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equality about balance of powers and so on
but the enlightenment had
of false view of reason
and it's still there and it's still out there
often in the media often in the democratic party
and in all sorts of folks, many distinguished newspapers
have the idea that reason is conscious
that it's universal
that it's logical
that it's literal it fits the world
that it's unemotional that emotion gets in the way of reason
that it's disembodied
and that it's interest based. That reason is there to serve your interests
and one horrible thing thing about this, is you see it in
the democratic party a great deal
there that is if you believe this you'll think all you need to do is tell people
the facts
and the figures
and then they'll reason to the right conclusion. Right? Wrong.
We've seen this certainly in the last two elections but we see it all the time
and the reason is that the cognitive and brain sciences have shown that this view
of reason is just false
in very deep way and not just false in a simple way
it's false in every single detail
every detail
So what is reason?
First, Ninety-eight percent unconscious
That is, most of the thought and the reasoning you do
is not accessible to your consciousness
and i don't just mean things that you hear that you are not conscious of
i mean most of the ideas that you have, the concepts that you have are unconscious
you don't know
your own system of concepts
very important i don't know mine we're studying it trying to figure it out he
we've made a lot of progress in it
but it's still hard could figure it out
understanding what your system of concepts in his hard
secondly
reason requires emotion and emotion is not always concious
uh... one of the things you'll hear from drew weston is a emotion can be
unconscious
this has really been studied dramatically most dramatically by António Damásio the
country's perhaps leading neuroscientist in a book called descartes error
and what antonio pointed out was this he studied people who had brain damage
strokes, accidents
where they lost their ability
to feel
they've lost their ability
the feel of emotions
and it turned out they could not be rational
Why?
Think about this suppose you are trying to figure out you have a purpose
and you trying to figure out what your purposes are
well if you don't know if you're going to be happy or sad if that happens
What are you going to do how do you reason? If you don't know if other people are going
to be angry at you are happy with you
what are you going to do?
You can't reason
and that is the truth
Reason, rationality, requires. Absolutely requires emotion and the pathways have
begun to be figured out
in great detail that shows in the brain how this works
now
uh... the next part of this is that
we have different worldviews. We don't all think the same
it turns out there that movement conservatives
and strong progressives
do not see the world in the same way
surprise
Heh. You go on the T.V. shows they talk right past each other
but it's because they see the world differently. They have different
understandings
of what morality is and it's important to understand
politics is about morality
every politician who proposes some policy
does it because he says it's right