Is ultimate reality rational?

Most philosophers and scientists assume it is. Add to these academic treatises the endless plethora of websites out there touting their own "theory of everything" or new metaphysical schematic blueprinting how reality is. But who says ultimate reality is rational, especially since what is rational is only what a particular species of upright bipedal primate on planet earth thinks it is. Why SHOULD the great mysteries of the cosmos make sense to a human mind? What if paradoxicality is inherent to reality, leaving us permanently stumped regarding it's nature and it's origin? What if reality is ultimately a surrealistic cacophony of absurdities and incomprehensible contradictions at root, no more logical than it is to a housefly? Could we live with our illusion of understanding it stripped from us forever?

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How the feck can you talk about rational? Talking about humans, and rational has no substance. Who is rational?

 

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Yes, it's rational to create rational models of the universe. If they work and have predictive utility, then it moves our understanding of the universe forward. At present, progress is being made, and there is no reason to give up.

 

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The creative process is all about chaos, and nothing to do with anything rational.

 

In science it doesn't matter where an hypothesis comes from originally, it's then tested against reality.

 

The basic gist of a world of relations and interdependent objects, a contingent world, a world of becoming, a sensible world, a world of space and time and causation, a world of phenomena, a natural world, a world in extrospective experience and a target of reflective thought, a world of things represented and understood outside themselves and thereby enabled to co-exist... Is that it should be consistent with itself, should constitute a coherent organization. Whereas things existing absolutely and independently of each other and in themselves actually compose no world [reality] organization / structure at all. Both "patternless" and "patternful", and contrasts of sound and absurd, would have no application to it.

In a different context, where there is no duality above of ultimate individuality and being [permanance], but only the one side of flux and becoming... Then the latter's starting condition of impotent anarchy (impotent in the sense of being unable to enforce or prevent anything, of lacking even a contradictory law that it will maintain its own lawless disorder) would by its very "character" not stop an orderly system from arising. In fact, "impossible" would be meaningless until systems were realized, whereby their regulative nature would forbid certain items against their rules / laws. However, the genesis of such an orderly process [which we find ourselves in] would not necessarily destroy the original impotent anarchy. It would still be transpiring "outside" (figurative) and could even be regarded as the still abiding transcendent "mother" of all such orderly processes [whether they be referred to as evolving worlds or whatever alternatives].

 

I think Nietzsche once said that truth is a kind of lie that helps us live our lives. That's an indictment against pragmatism as the guide of what is true and real. Predictability and workability don't logically entail truth imo. Take pain for instance. It certainly works and provides predictability for illness/injury. But does that mean pain is a real property of the world? No. It is a hallucination that works for us. Might rationality be the same way? I don't know. I''d like to think that reality is rational down to its roots. But who can really say?

 

If ultimate reality is unknowable to us, what does it matte if it is rational or not.
That said, I am not sure the term "rational" is the most appropriate, as I think rationality applies only to a thought process, or equivalent.
Rationality is the adherence of a belief with the reasons one believes, and to the underlying facts as we know them.
Ultimate reality IS (surely) the underlying objective truth... Rationality relates what we believe to those facts.

However, I would say that it is logical.
I say this because I think it rational that an ultimate reality that can produce complex structure bound by laws (whatever those laws may be, whether they are anything like those we believe them to be or not) has to follow a logical structure, has to be bound by those same laws.
Otherwise we have pure randomness and chaos, with no coherence.

For example, you play a game of chess and you follow the rules of chess. It is a highly logical game but with nuances such that computers are only recently beginning to exceed human players.
Now "play" the game with no rules, no rationality/logic behind it.
You end up with chaos, and (analogous to) random moves.
P1: "My turn... I throw this glass of water in your face and take your Queen."
P2: "My turn..."
P1: "No, my turn again..."
P2: "So you say. But I say I've won. As my pawn occupies this space here..."
And so on to absurdity.

If this is the ultimate reality, then there is nothing on which to hang our coat of existence as we know it.
And it is because we know we exist that I think it rational to assume that any ultimate reality is, as you would put it, rational, or follows some logic, some laws, even if we are ultimately incapable of ever understanding what those laws, what that logic, might be.

 

I'll go with logical. But the issue still remains as to why reality and the universe should have to behave according to OUR logic, a system of order that has only evolved in our brains to the extent that it has helped us survive. Furthermore, we should distinguish between logical and lawful phenomena. Just because the universe behaves according to laws doesn't mean it is behaving logically does it? It doesn't for instance logically follow that according the Newton's laws every object tends to move in a straight line. It's just a law, a description of what happens under certain ideal cases. A law is just a description of what is typically the case. We can certainly imagine many other universes where opposite things might typically be the case. So why would ultimate reality be bound by what is typically the case? Doesn't our experience show that catastrophic change also occurs in reality? Anomalies? Deviations from the norm?

Or at least a kind of order we simply don't understand.

Perhaps this is why we CAN count on there being some logic and order to thhe universe, because we are a part of it. We fit into it, and express the very order we see around us. In this sense we may be hardwired into the principles on which reality is structured. But even so, I can't help but feel such is all so anthropomorphic. The principles on which our consciousness is structured may only be locally true. Can the same principles be said to hold for all of reality, inclusive of domains and dimensions we hardly have any grasp of?

 

Logic isn't OUR logic, logic is universal and common to ALL possible universes.

 

How do we know that?

 

logic consist of knowledge, understanding and wisdom.
and the more of these three elements are obtained,
the more logic is perceived.

how could rational exist without irrational ?

 

I'm not sure what 'ultimate reality' is. (That doesn't mean that I'm denying its existence, it's more that I'm not sure how the phrase should be defined.)

So does common-sense. We live our daily lives as if the universe we find ourselves in behaves logically.

I don't really know where logic comes from or what it is. It's kind of inherent in our human psychologies, in how we think. Perhaps that's because we evolved in a world that behaves logically, so that our ability to think logically has survival value. Or alternatively, maybe it's because we are made out of logical stuff so to speak, such that neurons naturally behave like logic-gates in computers or whatever. Both possibilities suggest that logic might be something more than merely a form of human cognition, that it's probably more deeply embedded in reality than that.

I remember talking out of class with one of my professors back when I was a philosophy major, back in the day, about this problem. What justification do we really have that reality around us has to behave logically? Why are we all so sure about this? About the best that I could come up with (my answer still seems faintly circular to me) is that logical contradictions would seem to be situations where propositions are simultaneously both true and false, and it's difficult to imagine how that kind of situation could be physically instantiated as beings or states both existing and not existing. (It might conceivably happen on the quantum micro-scale though, with superimposed states and such.)

It's conceivable that we humans evolved to think logically because we live in an environment where logic prevails. But it's also conceivable that there are realms of reality where that isn't true. Again, quantum mechanics may or may not suggest that it doesn't entirely hold true down on the micro-scale. It might conceivably break down in singularities, such as the big-bang or inside black-hole event horizons. The state (if we can call it that) 'before' the big-bang would likely qualify as well. So again conceivably, whatever matrix this universe of ours emerged from (and maybe countless other spatio-temporally disjoint universes as well) might not even be logical as we understand that word. Whatever principles apply in such realms might arguably be so alien to human cognition that we can't even imagine their possibility, let alone begin describing them.

 

Because it's self-proving.

 

What if there are more than one logics that are also self-proving? Math has a lot stuff that is self-proving but not necessarily true.

 

mathematics is always true,
what is not true is the calculator(human element)

 

There isn't. That's why they call them the logical absolutes.
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Essay:On_Logical_Absolutes

 

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what is not true is the calculator(human element)

 

I believe truth is rational. LOVE is the greatest thing EVER. EVERYTHING is an expression of love and if that love is not expressed, the being will become upset. There are many examples of such a thing...

Time is the singular of TIMES, and so simply equals one. Since birth this is the FIRST time ANY of us have been here! It took me sixteen years to KNOW such a thing, which leads me to believe that when I was thirty-two I should have reached two: experienced such a thing for a second time. Such a transformation should have occurred naturally since I reached one in sixteen years, two should have occurred at thirty-two: unfortunately TWO is all I have to resolve such a situation.