Archive for the 'Internet Fixing' Category

Progressives have accepted an old view of reason, dating back to the Enlightenment, namely, that reason is conscious, literal, logical, universal, unemotional, disembodied, and serves self-interest. As the cognitive and brain sciences have been showing, this is a false view of reason. (pp 1-2)

*

A great deal of the political strife in America and elsewhere stems from the cognitive unconscious of individual citizens. [...] We need a new, updated Enlightenment. [...]

The Old Enlightenment values were a great advance in their day. But we know so much more now than in the eighteenth century about what it means to be human, and what challenges face humanity. Our Constitution is in large part based on the intellectual tools and ideas inherited by its framers from Enlightenment thinkers. These tools and ideas are no longer adequate. They have brought us great political, social, and material wonders. And, miraculously, the framers seem to have anticipated such developments, because the dynamic democracy they designed leaves open the possibility of revolutionary change. [...]

We will need to embrace a deep rationality that can take account of, and advantage of, a mind that is largely unconscious, embodied, emotional, empathetic, metaphorical, and only partly universal. A New Enlightenment would not abandon reason, but rather understand that we are using real reason—embodied reason, reason shaped by our bodies and brains and interactions in the real world, reason incorporating emotion, structured by frames and metaphors and images and symbols, with conscious thought shaped by the vast and invisible realm of neural circuitry not accessible to consciousness. (pp 13-4)