On the impossibility for rationality to become a belief

Rationality can’t become a belief, because a belief requires a single truth, when rationality can only deliver at least two truths. Closer than that can rationality not come to being a belief.

This problem actually resides in the for rationality fundamental classification – there simply isn’t only a single consistent classification, but several consistent classifications. This fact is difficult to understand, because it requires that we consider classification on a meta-level, when we normally just classify and then discuss reality as if the classification itself is uninteresting. However, at the most extreme level of simplification, this problem can be expressed as that the diagonal of the classificatory cube between pattern and process classes is irrational, ie, either ambiguous or contradictory, which Russell’s paradox also demonstrates. Classification can thus not be unambiguous and consistent, but can just be ambiguous and consistent (or put the other way around, can’t be consistent and unambiguous, but can only be consistent and ambiguous). Classification thus stands in the way for turning rationality into a belief.

One may think that this is a problem of classification itself, ie, not a problem of our possibility to describe reality unambiguously, but this problem actually penetrates deeper than that. Reality itself appears to suffer from the same problem in that it can’t find a consistent and unambiguous state, but instead has to change forever, thereby turning our possibility to describe reality unambiguously into a problem of that reality itself isn’t unambiguous - how can we describe something that isn’t unambiguous unambiguously?

We can, of course, like cladistics and particle physics do, turn this fundamental ambiguity into an imagined paradox (ie, “the tree of life” and “Higgs particle”, respectively), and thereby turn rationality into a belief in paradoxes, but paradoxes can’t be real (just like God can’t) because they are contradictory. Such things can we thus not find.

This problem may be comprehended as the defeat of rationality, ie, the victory of belief over rationality, but then we forget that belief has exactly the same problem to deliver a single truth. If we accept a God or Gods, then we may just as well accept “the tree of life” or “Higgs particle”, and if we don’t, then we have to content ourselves with ambiguity. This problem thus actually puts us in the choice between believing in an impossibility (be it Christianity, Islam or inconsistent Rationality like Cladistics and Particle physics) or accepting reality’s fundamental ambiguity. Our choice is thus between accepting that reality is ambiguous or denying this fact. Rationality itself chooses neither, but can’t reach a single consistent and unambiguous description of reality. Rationalists (ie, scientists like me) can thus just choose between accepting facts or denying them, whereof accepting facts leads us into ambiguity and denying facts leads us into belief.

I choose ambiguity. What do you choose?