Rationality, Irrationality and beyond

The inception of the idea for this blog preceded its creation by months and this first post is preceded by the creation of the blog by months as well. The reason of course is the level of inspiration required for each step and since this blog is about the corners of my mind; the inspiration required is much more than my regular blogs.

In this post, I shall describe a fundamental difference in my mindset differentiating two phases of my life. Simply put I understood that I cannot understand [Reminds of the line in Mr. India: "I saw that he cannot be seen."]. However, such statements create ambiguity by having the property of self-referentiality.

In the first phase of my life, I believed in reason. I believed that all phenomena around me can be reasoned. I tried to find reasons for new phenomena. I earned a reputation for curiousity for explanations. I had a hard time with things when I was told statements like nature of things [or people] made them so. The phrase "by nature" did not fit well with my framework of reason as anything [or anyone] can assume any nature without reason.

However, there was a transition after the realization that things [also people] have an intrinsic nature and they can't be forced against it. It can be viewed as a formal system which can generate an infinite number of different strings within its rules; but can't generate a single string beyond them. This changed my point of view. I understood why some things although apparently irrational persisted to exist. I understood the fundamental flaw was in my mindset. I was trying to apply a model beyond its domain. This meta-thought about my thoughts opened up new frontiers of thought. Undoubtedly, the experience was groundbreaking. I no more had a problem with the phrase "by nature".

[You can skip this paragraph, if you are not interested in physics.] This can be viewed as the phase when my thinking was similar to classical physics. I believed in determinism. Actually, that way of thinking helped me in learning physics too. However, the transition helped me move ahead in physics. I learnt paradoxical quantum physics. My earlier view left no room for uncertainity; but uncertainity principle is a basic principle of quantum physics. The realization that the true nature of particles is beyond our reason was easily acceptable after the mindset transition.

Now I understand that we have something which I would like to call frameworks of knowledge acquisition. After realizing the existence of such frameworks, it might be possible to switch from one framework to another. However, most people do not realize that they are acting under the rules dictated by their knowledge faramework. Interestingly, the mass realization of knowledge frameworks might also eliminate a lot of misunderstandings among people.