(Palazzi, 2023)
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. Introduction
2. Background: The Cognitive Limits of Rationality
3. Cognitive Blindspots
4. The Myth of the All-Seeing Eye: The Limits of Perception
5. The Epistemological Crises
6. Conclusion
The essay that follows is being published in six installments, one per section; this is the second installment.
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The Limits of Reason: Cognitive Psychology, The Epistemological Crisis, and Epistemic Humility, #2
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in. (Cohen, 1992)
[H]ow would we feel if science came up against experimental and intellectual brick walls, so that after centuries of trying, man finally concluded that the world was constructed – if upon intelligible principles at all – upon principles so bizarre as to be perfectly undiscoverable or unfathomable by the human mind? What if [humankind] became totally convinced that the world simply could not be understood, that the world is and always must remain an intellectual surd? Science might then continue at it pertains to technology, but not as it pertains to theory. What if all hope of theoretical understanding were permanently lost? (Davis, 1987: 293)
Only those who stop at the right moment prosper in philosophy, those who accept the limit and the comfort of a reasonable level of worry. Every problem, if one touches the bottom, leads to bankruptcy and leaves the intellect naked: No more questions and no more answers in a space without horizons. The questions turn against the mind which conceived them: It becomes their victim. Everything becomes hostile: [their] own solitude, [their] own audacity, absolute opacity, and the manifest nothingness. Woe to [that person] who, having reached a certain point of the essential, has not stopped! History shows that the thinkers who climbed to the limit of the ladder of questions, who laid their foot on the last rung, on that of the absurd, have given to posterity an example of sterility, whereas their peers, who stopped half-way, have fertilized the mind’s flow; they have been useful to their fellows, they have passed down some well-crafted idol, a few polished superstitions, a few errors dressed up as principles, and a system of hopes. (Cioran, 1949: pp. 115-116)
2. Background: The Cognitive Limits of Rationality
There has been considerable research published by psychologists and other scientists that has challenged, and indeed refuted, the view of human nature held by ancient Greek philosophers such as Aristotle, and reaffirmed by Enlightenment thinkers, of humans as essentially rational animals (Gray, 1995, 2002; Lloyd, 1995). Aristotle (384-322 BC), and even more relatively recent philosophers such as René Descartes (1596-1650), would be most likely astonished to learn that non-humans are not non-rational biomechanisms, but have some of the rational qualities that were thought to be exclusive to humans, such as mathematical, and even medical understanding. For example, domestic pigeons can spot cancer as well as human experts (Levenson, 2015), and unlike humans (even some mathematicians), pigeons performed optimally on the Monty Hall probability puzzle (Herbranson & Schroeder, 2010). The numerical competency of pigeons has been proposed to be on par with primates (Scarf et al., 2011). The humble honey bee understands the concept of zero as a number (Howard et al., 2018).
Nor are humans unique in having forward planning for the future, for ravens engage in future planning as well as apes and small children do (Kadadayi & Osvath, 2017). Canines are much less susceptible to over-imitation than human children, who are more likely follow bad advice; canines copy humans only to the extent it is necessary to achieve certain tasks (Johnston et al., 2017; Wujciak, 2017). Rats may have the power of imagination (Lai, et al., 2023). African elephants appear to understand human pointing cues to find food, a relatively complex cognitive skill (Smet & Byrnes, 2013). Asian elephants have complex personalities and a sense of selfhood, as do cows (Seltmann et al., 2017, 2018).
There are more cortical convolutions and a greater surface area in dolphins’ and humpback whales’ brains, than in human brains, raising the controversial question of whether the cetacean brain is “smarter” than the human brain (Marino, 1998; Marino et al., 2007). Whales and dolphins experience emotions and exhibit distinct personalities (Fox et al., 2017). Cuttlefish can pass the “marshmallow test” of future planning, to delay gratification if better food is forthcoming, by being trained to defer eating crab meat once they are shown that the more preferred shrimp meat was to come later (Schnellet et al., 2021). Rationality in the broadest sense as higher level cognitive information processing and problem-solving ability, is thus not exclusive to humans, contrary to past philosophers (Jensen, 2016; Veit, 2023).
Nor, for that matter, is complex problem solving. For example, to take a task beloved of behavioralist psychologists, maze solving, slime molds have shown the capacity to solve mazes (the “U-shaped trap problem”) in the search for food, more effectively than many robots (Grabianowski, 2012). The species Physarum polycephalum moves by shifting cellular fluid in the form of exploratory tendrils. These tendrils leave a trail of slime chemicals that constitute a chemical memory. As a consequence, the organism will not retrace paths that have not led to food, thus generating a relatively effective strategy of moving through a maze, without having a brain or central nervous system at all, purely relying on chemical signals (Reid et al., 2012).
Shore crabs (Carcinus maenas), having a brain about 10 times smaller than a bee in terms of the count of neurons, were trained to complete a complex maze (Davies et al., 2019). Hence, a brain, or even a central nervous system, or not much of one by mammal standards, is not necessary to complete a navigational task better than many AI systems.
Within the widely accepted evolutionary framework, this proposition that there is no sharp demarcation in terms of rationality between humans and other animals, although a challenge to many traditional rationalist philosophies, and religions, could be accepted as showing not that humans are limited in any way in the Enlightenment ideal of reasoning and logical capacity, but just that many animals participate in reasoning as well, so that the set of rational beings is much wider than either Aristotle and Descartes thought. So the considerations of animal cognitive science do not necessarily show any limits of human rationality. This argument is technically correct and shows only that certain philosophers and theologians have been too narrow in their categorization of rational thinkers or cognizers, holding to human chauvinism and exceptionalism (Sylvan & Plumwood, 1980). This literature does, however, have a deflationary effect upon the humanistic intellectual arrogance inherited from the Enlightenment.
Nevertheless, there is the further question of cognitive blindspots.
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