I suppose it’s the tone and the comment about “growing up in a rationality loving western tradition of thought”.

Maybe I’m paranoid, but in experience what comes next is typically some mystic mumbo-jumbo or talk about things we “just can’t understand” etc. then usually the speaker is religious.

I’d be happy to be wrong. The religion argument is just boring.

The logical positivists of the early 20th century held a semi-silly, self-defeating, and untenable position/range-of-positions in epistemology. No one in analytical philosophy takes their original, strong version of empiricism seriously.

One problem is that the more nuanced and plausible weaker versions of empiricism are not held by a number of prominent thinkers in the sciences. Instead, many of them (experts in their respective domains) continue to believe in and espouse semi-silly, self-defeating, and untenable versions of empiricism.

Whether Bach actually does is perhaps arguable. What the parent was referring to when he mentioned western rationality being myopic at times is probably something like what I described above.

the alternative to reason is not religion. It can be empathy, emotion, spirituality. You can call it mumbo jumbo if you want to, but it's an integral part of how humans experience themselves, the others and the world.

We’re probably mostly disputing definitions - I don’t consider those things separate from rationality (well except for spirituality).

Oh they are. When you have to take decisions, give priorities, give up control in favor of something else, you will see how big the gap is.

Then if you see emotions as a subset of rationality, then it's again your rational view of the world and how you make sense of it, but it's not the position held by most people.

I think this is a pretty good blog post that summarizes how I think of it: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RcZCwxFiZzE6X7nsv/what-do-we...