Despite our best efforts, we are deeply irrational. Our thinking is based on instinct, not on core principles; it's a top-down approach driven by feelings.

Off topic - a pet peeve of mine is seeing humans termed as “irrational”. Please forgive my rant, as it is not personally targeted at you.

We only seem “irrational” when we are talking about a narrow view of “rationality”, i.e., as defined by the cold hard logic of machines. We do not question why we have this definition of rationality. Our “irrationality” simply seems so because we have not bothered to understand the larger complexity of our evolutionary programming. It’s the same as not bothering to understand how a car works, and then claiming that the car works on magic. If one understands how it works, then it is no longer magic. In the case of humans, we may never fully understand how we work, but we can work towards a compassionate understanding of the same.

/rant

Absolutely on point. I would argue that irrationality isn't even possible. If person A thinks or behaves "irrationally" according to person B, there is simply a difference in perception between the two. A large percentage of those perceptions are created inside one's own mind which may or may not be aligned with the rest of the universe.

What about cognitive dissonance?

Ehh, is survivability the only metric by which you measure instinct?

You can, as a human, map the 'wrong' response to external stimuli resulting in, say, your death (or the deaths of your progeny, for that matter)

It sounds like your main objection is with conflation of "irrational" with "wrong". It's helpful to describe an extreme fear of heights as "irrational" but from an evolutionary point of view it might in fact be correct because it keeps those genes that give the rest of the population a healthy fear of heights in the gene pool. I think these are different concepts and a person can be both irrational and correct in their behaviour.

Reactions to feelings seem very calculable or at least there’s nothing about them that seems impossible for a computer to simulate.

Why is instinct not computable? That seems way easier to compute than rational thinking based on principles, it's just "if this, do that"

If you could isolate processes like that, sure.

With machine learning the processes are learnt so there’s not much manual programming other than the training and inference code

Everything in the universe must by definition be rational. Chemical reactions always happen a certain way, physics always works a certain way, numbers add up the same every time.

If something seems irrational, that's because there are rational things layered on top of one another in a way that creates a misapprehension in a partially-informed observer.

> Everything in the universe must by definition be rational.

Why? You assume nature must be comprehensible to us because you define it that way? Nature's not under any obligation to us.

> If something seems irrational, that's because there are rational things layered on top of one another in a way that creates a misapprehension in a partially-informed observer.

Possible irrational things: Collapse of the wave function, consciousness, why anything exists. There's also non-computable functions, paradoxes like the liar paradox, and the inability to refute various skeptical possibilities like living in a simulation.

Combine that with the fact that all models are wrong, some are just more useful. We can't model the entire universe with perfect accuracy without the model being the universe, which means there are always things left out. Our rational explanations are approximations.

Rationality != comprehensible to us

We can't look at quantum mechanics and call it irrational. The way the universe works is by definition the right / correct / only way. If logic points one way and reality points another, the logic isn't taking everything into account.

You're confusing the map for the territory. Rationality is something that makes sense for us. That need not apply to nature. It's misplaced to say that nature is rational. Nature just is.

You say:

>Rationality is something that makes sense for us

But I say:

Rationality is something that makes sense.

So nature cannot be irrational. For instance: we had the very logical Newtonian mechanics. But Mercury's orbit did not make sense. Later on Einstein saw another layer of logic that put both Newton and Mercury in more context, and now both make sense again.

When we see things now that make no sense, it indicates faults in our mental models, not in the things.

In the context of a person behaving or thinking "irrationally": their brain is just atoms and chemicals. It has to work right. If their behaviour and thoughts do not line up to reality, that's a feature of said brain.

Perhaps the irrationality is due to the brain giving too much weight to certain factors, or perhaps they are in fact behaving perfectly logically given what they know and you don't. Perhaps its workings can be improved in software, or in the next hardware generation.

But there's no spooky mechanism that can't in principle be modelled and implemented in a different architecture, ie, transistors.

Quantum effects don't. There are rules but results are within range random.

That's not proven yet. Random behaviour might be due to undiscovered inherent properties.

But even if there are random things, are they thus irrational? Or just unpredictable? Is today's lottery number wrong in some way?

Quantum mechanics works the same way every time. Being random doesn't mean they're not working the same way every time, the distribution never changes.

The poster I was answering to was using examples like "numbers add up the same every time" which is not the case for quantum effects.

Instincts are evolved and have a rational basis, just not one your consciously privy to.