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I think this doesn't appreciate how important intuition is.
Also you dismiss System 1 and 2 rather quickly. The important point of thinking slowly is not just that you arrive to more a "correct" conclusion, but that if you think slowly enough times, that thinking gets encoded into your System 1.
When you are driving your are not mindlessly making "involuntary" dumb decisions. Those decisions are based on all the slow thinking you did when you were being trained to drive.
Chess master players also make fast "involuntary" decisions, but these decisions are anything but dumb.
Consider how Einstein started his journey into general relativity. He explained his "happiest thought" of his life when he considered the equivalence of free falling to zero gravity and realized they must be the same phenomenon. How did he arrive to that thought? Intuition.
A toddler could not arrive to Einstein's happiest thought, only a physicist with thousands of hours of experience could, so his intuition wasn't dumb. The fact that this thought was "involuntary" doesn't make it any less valuable than considered, analytical, conscious, "voluntary" thoughts.
I believe most scientists have their most revolutionary insights in a similar way: they come "involuntarily" from "nowhere". The only thing special about Einstein's happiest thought is that he recognized it.
Most people don't introspect how they think, but any experienced mediator (mindfulness) knows that thoughts come from "nowhere", all of them. There's no such thing as "voluntary" thoughts. And it's no surprise that most mediators agree that free will cannot possibly exist, as do most neuroscientists, and philosophers (if you ask them about libertarian free will).
Therefore it stands to reason that this admiration we have for scientific "voluntary" analytical, conscious thinking, is just an illusion,
Strange, I thought I was giving intuition a fair shake.
See, I have practiced Buddhism for a while and I agree with this statement. That being said, conscious thought or rationality or whatever you want to call it is clearly real, and has effects on the world. Something can be an illusion and still change the way people act/behave.
The way I see rationality is essentially a shared fiction or mythos that groups of humans indulge in because it helps us coordinate very precisely on meanings, measurements, etc. If rationality didn’t matter at all and you fully bought into the idea of it being a pointless illusion, why even have this conversation?
I see the three things as different.
Consciousness: doesn't control anything
Analytical thinking: more thinking, takes more time
Rationality: structured rules for thinking
I'm not saying rationality doesn't matter (although I think it's overrated), I'm saying the idea that thoughts can be consciously generated is an illusion.
Consciousness exists, but all it does is observe. It doesn't control anything.
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