Who decides reason?

"What truly is logic? Who decides reason? It is only in the mysterious equations of love that any logic or reason can be found."

John Nash, a serving Senior Research Mathematician at Princeton University who shared the 1994 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.

Reason: that power of the mind to think, understand, and form judgments by a process of logic, can also be a cause, explanation, or justification for an action or event.

As such, reason is, or at least ought to be, the entire mental or rational nature of man, specifically that normal exercise of his rational faculties as distinguished from the intelligence of the brute: a characteristic lacking or showing a lack of reason or intelligence.

In any case, that is what we think and believe: for reason originates in the mind of man, while the cause of any event, act, or fact, as commonly understood, is the power that makes it to be; and as such, the reason of, or for it. At least, that is the most common and widely held explanation given by the human mind. Yet reason and cause are, used often as equivalents in common parlance.

Nevertheless, is an event, act, or fact always the result of considered reason and the conclusion of logical thought? I wonder, because the act of thinking logically cannot possibly be natural to the human mind.

If it were, then mathematics would be everybody's easiest course at school and our species would not have taken several millennia to figure out the scientific method. The scientific method is the principles and procedures for the systematic pursuit of knowledge involving the recognition and formulation of a problem, the collection of facts through observation and experiment, and the making and testing of ideas that need to be proven right or wrong.

In fact, I suspect, we do the opposite: we make an instinctive decision; then build up an infrastructure of reasoning to justify it; and call the result common sense. Thus, reasons are not really, what makes us do things. Reasons are things that we make up, much later, to reassure everyone that we are all logical and that the world makes sense.

We do unreasonable things, because we want to do them at that time, and for no reason. Much later, we sit in the wreckage of our actions, building reasons out of little bits of wreckage, so we will have something to show others.

Look, this is what caused it; and so, the whole mess at least appears reasonable.

That way, we convince ourselves and others that at least there was a reason for the disaster; though often times, there is no reason. We just blew it to the ground because we felt like doing it; and it could happen time-and-again, no end of times - human nature being thus. Things do not happen for a reason, we make reasons out of things that happen because it is easier to live with it if we attribute a reason.

At the most, it is likely we did what we did for whatever reasons occurred to us at the time, depending on whichever emotion was running thickest in our blood. We made our choice and came up with the reasons later.

The real irony and hell of life is everyone has reasons, after the event.

Perhaps, that is the reason why we say life has no meaning: we look for meaning after life passes us by and invent excuses for the events that passed, calling it reason instead of making our reasons rise above our excuses, in order that we may rise in stature. It is just simple logic.

In a world where illogical people search for truth, a misleading notion or false belief is increasingly being perpetuated that the unconscious or the intuitive is all that really matters in any endeavour, and that the conscious, rational, logical, analytical mind is the mortal enemy of human awareness and human growth.

In such a world, liars have become idealists, saints, and prophets. The truth is; passion, that intense desire or enthusiasm for something, may have fueled us; but can do so no more.

It will in future be our enemy. Reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason, must furnish all the materials for the future growth of the human race. It is amazing how once the mind is free of emotional pollution and kept sincere; logic and clarity emerge.

Logical thinking can outwit random processing because random processes do not have the smoothness that logical thinking has and are arbitrary and unsystematic, whereas logical thinking is the process of using your mind to consider something carefully taking into consideration all possible pros and con - the favourable and the unfavorable factors or reasons; advantages and disadvantages - of a given situation.

Nothing is ever for sure. That is the only sure thing in life; and that is what makes life interesting: a dream for the wise, a game for the fool, a comedy for the rich and a tragedy for the poor. It is all in the makeup of each individuals thinking.

The act of thinking logically may not possibly be natural to the human mind; but the human condition: the self-aware and reflective nature of Homo sapiens that allows for analysis of existential themes; and the characteristic of human nature, require us to think even if we are not in its habit.

Mercifully for mankind, persistence wears down resistance to thinking. After all, it is in the process of our thinking that we have created the world itself - as it is, different to each, according to individual thinking; and, the reasons for each individuals thinking may be many fold and different to the others.

As such, who decides reason? Reason, after all, is the means by which rational beings understand themselves to think about cause and effect, truth and falsehood, and what is good or bad. Thus, does reason not depend on intelligence? Perhaps, that may be the reason why reason itself is defined in different ways, at different times, by different thinkers. So who decides reason?

Reason itself has many reasons. The human nature is, no longer assumed to work according to anything other than the same "laws of nature" which affect inanimate things. As such, psychologists and cognitive scientists have attempted to study and explain how people reason - for example, which cognitive and neural processes are engaged by the mind and how cultural factors, affect the inferences that people draw.

It is still an evolving process and may never ever be completely completed because the human nature and the laws of nature too are in constant change, evolving. In the ultimate analysis only the standards of practical reason, govern the determination of our actions in the way that standards of logic and evidence govern the determination of our beliefs.

Variously formulated, reason requires that we act only on the principle that take into account the recognition that we are just one person among others whose concerns are just as important as our own.

This kind of principle directs us to act in ways that are intuitively recognizable as moral, but it does so based on a view about what counts as a good reason for action - one that takes the equivalent and related reasons of others into account. Be that all as it is, none of it answers, in the last analysis: who decides reason?

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