Just another tool

“The vaunted human capacity for reason may have more to do with winning arguments
than with thinking straight“.
Elizabeth Kolbert, Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds

I love that. Just love it.
“The … human capacity to reason”!

Other thinkers hail reason as the thing which sets us apart from the rest of the animals…

The way I see it, reason is nothing but just another tool.

The thing which sets us apart from the rest of the animals being our ability to observe ourselves while interacting with the rest of the universe. Otherwise known as consciousness.

Basically, reasoning is nothing more than a ‘dialogue with myself’.
When I ‘consider a thing’ in my mind, consciously, I practically put my brain to work.
I order my memory to summon up all the data it has on the subject and I ask my frontal lobe to process that data and to reach a conclusion. In theory…
In the real world, my amygdala – the piece of the brain where emotions are processed – already has an opinion about everything which crosses my mind. The more familiar the thing, the stronger the opinion. The more often my mind – meaning I, had expressed itself regarding a subject, and the more recently, the stronger the opinion my amygdala already has about the matter.
If the matter is considered for the first time, and has no connection with anything else I had already ‘conclusioned’ about, only then my amygdala might keep its opinion for itself. The key word here being ‘might’…

Since this is nothing more than a blog post, I’m not going to prove my opinion. To discuss the importance of the fight-flight mechanism and to mention that this mechanism had done more – evolutionary wise, than reason for our survival. For us having the opportunity to develop this vaunted capacity for reason…

I’ll just end it abruptly.
Mentioning that our individual consciousnesses use reason as a tool. To arrange facts in such a manner as to confirm the already reached conclusionary opinions put forward by our amydalae. “To win arguments”, if you will, including when debating with ourselves.
Only when the facts – the harsh reality, contradict in a flagrant manner the already held convictions we might change our minds.
The more immediate the danger we put ourselves into by sticking to our convictions, the more likely we are to cave in to the facts.

To the facts as we perceive them… Which is yet another story!