Drawing a line for reason
By: Ayush Singh
Tags: Philosophy, Life Lessons, Critical Thinking

Reason, as defined by “Cambridge Dictionary” in a broad sense, maybe, is:

“The cause of an event or situation or something that provides an excuse or explanation”

Which is exactly where I wanted to go to(provided that I am the one writing this).

Now, reason helps us make sense of the world we live in. We all know certain truths which haven’t changed or proven to be false since our birth. These truths or facts form the basis or the groundwork for our greater, vaster understanding to build upon. Each thought we encounter, is based on some fact which we believe to be true.

For example, we know that tomorrow the Sun will rise from the East. A simple explanation or reason for this can be that since it has done so for all the previous days we have lived and even before that, the chance that it might change in a day is approximately none. Going scientifically, we can provide more detailed and comprehensive reason dwelling into gravitation and the laws of motion of planets which we all are familiar with(I hope). Both of these approaches take some basic fact or truth which is held to be right in any case, called universal truths. These are the basic building blocks of our reasoning.

When we are born, our mind is not able to think along the lines of reason. That is because we don’t know any universal truths to build upon our reasoning. All we know is what we feel, see and hear in the moment. Zat Rana, whom I have recently come across on Medium, explains this in a different and enlightening way:

“When we are born, our body has no self. There is no I there, and even other people aren’t yet distinguished as objects or persons. Our conscious experience is pure sensations, something neuroscientists call affect. Slowly, as we begin to move around in the world, and as we begin to relate to language, we create conceptual models to draw different boundaries within this experience of affect.”

Consider the mind of a child. A child keeps asking “why” questions recursively. Mostly because they don’t know the underlying facts or reason behind a certain event. Sometimes, they will ask a question which even adults have never pondered upon, which in turn gets them the old “stop asking questions and do your homework/go play outside/daddy is tired sweetie, can we do this later?” kind of response. Their brain is hyperactive, so the moment they hear a response like the ones above, they switch to something else, probably a new stimuli in their surrounding. Or they might think about it for a while on their own, then put it in a corner of their mind where it sits peacefully, gathering dust, until one day, when something triggers their memory and they recall this, vaguely, and get confused again.

I was observing a child one day on the bus. He too was asking questions to his mom, I can’t recall the topic(such is my forgetful mind). But later when I was thinking about this event, the recursive mode of his questioning caught my interest. I began to wonder “Why doesn’t everybody question everything like that?” Surely this is a nice way to learn. Then I realized that it might be a good way but not the optimal.

For starters, nobody has got the time to answer these “why” questions back to back. Even the most patient person will either slowly run out of patience or run out of answers, getting stuck on some question to which they themselves don’t know the answer to, something they haven’t asked themselves till now, neither heard anyone ask and got an answer to. I imagined myself, answering a child’s question barrage like this, which brought me distress and a fit of rage. How can something feel so right and yet so infuriating to me? I decided to write a separate piece for this.

Also, asking questions like this might give us all the information we want, but it makes us lose a very important aspect of ourselves: our own line of thinking(don’t relate this “line” to the title). We all have a unique way of processing the information we are given, we give importance to some parts of it and blindly ignore some. Asking these “why” questions from the same person, will slowly condition our mind to think like them. We will connect the information, but the neural pathways formed will not be as strong as the ones when we get that moment of euphoria, when something clicks in our brain and we connect the cause and effect of an event.

I later realized that this is the way we research something online. We keep going to new links and texts and images, opening multiple new tabs on whatever catches our interest on the current page. This might look similar to asking the barrage of “why”s, but it is not. Here we form the connections by ourselves, we think for ourselves as to which information is worth looking into further. The neural paths formed are our and ours alone(mwahahaha).

I then started asking this barrage to myself. I imagined myself to be a small child, and picked a silly question which a child would ask. The conversation goes like this:

Me: why is the food hot? M2M: because when we cook food or put it in microwave it becomes hot.

There’s a bifurcation here. The child can pick on anything they like and ask the next question. Hold on. This just negated my previous reason of why the “why” barrage is not a good way to learn. If the child themselves picks what to ask next, then the pathways created will be unique. Wow. Let’s continue:

Me: why do we make the food hot before eating?( I took the microwave part to question further) M2M: because hot food tastes better than cold food. Me: Why does hot food taste better? M2M: because when we eat hot food it gives off an intense feeling of its taste, making it feel tastier. Me: Why does hot food need to be tasty? M2M:….

I was stuck. I found a gap in my own knowledge by asking myself these “why” questions repeatedly. I could have provided a bullshit answer, but it was not possible, considering the fact that I was having this conversation with myself, in my mind. I had found an elegant method to test my reasoning.

This again got me thinking, how deep can we go, asking questions like this? After a few iterations, no matter how silly the question may be, the answer becomes scientific. We cannot reason the question in that particular iteration using the layman language of day to day conversation. And science, as we know, has it’s own limits. We cannot go questioning deeper and deeper like this scientifically, because after a point we will encounter an event or question where science hasn’t yet progressed that far. We will get stuck again.

So how do we decide the universal truths to build our reasoning upon? How do we fix certain facts to be universally true? Just because they haven’t been proven false till now does not mean they won’t be in the future. When do we stop asking these why questions, so that the information we have obtained so far in a particular barrage is complete on it’s own? How do we know that the answer obtained from a why question is the answer which doesn’t require any further questioning? When do we draw the line for reason?