Rationality is limited
Current position (as of 2025-07-19, reinforced 2026-04-18)
Rationality is not universal truth; it's a local tool. It's powerful within a bounded domain and deceptive at the edges. Things that appear "irrational" or "delusional" (quantum weirdness, altered states, intuitions of genius thinkers) may sometimes be closer to what's actually out there than our safely-bounded rational worldview.
From 2025-07-19-rationality-vs-delusion:
Rationality isn't the universal truth; it's just your current truth. It's a tiny window into an infinite cosmos.
The maximalist framing in the same piece ("rationality is the real delusion") is best read as rhetorical amplification. The underlying position is that rationality has a ceiling, not that it's worthless. See rationality-used-vs-rejected for the tension this creates with the rest of his corpus.
2026-04-18-nothing-matters supplies a specific, cooler instance: the creator-regress. If everything needs a cause, so does the first cause; if the first cause can be uncaused, so can atoms. One of rationality's foundational moves (causal reasoning about ultimate origins) doesn't have a coherent destination.
2026-06-14-cause-of-pain shows the productive side of this: he deliberately adopts a belief he knows isn't strictly justified because it's useful. "I am delusional enough to believe that if you keep putting effort into a certain direction for long enough, you increase your odds of getting lucky." Calling it "delusional" is self-aware — the point is that a chosen, slightly-unwarranted optimism is the right operating stance even though rationality can't guarantee the payoff. This is the same "embrace the delusion" move as Rationality vs Delusion, but cool and applied rather than polemical (see rationality-used-vs-rejected).
Argument structure
- History: every generation's "rationality" turned out parochial in retrospect.
- Physics: relativity and quantum mechanics show reality breaking rational intuitions.
- Psychology: confirmation bias means "rational" thinking is partly self-confirming fiction.
- Edge cases: altered states and visionary thinkers access something rationality misses.
- Cosmology: the creator-regress shows causal reasoning loses traction at ultimate origins (2026-04-18-nothing-matters).
- Therefore: rationality is a tool, not a ceiling.
Related positions
- no-singular-self — the rational assumption of a unified self is one of the things that fails
- switch-perspectives — rationality-vs-other is one axis of the lens-rotation
- cosmic-purpose-open — direct application: refuses to use rational causality to pick religion or anything else
Related themes
History
| Date | Position | Note |
|---|---|---|
| 2025-07-19 | As above (qualified: "ceiling" read) | Articulated in Rationality vs Delusion; stated with polemic force |
| 2026-04-18 | Reinforced | Creator-regress in Nothing matters, we humans are nothing as a specific, cooler instance |
| 2026-06-14 | Applied | Cause of Pain — chosen "delusional" optimism as a deliberate operating stance ("luck meets preparation") |