Monday, August 09, 2010

Reason Has Nothing To Do With Reality

"We like to believe that the gift of human reason lets us think like scientists, so that our conscious thoughts lead us closer to the truth. But here’s the paradox: all that reasoning and confabulation can often lead us astray, so that we end up knowing less about what jams/cars/jelly beans we actually prefer. So here’s my new metaphor for human reason: our rational faculty isn’t a scientist – it’s a talk radio host."

(via Jonah Lehrer's We Are All Talk Radio Hosts, now at Wired Science)

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