Philosophy, et cetera

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2024-11-01 17:00:04

Decision-making is firstly a temporal process, as you touched on at the end. I actually firmly believe rationality IS an abstract concept, and all we can do is aspire towards it. If you are being pursued by an axe-wielding maniac, and you come to two identical looking doors, the best decision is simply to MAKE a decision; it may be the worse path, but the worst possible path is weighing up which one is the best while the axe-murderer catches up.  Posted by Stephen Cooper

What if the fluctuation of intrests between hte two bails of hay is such that the ass keeps wanting hte one he is not looking at. all that would take is for him to over value things in his memory over things in his sight (one would think the opposite would usually be true but one can think of many examples of "it was better in my day" sort of fond memories. If that is hte case then the ass opens himself up to making a choice and choses one but immediatly gets the urge to chose the other. The question is - is he capable of rejecting the urge because he is facing the other pile of hay? this seems to be how indecision often works - with hte person making an abortive attempt in each idrection a few times before deciding - and them maybe regreting it for no logical reason. Your argument of course solves the paradox in an absolute sense in that one should take the cost of cognitition into the equasion but of course the ability to do that IS cognition - if one was conserving mental power one would usually not bother to test if things required mental power - because it requires mental power to do so - thus leaving a subjective problem if not paradox.  Posted by geniusnz

Stephen - I would still think that rationality has to be grounded in an ecological context for the concept to be any use. To take your axe-murderer example: do you really want to say it is rational for the victim to stop and weigh up their options before choosing a door? Genius - re: fluctuations, I was meaning to suggest that the ass stop thinking about it altogether once the appropriate 'time' is up. So later fluctuations would be irrelevant. You rightly note that we must also 'work out' when to stop working things out, a puzzle I'm not sure how to answer. I suspect that overall a brief test here (to work out roughly how much effort one ought to put into working out the original problem) would be beneficial to us. It would use up some mental power, sure, but not nearly as much as would working away at a problem for hours more than you needed to. Think of it as a sort of insurance policy.  Posted by Richard

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