiency; but it’s almost always “per se,” and an auxiliary to something else, grounded in human needs, desires, or worldviews. It’s the horse, not the cart or the destination.
There may not be inherent rationality in the universe per se, but in even the most fevered or disordered mind, there’s a sprinkling of it. The patterns that we perceive may not have been encoded by a higher mind; maybe they’re just the patterns our minds perceive that make it all hang together. They’re out there, but it’s we who recognize and identify them. That’s essentially what I told Lewis over breakfast. I think he agreed with me. Anyway, we had a good laugh about it.