Rationality Robots: a Life Without Reason

When I initially signed up to blog about the topic of rationality many weeks ago, I had expected to learn how exactly humans make decisions and rationalize certain choices. In my mind, one of the key characteristics of humans that set us apart from most other organisms on Earth was our ability to be rational and do things with reason as opposed to running wildly around and relying on instinct.

I now understand that, actually, these concepts of rationality and reason are not at all one in the same. Humans do tend to do things with reason while simultaneously being "non-rational." This term non-rational is preferable to irrational because we don't do things senselessly, we simply do not do them rationally.

The concept of rationality requires 3 primary assumptions:

1. Everything must be evaluated using a single metric to signify value
2. The decision-maker must posses perfect knowledge so as to compare all possible outcomes and alternatives to a situation and their respective values
3. The primary goal must be to always maximize one's outcomes by using the equation presented by the Expectancy-Value Theory. Simply put, this is (probability of an outcome happening) x (value of the outcome) = expected value. 

By definition, this are the principles of rationality that must be considered in a rational decision making model. When this topic was presented to us in class, I really had a hard time wrapping my mind around it because I immediately noticed one thing: these assumptions are highly improbable to occur in humans, and may be downright impossible to achieve the vast majority of the time. In every day life, we do not use the same metric to compare all things for value, humans absolutely do not have perfect knowledge (what is perfect knowledge, anyway?), and we don't always choose the "best" outcome based on expected value. This meant that my delusion about humans being rational actors was 100% that- a delusion.

So that's that then: humans are not rational, and my entire life has been a lie. In all seriousness though, I began to think about what life would be like if we were these highly rational beings I once assumed us to be. For starters, I'd like to think life would be pretty boring. 

When I think about some of the greatest things about the human experience, things like relationships, emotions, connections, and intuitions quickly come to mind. If humans were the rational actors we assume them to be, would we be able to enjoy or have any of these things anymore? I would be inclined to say it would be difficult at the very least. Relationships and emotions often make us act incredibly non-rationally, and that's a good thing! Would you want to be friends with someone who would calculate every aspect of your relationship down to a single metric of value, weighing the risks and benefits of continuing to be your friend and what the payoff could be? Most would say no.

Instead, we build relationships and connections with people based on our experiences and emotions, sometimes even causing us to knowingly put ourselves in harms way to protect a loved one. The rational actor would never do that, as it would compromise the expected value equation. One could also argue, I suppose, that the payoff of self-sacrifice is that someone you place great value on would be saved instead of you. I feel this example only helps to further prove that sacrificial behavior is never rational, because it doesn't originate from perfect knowledge. Our "knowledge" can never be perfect because it is highly subjective, so it stands to reason that our values would also be subjective and imperfect; this is the by-product of how we collect and store knowledge in our cognitive maps. It is adaptive, beneficial, and it makes life worth living.

In a rational world, we would all have perfect knowledge so we would all value the same things in the same way. Not only would this be incredibly boring, it would downright erase the power of human passion and innovation, breaking us down into nothing more than rational robots: input data, calculate, output response. Rinse and repeat. Not only is rationality an unattainable goal for humans based on the nature of how we navigate our world using highly subjective experiences, it's a darn good thing we can't achieve it in its entirety, lest we compromise everything that makes the human experience special.

So, would a life full of rationality be a life with reason? I don't think so- it's not what makes us who we are, both collectively as humans and individually as people.