tkocian comments on Rationality Quotes October 2011 - Less Wrong

3 Post author: MinibearRex 03 October 2011 06:41AM

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Comment author: [deleted] 03 October 2011 08:35:56PM 11 points [-]

Reason is the faculty that identifies and integrates the material provided by man’s senses. It is a faculty that man has to exercise by choice. Thinking is not an automatic function. In any hour and issue of his life, man is free to think or to evade that effort. Thinking requires a state of full, focused awareness. The act of focusing one’s consciousness is volitional. Man can focus his mind to a full, active, purposefully directed awareness of reality—or he can unfocus it and let himself drift in a semiconscious daze, merely reacting to any chance stimulus of the immediate moment, at the mercy of his undirected sensory-perceptual mechanism and of any random, associational connections it might happen to make.

Ayn Rand

Comment author: Document 03 October 2011 09:03:36PM 5 points [-]

It's too bad this has already dropped off the front page. Someone should request sticky threads here, although I don't care enough.

Comment author: soreff 05 October 2011 08:31:48PM 3 points [-]

This view is much too binary. There are a myriad variety of choices of what to focus on, what aspect of it to focus on, and how much effort to apply to the focus. Someone can be purposefully aware of a very specific task, say a high speed race, with the bulk of their thinking down at the level of pattern matching. Someone can do highly abstract symbolic manipulations while half asleep and still recognize when they bump into the right set of manipulations to solve the problem.

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