Ratio’d Senses

for patrick as a cartoon response to some quality wondering. Written on the porch in the sun with no particular place to be on the first day of 2024.

can look at vervaeke’s stance on rationality from the perspective of his scientific work on relevance realization. Which is technical and mostly over my head but it goes something like: to realize what is relevant (or meaningful) a person uses various types of intelligence (try: heart, gut, mind, meta) in proportion to what is present in the environment. These types of intelligence produce associated ways of knowing the world (try: caring, acting, reflecting, reasoning) and help us not die and stuff.

Reasoning has been blotting out the other types of knowing because Enlightenment. A bunch of people call this focus on mentally-reasoned knowing, rationality. Vervaeke says No! This is a narrow view of an older and richer concept of rationality (as coded into the west by specific ancient greek guys).

In the older view the ‘ratio’ in rationality means: the right proportion of the types of intelligence in harmonious communion with the environment for the purpose of livin good. Ratio. The balancing of the senses of bein’ human.

Generally, Enlightenment happened and mind got a bit inflated and body and spirit got crowded out and that seems to not be working very well so a redefinition of ‘rationality’ could help rejigger things. Thus, a new more feature rich and practicable for our decidedly uncertain times ✨RATIONALITY ✨.

Examples of knowing like a

heart-opening compassion as a type of knowing that unfolds existence in fundamental to our quality and continuation of life way (heart)

and a

observing the material environment to produce quantifiably measurable trajectory for analysis and prediction so as to secure reality (mind)

and an

intuition to direction born of lived experience (gut)

and an

intention to ritually reflect on how it’s all going by lettin’ go (meta)