On Rationality

~13 min read

Note 02/26/2026: I used to think and write like this all the time. I think it gave me a sense of control; I figured I could get a grip on my immediate reality if I could just put pin down the big abstract stuff. From what I can tell this wasn’t written for a class either, which is surprising since I used citations, and because my personal writing of this nature was usually far more abstract and not nearly as verbose. Enjoy.

I would like to think that most people believe that they operate based on reason. I don’t mean to say that this is a natural or even an easy state for most humans to achieve (and as we shall see, humans can be rather consistently inconsistent), but due to the state of the world we live in reason and logic are seen as admirable traits garnering success, and so people are inclined to see these traits within themselves. The human brain is rather good at this actually. Science is one of the most successful ideologies we’ve ever invented, amounting to arguably the greatest proliferation of human advancement yet. As such we adapt to its counterparts well, to the extent that it feels natural to us, as if there is no other way of being. Timekeeping for example is a powerful tool. It lets us coordinate things accurately and precisely, core principles of any good scientific endeavor. Clocks allow us to sync up global transportation networks, global positioning systems, communication networks, and so much more. They allow us to visualize new dimensions. We anchor ourselves to what has happened, what is happening, and what will happen. We live not just according to what is happening right now, but in accordance with what we have to do to reach an optimal future based on a trajectory guided by our efforts meticulously planned over a given timespan—all oriented based on seconds, minutes, hours, days, and so on.

Even now while writing this, I am knowledgeable of the work needed to complete the essay and roughly how long it will take. I’ve allocated my time—which hasn’t happened yet—to know when I will research, write, and turn in this assignment. This is in conjunction with time I will give myself to work on other classes, jobs, and personal pursuits in order to achieve a goal in some abstract future that I have gauged based on intuition that will happen at some point, based on a time it will happen. In a way, our lives extend beyond just now—we think about the future as if we’re already living it.

While we are capable of leveraging our surroundings as instruments to enhance our thought processes, we are not innately compelled to do so. Knowing the time and orienting our schedules in conjunction feels natural, but remove the clock (and other queues) and we will adapt in bizarre ways. In 1962 French speleologist Michel Siffre spent two months in a subterranean cave in the French Alps, cut off completely from natural light and indications about time. Without external cues, his sleep patterns settled into a 24-hour cycle, drifting closer to a 25-30 hour cycle as time went on. Similarly, we can use odometers in cars to figure out our speed and adapt accordingly, as if the instrument was an extension of ourselves, but if removed we would have now way of gauging our speed.

It seems weird that something so intuitive that has such precedence in our lives is actually so impermanent, and could disappear just as easily. But in fact, it has happened many times before. A good way to convey this is through seeing how previous ideologies have improved human lives and in turn how we then attempted to apply these concepts to unrelated facets of life. Just as precision, logic, and exactness has snuck its way into our decision making, so too did concepts related to steam at the advent of the industrial revolution sneak its way into unrelated fields. 19th and 20th century psychologists adopted the language of machines into their work, using phrases such as “under pressure”, “letting off steam”, and “mental pressure”. Writers such as Charles Dickens described characters and situations mechanistically and with industrial metaphors, such as describing people in his stories as “cogs in a machine”. Computers have seeped into our colloquialisms as well, with phrases like “let me process this”, “this is my default choice”, “I’m stressed, I need to unplug for a bit”, or “man i’m tired, if I don’t stop i’m gonna crash”.

My point in explaining all this is that our successful theories can integrate into our intuitions until they are expected and seem natural, but they are in fact impermanent and require intention to maintain. Once they cease holding a presence in our lives (due to a lack of utility or otherwise) they will cease to be adopted. Another important thing to mention is that our mental processes that drive our lives do not actually fit into the notion of a singular process, but roughly amount to two processes, an automatic, impulse-based judgment system and a manual, directed, abstract system that is effortful but more logical. This notion of two systems was popularized by Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking Fast and Slow, in which he labeled the two systems System One (Fast) and System Two (Slow). The notion that there are two discrete agents in your brain making decisions isn’t wholly realistic, but serves as a good analogy to understand how your brain thinks psychologically.

Our system one brains hearken back to an earlier time, when animals could be successful in their environments acting on their simple interests and desires and didn’t have to deal with novel problems very often. Most animals, a very significant ‘most’, still do operate wholly with this type of brain. Humans are unique in that they operate in tandem with their system one and system two brains. Many situations can be solved with quick impulsive decisions—eating, avoiding pain, seeking shelter, making common associations—but many situations, especially in the modern world, require us to reason with things we don’t understand. As Kahneman points out, system one isn’t even capable of realizing it is wrong, it does the best it can with what it has, and so people can lead themselves into fallacies without even realizing it. System one (as well as system two) operate associatively as well. Upon seeing a collection of seemingly random words, we can tell if there is a connection between the three immediately even if we don’t realize it. We can infer details about a situation based on piecing together information from a story. All of this happens automatically, without consideration of if it could be wrong, and it works to efficiently let us make sense of the world. As with the metaphors before, it only makes sense that people would adapt current theories into their colloquialism as they made associations in the workings of the world to steam engines and computers.

As it turns out, the inconsistency of human reasoning can be expressed in a common philosophical thought experiment known as the trolley problem. Joshua Greene talks about the trolley problem in the articles Solving the Trolley Problem and Pushing Moral Buttons: The Interaction between Personal Force and Intention in Moral Judgement. Specifically, he refers to two versions of the trolley problem that I will call the ‘switch’ trolley problem and the ‘push’ trolley problem. The switch trolley problem is one you might have seen before. It involves you (or some person being tested) that is in front of a switch that changes the tracks for a moving trolley. As it currently stands (without any interference), the trolley will go down the main track and hit five people, killing them. If the user decides to divert the trolley, it will not kill the five people, but it will kill a single person on the other track. The push version of the trolley problem involves the same dilemma, but instead of switching the track to save five people the user can push a fat (or backpack wearing) person onto the tracks, killing them but saving five people. These problems are quite popular in the media as moral exercises, with an iteration of the switch trolley problem (or several iterations) being forced upon Chidi Anagonye in The Good Place Tv show, and the push trolley problem being seen in the video game Prey (2017). As Greene points out, the problems are mostly the same. They “involve tradeoffs between causing one death and preventing several more deaths” (175). From a utilitarian approach, the answer seems fairly obvious in both cases. Utilitarians will make the choice that causes the least suffering, and will choose the option that considers the experience of all relevant beings.

It should be noted that the trolley problem is intrinsically a problem of tradeoffs. It serves to see how people respond differently given slight changes in parameters. Indeed, Greene says that “the longstanding hope is that a solution to the normative Trolley Problem will reveal general moral principles. Such principles, in turn, may apply to challenging, real-world moral problems such as those encountered in the domain of bioethics, war, and the design and regulation of autonomous machines such as self-driving cars” (175). Increasing the amount of people on the direct track would increase the likelihood of people pulling the lever. Increasing the amount of people on the opposite track (or decreasing the amount of people on the direct track) would decrease the likelihood of people pulling the lever. Nonetheless, as Greene states, “ as a matter of psychological fact, people tend to approve of trading one life to save several lives” (175). This conclusion doesn’t apply to all iterations of the trolley problem though. In the case that people have to push a person onto the tracks, they are much less willing to do so even if they would pull the switch. Even if they cited the utilitarian approach as justification for pulling the lever, they would say, perhaps inconsistently, that the same logic doesn’t apply in the case of the push trolley problem. To see why people act so inconsistently, we will have to look at the details of each problem in how they differ.

In terms of consequences the problems seem to be identical. In both cases a decision is made by the user that will directly cause the death of one person to save the lives of five others. In both cases we can assume the ‘value’ of each individual is the same, and so five people will be more valuable than one person, and that these groups retain the same value across problems. The key difference is in how the harm is caused to the singular person. In the case of the switch problem, the user pulls a lever which they consciously realize and connect with the death of an individual. In the case of the push problem, the user physically pushes someone into immediate bodily harm. The end consequences are the same, but the means in which one has to take to reach those ends aren’t the same, and as it turns out are quite significant in decision making. If we look back to System One, it becomes clear why people are less likely to inflict harm upon a person. System One could be considered a ‘gut’ judgment. It helps us instinctively avoid conflicts that could hurt cooperation with others, which as shown in Greene’s Moral Tribes, help humans maintain a survival advantage over outsiders. In the case of pushing a man, it is easier to make the impulse associations that we are to harm a person, and so are less likely to consider following through even if the action contradicts what the person morally believes. Conversely, pulling a lever might be logically connected to killing a person, but our gut reactions don’t quite connect the pulling of a lever with bodily harm in the same way physically pushing someone does. As Greene states, “we are more likely to disapprove of harmful actions that involve the application of personal force – roughly, cases in which the agent pushes the victim. Second, we are more likely to disapprove if the harm is intended as a means to the agent’s goal, and is not merely a foreseen (or unforeseen) side‐effect.” (176).

What is interesting is that mental processes of the brain can be located within the brain, and in some cases their absence or inability to contribute to reasoning can result in different methods of reasoning with different precedents. The amygdala is a part of your brain located in the temporal lobes. It is essential in handling emotional responses to situations (Damasio, 51). The amygdala is closely linked with system one. When moral questions are posed to people similar to the push trolley problem and they are in an fMRI machine, theri amygdala lights up. Their brain, without even knowing why, comes to the conclusion that causing direct harm is bad due to a conflict with our emotions. This reasoning is done despite any greater logical reasoning, and despite this people will stand by their unjustifiable, emotional preferences. What is interesting is that in cases where people’s emotional systems are damaged or impaired (such as the case with psychopaths, people under the influence of some drugs, or people with damaged frontal lobes), they tend to act consistently no matter if the experiment involves emotional triggers. This does not mean that all these people would see the five people saved or dead, but that whatever outcome they decide for one experiment they tend to decide the same for the other. They show no regard for impulse-based emotional decisions because they are incapable of being swayed in that regard; they have no emotional reaction.

It would seem that we humans are not much better than animals afterall. We have the ability to exercise reason, but we are confined by our biology and the foundations of our origins and predecessors. As David Hume would say, we are “slaves to our passions”. We are capable of overriding our immediate impulses, yes, but only as a dedicated skill. Our modern world, which was built largely in part due to an appeal to reason, now extorts and exploits our instinctive, simple judgements all the time. Food, sex, and fear are all commodities sold to masses that can’t help themselves but tap into their impulsive inclinations. Apps gather user-bases by the billions on platforms designed to drip-feed people happiness in short, instantly gratifying content. Politicians and celebrities alike encourage people to act without reason, promoting emotions and unchecked feelings as trustworthy compasses to navigate any and all landscapes. Antithetically, and in awareness of this, philosophers such as Aristotle promote ideas such as virtuous living, in which people appeal to higher meanings beyond their instincts. Indeed, similar principles can be seen in the highest virtues of religions such as Buddhism and Christianity.

It’s not all bad though. Being a slave to our passions only indicates that we operate based on motivation, which in itself is not a bad idea. All of evolution occurred because the creatures all the way back to the most insignificant speck of RNA ‘wanted’ to survive and reproduce. As our intuitions evolved, reason allowed us to serve values that aren’t simply immediate inclinations, but this is still desire or motivation nonetheless. Our immediate decision making system (System One) might be inflexible and prone to fallacy, but it is quick and efficient. It is useful in navigating the world efficiently, because as it turns out most of what humans (and other animals) do are simple low-consequence mundane tasks that work well when done efficiently. System Two, when used in conjunction with System One, serves to help humans navigate the world, and it is only in a balance of these two systems can we do so efficiently. Greene uses the analogy of the camera here. In using a camera efficiently, there is an automatic focusing mode that serves well for most situations, and a manual slow focusing mode for precise shots. The trolley problem as outlined by Joshua Greene, whatever the solution, can be better understood by realizing the systems that affect our decision making. The knowledge that we don’t operate wholly on reason is not a weakness, rather it is the knowledge of this fact that allows us to premeditate and account for likely faults and blindspots in our modes of reasoning.