Beyond Reason to Action

(continuing a series of posts in the last 3 days on "reason")
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There is one additional problem with "reason" that I have not mentioned that is immediately relevant, and that is that "reason" is so "academic."

What I mean by that is that reason has, by itself, absolutely zero action component. One could "reason" all day, or a million years, and it would never affect any external thing one whit.

In the real world, the one academics avoid, there is no point in thinking about something if you aren't contemplating action of some kind.

So, I just discussed the idea that the context in which we think or reason has an impact, and alters the outcome of such reasoning. The mechanism for this is pretty obvious, once you think about it.

However, context has a different function as well. We are, after all, cybernetic organisms. We perceive the world, map that into some model, determine some action to initate, initate it, and quickly repeat that loop endlessly, attempting to converge on some goal.

So my point is that context influences, and may alter or determine the outcome of any action.

One very specific context I have in mind here is the intention of the actor, assuming the actor is human. Along with that context, and mixed into it, is the mental model, i.e. framework, i.e. meaning associated with this action and possible outcomes.

So, it matters "what we think we are doing" in addtion to what we are doing. More specifically, what we think we are doing is in fact part of what we are doing, and colors it in some manner, almost epigenetically, as methylation states color genes on DNA.

This effect has anecdotally been reported by a great many people over the past several thousand years.

An example of this was the story I told, probably made up, of two stone-masons working in a Medieval church construction. One was doing poor work and one great work, and the supervisor went to see what was going on. He asked the one doing shoddy work what he was doing, and he replied, as if it was obvious and what a dumb question, "Building a wall."

Then he asked the one doing great work what he was doing and that mason replied, again as if it was obvious and a dumb question, "Building a cathedral."

Clearly, and probably undisputed, the meaning with which a human holds an action influences the outcomes of that action in many ways.

What is surprising is what a powerful effect this seems to be, even in cases where you cannot see how the work itself is being influenced, but you can observe the overall outcome.

Here, like M. C. Esher's waterfall in some cases the large-scale outcome of building a cathedral is a cathedral, and the outcome of "building a wall" is nothing.

The same seems to be true in software engineering. The mechanism is not clear here, and one would think that "Java is Java." Yet, seemingly good code written by angry people works less well than similar appearing code written by happy people.

It is not clear exactly how the mood gets under the skin of the program, but to myself, and to some other senior IT people I discuss this with, this effect is very real, and they know immediately what effect I'm talking about.

In any case, I wanted to open up the door for further discussion about the failings of pure reason, and one of them is that humans are never pure anything, and so being reasonable, even being able to totally prove one's point, is not necessarily a good guide to the outcomes of action. It is an often necessary but also often not a sufficient criteria.

The busy executive who has his secretary buy flowers for his wife, versus one who buys them himself, may find a very different result once he gets home.

It is not my point to analyze all the possible pathways and mechanisms involve here. My point is to raise another dimension in which pure reason, by itself, is insufficent for daily living, and not a very good guide to action.

Certainly, for every one of the cases I mention, something can be defined as the locally causative agent. I am asserting that if it wasn't that agent, it would have been another one, because the actual cause of the outcome is only expressing itself through whatever is handy. We need to look further upstream to actually see what is going on.

The difference, incidentally, is not just in the external world. The meaning of some action or activity greatly influences the ability of someone to carry it out, and affects how they feel afterwards - exhausted or elated.

Again, to understand what is going on we have to look beyond "content" to "context" to get a complete picture. I'm asserting that it matters to more than a court of law. It matters to phsyiological outcomes in the body of the person acting. It matters to the impact of the action, seen from afar, on the outside world.

It is as if, mentally connecting an action and a larger game plan or framework of meaning somehow completes BOTH the action and a little bit more of the framework's agenda than would have occured otherwise. The effect may be "negligible" locally, but over time, it can accumulate to something and even accumulate to totally dominate the resultant, seen from afar.

The key point here is that this effect which I allege, anecdotally, is not within the realm of "reason" for action. Listing the reason for an action is a dormant activity. Having an intent is very different.

Let us suppose for a minute that this is true. The advocates of reason would argue that such "emotional" content is baggage, in the way of a pure life, and should be discarded. I would argue that this "intent" or "will" thing is, in fact very real, and very important, because not only can it be a thing that destroys a desired outcome -- it can be the only thing that can create a desired outcome.

Great victories are never won on the basis of "reason". If that is true, then we should be paying attention as well to something else, or we might redefine (reason + something else) as "reason-2.0".

Wade