That seems somewhat tautological - reasoning is how rational arguments are made.
It seems to me that reasoning is effectively making conclusions from a valid argument; regardless of the truth of the premises, if the conclusion is reached through valid argument, it has been reasoned. If the premises are true, the argument will be sound and the reasoned conclusion will be true. If one or more premises are false, the argument will not be sound and the reasoned conclusion will be false although correctly reasoned. In other words, in both cases, reason is used to argue correctly given the premises, but the conclusion will only certainly be true if the premises are true.
No, it's quite logical to be scared of a tiger if you think it's inhabited by alien souls and you're afraid of alien souls; it's the premises that are false. It's also quite rational to scared, given that premise (i.e. that belief). It's the belief that's irrational, not the reasoning based on it.
It's not the truth or falsity of the premises that make an argument logical (valid). When true, they make a valid argument sound
You seem to be conflating Reason and Rationality. They are not the same.
Reason is the ability of consciously making sense of the world from logic, verification of fact, justifying belief and practice via existing information.
Rationality is the quality or state of holding beliefs that conform to reason.
So tell me, how do you ascertain if a premise is true? By reason is it not? So the only way to see if something is true, ie reasonable, is to examine the premise down to the axiomatic.
While arguments can be made by rational means from irrational premises, the end result remains irrational - like a mathematic proof that starts out declaring 1=0 will always be irrational regardless how complex or rational the rest of its argument was.
If the axiomatic starting point is irrational, then the entire argument is irrational regardless of means employed. Chemical interactions or nerve depolarisation, which would be the first origin of why we would consider something axiomatic, cannot be anything but irrational as no reason can be employed here. Thus, as I said, if we accept this as the origin of thought, then the validity of any propositions can never be established as we simply cannot say the original axiomatic premise can be 'reasonable', ie based on logic and thought. The only reason why we would accept this naturalistic materialism however, rests on our trust of our Rationality which we have just completely eroded. It doesn't mean that we are necessarily wrong, it does however mean we can never trust anything at all as being correct.
You essentially just want to stop at the premise, but that is the whole point of the argument. We cannot hold any premises to be true at all if we accept naturalistic materialism.
Yes, I don't agree with your first (compound) premise. I agree that reasoning requires insight or understanding of the logical relations between the premises - that's how a valid argument is constructed; but I don't agree that neurons firing in the head cannot be the underlying cause of insight or understanding. It may turn on how one defines insight or understanding, and/or what kind of information processor can achieve them. But I also think there's an implicit appeal to incredulity in phrases like, "neurons firing in the head". But then, who would believe transistors switching in microchips could beat the world's best human competitors at the verbal quiz game 'Jeopardy'? Who would imagine that a simple static grid of cells that can be black or white ('on' or 'off') depending on the on/off states of neighboring cells (i.e.
Conway's Game of Life cellular automaton) could
emulate a computer (universal Turing machine), or make a
self-replicating structure, or
emulate itself? The interactions of simple parts can give rise to exceedingly complex behaviours.
'Neurons firing in the head' produce a range of informational structures, from content-addressable storage (memory) and associative mapping of that storage, to inductive and deductive logic processing, that can be used to facilitate understanding and insight. High-level systems such as those involving the self and language understanding, are composed of subsystems, and those of smaller subsystems, and so-on to the neuronal level. In the brain the hierarchy is not rigid - subsystems are shared and cross-connected, and there are competing 'opponent' systems down to the individual neurons.
First Premise: No belief is rationally inferred if it can be explained from non-rational causes.
My first premise is not compound. It is axiomatic. I cannot say something is logical or reasoned through if it is held without needing to apply any logic or reason.
You keep talking about complex interactions etc. as if this somehow changes anything to the argument. It makes no difference. That simple interactions can have complex results or a computer can win Jeopardy is completely irrelevant. If Reason occurs because of activities that are not themselves rationally derived, there is no reason to trust or consider the result rational.
So lets assume that our physiology is responsible for our thoughts - all that that means is that we therefore cannot trust that our thinking is rational, as the axiom need not be X but could have been Y. We only consider it X because of irrational nerve depolarisation, but for all intents and purposes it might just as well have been Y.
Last I heard, Wernicke's area is mainly involved in the phonetic and syntactic aspects of language, recognition and parsing; the full understanding of meaning is distributed across the cortex, as one might expect.
A lot of work has already been done - parts of some systems have been comprehensively explained (e.g. parts of the visual system), and others functionally mapped in considerable detail. Sure, there's a lot more to do than has yet been done, but with in excess of 80 billion components, it's a complex system.
I don't have links for them, although they're probably online - I learned of them from books (e.g. by V.S. Ramachandran) and conferences. One example of a very specific deficit was a man who had a stroke and ceased to be able to recognise items. He couldn't recognise himself or anyone he knew, and he couldn't recognise objects, although he knew what type of objects they were and could describe them in detail. For example, when shown a carrot, he knew it was a vegetable, and described it accurately, but he didn't know what vegetable it was; on the other hand he could also tell you all about carrots, their appearance, growth, use, etc. When asked to draw a selection of flowers, he made drawings labelled 'rose', 'tulip', 'daffodil', etc, but he drew imaginary flower shapes, nothing like the real thing, and yet he could accurately describe the features of the real flowers. Then there's Capgras' syndrome, where someone thinks their partner has been replaced by an identical imposter; believed to be due to damage to communication between the recognition & discrimination centre in the fusiform gyrus and the emotional limbic system (the amygdala). Another oddly specific one is 'Telephone syndrome', where individuals are in an apparently minimally conscious state, showing sleep/wake cycles and eye tracking, but unresponsive and uncommunicative - until they're given a phone call, when they suddenly become fully conscious, alert, and normally communicative, only to subside back to unresponsiveness afterwards, even to the same person that called them. Another is paralysis denial, where the individual is paralysed in some way, but denies it and attempts tasks requiring the paralysed limb, claiming success, or making unrelated excuses, when they fail dismally; there's a disconnect between their physical state and their brain's body map, making them unaware of the paralysis and unable to learn of it. Similarly, there's hemispherical neglect, where the left or right half of the person's perceptual experience is absent (i.e. half their perceptual world), although all the perceptual pathways are intact.
Yes? I agree the brain and neuronal pathways play a significant part in our reasoning. I just don't think it consists SOLELY thereof.
If anything, these examples show attempts at Reason which fail to deliver true results, but if a system was so significantly disrupted, one would wonder if Reason would have been possible at all if solely derived from it.
While not definitive evidence, these examples are actually essentially to what I was referring as they imply that Reason is attempted in spite of its supposed 'hardware' not functioning. They show that we actually don't know where our 'Reason' truly lies, if anything.
We cannot say that 'its complicated but obviously it must just be a function of the brain' as this is a complete shot in the dark not based on anything but the vaguest suppositions.
This is just an example to explain the principle, by no means even a good example: If we look at a city from the air and see cars heading to office blocks and back, we cannot merely conclude that they are self-functioning. If we see new buildings going up and others decaying, if we see highways disrupted by accidents or natural events, we will see failure and change in functions of the city, but this does not mean we can conclude the 'city' as a self-functioning entity. We will see the 'city' making rational choices, but it was not made by it, but by people within it we do not see. Essentially the 'city' consists of both the buildings and their inhabitants - to the brain therefore we are at the looking at the city stage, we are unaware of the 'people', the rationalising component and have so far failed to find them, only seeing disrupted pathways 'they' are attempting to overcome or normal ones. Perhaps this component does lie merely in the functioning, but we can by no means conclude this based on current knowledge, this is merely the assumption made by Naturalistic Materialists.
