This is an essay I wrote to try to better understand rationality for myself. Towards the end of the post I try to extract out some practical implications of the analysis. I hope it is useful for you.

Rationally awake

In rationally logical, we explored logical thought - an important part of rationality that lets us split the world into pieces. To continue developing our understanding of the rational, we need to examine another key concept - reason.

To be rational, your actions need to be grounded in reason. A reason itself must sit ontop of other reasons. At lunch you eat a sandwich because you are hungry, but your hunger is not the final causal explanation. Though we cut off the analysis, there is a reason for your hunger, and a reason for that reason. This stack of reasons leads back to the ultimate reason or purpose of your existence - your telos. By this line of argument, rationality in its finality must involve acting in line with your telos.

Rationality and knowledge are themselves connected through reason. When we make use of knowledge and act on it, we are acting for a reason. Therefore rational behaviour is in part acting on the knowledge we have available.

Imagine I have a difficult decision to make with incomplete information available. In this circumstance, it can be rational for me to follow my gut, even though I can't explain why. For this to be rational, I must be making use of some inexplicit knowledge. We assume that explicit knowledge is the only type of valid knowledge, but this is wrong. Knowledge develops from the subconscious into the explicit. Initially it manifests as behaviours acted out physically as imitation and play, or experienced mentally as emotions or curiosity. The knowledge hasn't been sufficiently understood and generalised to be articulated yet. It then evolves into narrative, expressed in art and culture - drama, myth, literature, symbols and dreams. Finally the ideas can emerge more explicitly in philosophy, science and logical argument ^[1].

	Individual	Collective
Subconscious	Emotions, curiosity	Imitation, play
Narrative	Dreams, visions	Drama, myth, literature, symbols
Explicit	Logical argument	Science, philosophy

Logical argument is at the top of this pyramid of abstractions. If you only value explicit information, a lot of knowledge that you could make use of will be stuck in the lower levels of abstraction...

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