Automatic Dansk

Reasoning and logic are to each other as health to medicine, or - better - as conduct is to morality. Reasoning refers to a gamut of natural thought processes in the everyday world. Logic is how we ought to think if objective truth is our goal - and the everyday world is very little concerned with objective truth. Logic is the science of the justification of conclusions we have reached by natural reasoning. My point here is that, for such natural reasoning to occur, consciousness is not necessary. The very reason we need logic at all is because most reasoning is not conscious at all.

Julian Jaynes, in "The origin of consciousness in the break down of the bicameral mind" (1976)

Made by a human Licenses RSS feed