Humanity As Rationalizing The Irrational: The HARTI Hypothesis

Sequel to Brains Are Cool Enough to Be Quantum. Are They?

What makes us uniquely human is our ability (and tendency) to rationalize the irrational; possibly tied to our hemispherical brain structure. This is what enables calculation, language, and the radicalization of other traits we share with animals.
Explore this hypothesis, weighing evidence for and against, in comparison to any remaining plausible alternatives.

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1. Overview

The Humanity As Rationalizing The Irrational (HARTI) hypothesis proposes that the defining trait of Homo sapiens is our unique capacity—and compulsion—to make the irrational rational. Here rationalize is taken in its double sense:

1. Technical: to render intelligible through abstraction, compressing irreducible particulars into general forms.
2. Pejorative: to justify or excuse by making something appear rational, even when it is not.

This dual power makes rationalization both the engine of human creativity and civilization, and the root of human delusion and self-deception. It suggests that rationalization underlies, and may even precede, the more commonly cited hallmarks of humanity such as reason, language, morality, art, and play.

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2. Historical Background

Classical and modern accounts of human distinctiveness often identify different core traits:

1. Rationality: Aristotle’s definition of humans as the rational animal.
2. Language: Descartes and later Chomsky emphasized recursive, generative language as uniquely human.
3. Morality: Kant argued that only humans are capable of recognizing universal moral law.
4. Play: The anthropologist Johan Huizinga proposed Homo ludens—the playing human—as the foundation of culture.
5. Self-awareness: From Descartes’ cogito to modern psychology, humans have been seen as uniquely reflexive beings.

The HARTI hypothesis reframes these traditions by suggesting that abstraction is prior: language, reason, morality, and play all presuppose the ability to transform irreducible particulars into structured conceptual forms.

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3. Cognitive Basis

3.1 Hemispheric Specialization

Neuroscientific theories of lateralization suggest:

1. The right hemisphere emphasizes holistic perception, novelty, ambiguity, and metaphor.
2. The left hemisphere emphasizes categorization, sequential analysis, and control.
3. According to Iain McGilchrist, human distinctiveness emerges from the tension between these modes—transforming the irrational into the rational by holding paradox while forcing coherence.

3.2 Predictive Processing

In the predictive processing framework:

1. Cognition compresses sensory flux into hierarchical generative models.
2. Abstraction is a form of lossy compression, simplifying irreducible data while preserving useful structure.
3. Rationalization thus emerges as the brain’s fundamental survival strategy: making the irrational tractable by re-describing it in rationalized form.

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4. Rationalization as the Enabler of Human Culture

4.1 Language

1. Abstraction supplies conceptual types (e.g., dog, justice) that words label.
2. Grammar and syntax depend on stable categories that rationalize perceptual chaos.
3. Without abstraction, semantics lacks reliable content.

4.2 Reason

1. Logical inference operates on idealized representations.
2. Mathematics rationalizes irrational phenomena: infinity, limits, or irrational numbers.
3. Scientific theories reduce complexity into manageable models—rationalizations of nature.

4.3 Morality and Law

1. Reciprocity and empathy in animals are rationalized into universalizable concepts such as rights, duties, and justice.
2. Legal codes are formalized rationalizations of social conflict and ethical intuition.
3. Religious commandments embody moral abstraction into normative systems.

4.4 Art and Religion

1. Art abstracts emotion, experience, or mystery into form, symbol, and narrative.
2. Religion rationalizes transcendence: making the ineffable intelligible through myth, doctrine, and ritual.
3. At the same time, rationalization risks ossification into rigid dogma or ideology.

4.5 Play

1. Animals play spontaneously, but humans rationalize play into sport, theater, and ritual.
2. These forms are structured systems of imaginative exploration, rule-making, and symbolic meaning.
3. Play thus becomes a laboratory for abstraction itself.

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5. The Double Edge of Rationalization

5.1 Constructive Aspects

1. Enables science, mathematics, and philosophy.
2. Provides symbolic tools for planning, cooperation, and cumulative culture.
3. Allows humans to metabolize uncertainty and confront existential questions.

5.2 Destructive Aspects

1. Produces ideology, propaganda, and self-deception.
2. Justifies atrocities by cloaking irrational desires in rational form.
3. Encourages overreach—mistaking abstractions for reality itself.

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6. Comparison with Other Theories

6.1 Reason

• For: Long treated as uniquely human.
• Against: Depends on abstractions; cannot operate without structured conceptual input.

6.2 Language

• For: Recursive grammar and generativity are distinctively human.
• Against: Requires prior abstraction to provide content for words and rules.

6.3 Morality

• For: Universalizable moral law distinguishes human societies.
• Against: Moral concepts are abstractions of instinctual fairness and empathy.

6.4 Play

• For: Play is foundational to creativity and culture.
• Against: Shared with animals; human distinctiveness lies in rationalized play.

6.5 Self-awareness

• For: Reflexivity allows narrative identity and introspection.
• Against: The “self” is itself an abstraction—rationalization of experience into a stable narrative.

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7. Criticisms

1. Continuity with Animals: Many animals exhibit abstraction (tool use in corvids, symbolic gestures in apes). The difference may be degree rather than kind.
2. Overreach of Abstraction: Philosophers such as Wittgenstein argue that not all meaning can be abstracted; some is irreducibly embodied or practice-bound.
3. Artificial Intelligence: Machines approximate aspects of abstraction (e.g., symbolic AI, deep learning), suggesting rationalization may not be uniquely human.

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8. Implications

8.1 Evolutionary Anthropology

1. Abstraction explains the “ratchet effect” of cumulative culture.
2. It allows humans to build on prior innovations across generations.

8.2 Education

1. Teaching analogy, categorization, and schema-building emphasizes abstraction directly.
2. Language and reasoning can then ride on this conceptual foundation.

8.3 Artificial Intelligence

1. AI excels at pattern recognition but struggles with transferable, systematic abstraction (compositional generalization).
2. True human-like intelligence may require the ability to rationalize the irrational.

8.4 Theology

1. In Genesis, the act of naming is a primal moment of rationalization—ordering creation into kinds.
2. Religious doctrines can be viewed as abstraction layers over mystery, balancing illumination and distortion.

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9. Conclusion

The HARTI hypothesis situates humanity’s uniqueness not in pure logic, speech, or play, but in the general-purpose ability to transform the irreducible into the intelligible. This capacity:

1. Enables: language, reason, morality, law, art, and science.
2. Constrains: human cognition through self-deception, ideology, and delusion.
3. Defines: our paradoxical nature—creators of meaning, yet masters of rationalized folly.

Whether viewed as the root of our greatness or the source of our downfall, rationalization remains central to any account of what it means to be human.