What makes post-rationalism post-rationalism?

• Tpot, post-rationalism
  2025-12-21
• Funnily enough, it only dawned on me very recently that post-rationalism might really mean that: beyond rationalism
• I mean, no, of course I always got that that is what the phrase is saying, but it didn’t feel true to me, it wasn’t part of my felt sense of the term. More like, “people who bounced off rationalism” than “a worldview that actually includes more stuff than rationalism, or at the very least is a direct response to rationalism”. But now this feels much more true!
• This is partly because I’m living in a very rationalist-infused space so I’m getting more hands-on data re: a worldview that I haven’t seriously engaged in much for a few years
• I guess post-modernism is a reaction to modernism. It’s not that it “transcends and includes”, in the spiral dynamics sense, it’s more that it disagrees with core assumptions, and is borne out of people witnessing modernism and saying “hang on, no, we don’t agree with these core assumptions”, and that’s how post-rationalism feels to me
• Off the top of my head, how post-rationalism is a response to rationalism:
  • (Also note that this is of course me talking about my models of rationalism and post-rationalism, which are bound to be very particular)
  1. Rationalism says ”suffering is bad and the universe is very bad in some ways (e.g. factory farming, war)”, post-rationalism says “nothing is bad”
  2. Rationalism says "the intellect is ~everything!", post-rationalism says “beware of left-hemisphere capture, Heidegger’s ‘technological attunement’, Vervaeke’s ‘the tyranny of propositional knowledge’”
  3. Rationalism says "we can control the universe!", post-rationalism says “hubris, follow the Dao”
  4. Rationalism says "spirituality is woo nonsense", post-rationalism says “this way leads huge personal suffering reduction, meaning, profundity”
  5. Rationalism leads to living from the head (conceptual, rigid, disembodied), post-rationalism helps you unlock your body (movement, embodiment, libido, sexuality, eros)
  6. Rationalism is all about truthseeking, post-rationalism recognises that there is no conceptual/linguistic truth (see things like… No Self, Kegan 5, Buddhist deconstruction/emptiness)

1. Nothing is bad

• Quick thoughts:
  • from an Enlightened perspective, the Universe just “Is”. “Ultimate Reality” (as agreed upon by the Snowmass Contemplative Group mentioned in Bill Plotkin’s “Saints and Psychopaths”) is “perfect”
  • There’s no “badness” that you can point to
  • To experience “ultimate reality” (which I call “layer 1” in the consensusism model)… things can’t be “bad”/wrong in this layer, by definition. They just Are

2. Rationalism thinking failure modes

• See Ian McGhilchrist’s “The Master and His Emissary”
• ChatGPT prompt: “please give a 1 sentence summary of left-hemisphere capture according to Ian McGhilchrist”
  • ChatGPT: Left-hemisphere capture, in Iain McGilchrist’s account, occurs when the left hemisphere’s strengths—abstraction, categorisation, manipulation, and explicit representation—come to dominate our understanding of the world, while the right hemisphere’s broader, relational, and context-sensitive mode of attention is sidelined. In this state, we mistake simplified models, labels, and representations for the living reality they point to, prioritising control, certainty, and efficiency over openness, meaning, and embodied presence. What is lost is not intelligence but wisdom: the capacity to stay attuned to nuance, ambiguity, and the wholes in which things belong. When left-hemisphere capture takes hold culturally, it produces a world that is increasingly fragmented, instrumentalised, and disconnected from lived experience, even as it becomes more explainable and manageable in theory.
• Heidegger’s technological attunement:
  • ChatGPT: Heidegger’s technological attunement describes a fundamental mood or way of being in which the world is disclosed primarily as standing-reserve—a collection of resources to be ordered, optimized, predicted, and controlled for use. Under this attunement, things (including people and even ourselves) show up less as beings with their own meanings and more as instruments whose value lies in efficiency and utility. This mode of revealing is not just about machines or tools but about how reality as a whole is interpreted, narrowing our openness to other ways of encountering truth, such as poetic, ethical, or contemplative understanding. The danger Heidegger points to is that when technological attunement becomes dominant, it conceals its own contingency, making it seem like the only sensible way to relate to the world, and thereby obscuring richer, more humane forms of dwelling and care.
  • 👆 re: seeing yourself as a resource to be optimised. Seeing your productivity as the most important thing, because e.g. the universe is bad and broken and you must work hard to fix it
• Vervaeke’s “tyranny of the propositional [knowledge]”
  • Vervaeke’s 4 Ps of Knowledge
  • ChatGPT: Vervaeke’s “tyranny of the propositional” names a cultural and cognitive imbalance in which declarative, language-based knowledge (“knowing that”) is treated as the primary or even sole form of knowing, crowding out other equally essential modes such as procedural skill (“knowing how”), perspectival understanding (how the world is meaningfully disclosed from a lived point of view), and participatory knowing (being shaped through involvement and practice). When propositional knowledge dominates, we come to believe that understanding reality is mainly a matter of having the right statements or theories, rather than cultivating appropriate ways of perceiving, acting, and being. This leads to a loss of wisdom: we can explain more and more, yet become less capable of responding fittingly, adaptively, and meaningfully to the situations we actually inhabit.

3. “We can control the universe!” vs “follow the Dao”

• I’m just gonna turn to ChatGPT for this one, it’s late

A deep, often unspoken assumption in rationalism and effective altruism is that the universe is, in some important sense, fixable: that with enough intelligence, information, coordination, and effort, we can understand what matters most and then deliberately steer reality toward better outcomes. This orientation treats the world as a problem space—complex, yes, but ultimately amenable to optimisation and control. Moral urgency follows naturally: if suffering can be reduced and futures improved through correct intervention, then failing to act decisively is not humility but negligence. From this perspective, confidence in models, planning, and leverage is not arrogance but responsibility.

Post-rationalist critiques tend to target not the aim of care or improvement, but the stance toward reality that accompanies this assumption. Drawing from traditions like Daoism, phenomenology, and systems thinking, post-rationalism emphasises that the world is not merely complicated but fundamentally opaque, self-organising, and responsive in ways that resist full representation. Attempts to “fix” or control it too directly risk Goodharting, unintended consequences, and the flattening of values that cannot be easily formalised. The Daoist-inflected warning here is not “do nothing,” but “act in accordance with the grain of reality”: cultivate attunement, timing, and responsiveness rather than imposing abstract plans. Where rationalism fears passivity, post-rationalism fears hubris—the belief that our models entitle us to command outcomes rather than participate humbly in unfolding processes.

Seen this way, the tension is less about optimism versus pessimism, and more about how agency is understood. Rationalism foregrounds agency as intervention: selecting actions that cause desired effects. Post-rationalism foregrounds agency as participation: shaping oneself and one’s context so that appropriate action emerges from alignment rather than domination. The disagreement is not whether humans should care or act, but whether wisdom lies primarily in sharper maps and stronger steering, or in deeper perception and wiser yielding. The unresolved question—and perhaps the productive one—is how to act powerfully without mistaking the map for the territory, and how to follow the Dao without turning humility into an alibi for inaction.

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Spiral dynamics: orange and beyond

ChatGPT:

In Spiral Dynamics, the Orange level represents the modern, achievement-oriented worldview that emerged with the Enlightenment and now underpins science, capitalism, and much of contemporary liberal society. Orange is characterised by faith in reason, measurement, and progress: the belief that reality can be understood through objective analysis, broken into parts, and improved through innovation, competition, and optimisation. Truth is something to be discovered by the best methods; success is evidence of merit; and problems are solved by smarter strategies, better incentives, and more efficient systems. Orange excels at generating wealth, technological power, and individual freedom, but it tends to reduce value to what can be quantified, privileging control, prediction, and scalability while sidelining meaning, tradition, and relational context.

The next level in the classic Spiral Dynamics model is Green, which arises partly as a corrective to Orange’s excesses. Where Orange sees the world as a machine to be optimised, Green experiences it as a web of relationships that must be cared for. Green emphasises empathy, inclusion, equality, and the lived experience of individuals, often questioning Orange’s claims of objectivity as masking power, bias, or harm. It brings crucial insights about social justice, ecological limits, and the irreducibility of human subjectivity, but can struggle with decision-making, trade-offs, and coordination at scale, sometimes flattening differences in the name of harmony. In this sense, Green is not a rejection of Orange’s intelligence so much as a moral and emotional rebalancing.

Many post-rational thinkers are particularly interested in what Spiral Dynamics calls Yellow, a stage beyond the Orange–Green conflict. Yellow integrates Orange’s analytical power and Green’s relational sensitivity without being fully captured by either. Rather than asking which worldview is “right,” Yellow treats perspectives as tools appropriate to different contexts, emphasising systems thinking, second-order awareness, and adaptive governance. Control gives way to stewardship; certainty gives way to ongoing sense-making. From this vantage point, the task is no longer to optimise the world according to a single metric, nor to dissolve agency into consensus, but to participate intelligently in complex, evolving systems with humility, flexibility, and care.

”We Space”, intersubjectivity

ChatGPT: “could you write about how “We Space” practices, like Circling? I have a mentor who was like “yeah this just won’t make any sense to them because it doesn’t involve things that they value”

“We Space” practices like Circling operate in a domain that sits largely outside the value structure of modern rationalist or “Orange” worldviews, which helps explain why they often feel confusing, trivial, or even suspicious to people grounded there. Orange tends to value clarity, propositional insight, individual competence, and outcomes that can be tracked, transferred, or scaled. Knowledge is something you have; growth is something you can explain; progress shows up as better models, skills, or results. From that frame, a practice whose “output” is a shift in shared attention, relational field, or moment-to-moment felt sense can look like noise, indulgence, or group therapy without a theory of change.

We Space practices work on a different assumption: that some of the most important human capacities—trust, mutual intelligibility, emotional regulation, collective sense-making—do not live primarily inside individuals, nor can they be accessed through detached analysis. Instead, they emerge between people, in real time, through attention to micro-signals like tone, timing, posture, and affect. Circling is not trying to generate beliefs or conclusions; it is training sensitivity to how meaning is co-created in interaction. From within the practice, insight arrives not as a statement (“I learned X”) but as a felt reorganisation of how others show up and how one is able to respond to them.

This mismatch is why explanations often fail. To someone who values explicit models and instrumental leverage, saying “this helps you sense the relational field” is like explaining music theory to someone who has never heard sound. The practice is doing work, but it is not the kind of work that Orange has learned to recognise as real. Post-rational framings try to bridge this by pointing out that We Space practices cultivate capacities that Orange implicitly relies on but rarely trains—such as navigating ambiguity, repairing breakdowns, or coordinating without coercion. Still, your mentor’s point holds: if a culture has not yet learned to value participatory or relational knowing, We Space will feel unintelligible, not because it is nonsense, but because it is operating in a dimension of value that has not yet come online.

Authentic relating

ChatGPT: “could you write a similar thing re: authentic relating? a sense that rationalists may mostly want to communicate for knowledge exchange, rather than like… emotional connection, vibes, something like that? (this is a crazy strawman I’m sure) ”

You’re right to flag the strawman risk here — but there is a real pattern underneath it, and it can be described without pathologising either side.

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Authentic relating practices tend to foreground communication as a way of being-with others, rather than primarily as a means of exchanging information. The point is not to transmit correct beliefs or converge on shared models, but to make present one’s lived experience—emotions, bodily signals, uncertainties, intentions—and to let those be received and responded to in real time. Meaning arises less from what is said than from how it is said and how it lands: tone, pacing, vulnerability, and mutual attunement matter as much as semantic content. From within this frame, connection itself is not a side-effect of good communication; it is the medium in which understanding becomes possible.

By contrast, many rationalist spaces implicitly treat communication as epistemic plumbing: a tool for sharing beliefs, arguments, evidence, and updates to one’s world-model. Clarity, compression, and accuracy are prized; affect is often seen as noise unless it carries informational value (e.g. as a bias to be corrected). In such a culture, conversations oriented toward “vibes” or emotional disclosure can feel inefficient, self-indulgent, or even manipulative, because they do not obviously advance the collective project of knowing more or deciding better. Importantly, this is not because rationalists lack emotional lives, but because their norms have learned to route legitimacy through cognition rather than through felt relational presence.

Authentic relating can therefore feel illegible or threatening in rationalist contexts: it asks participants to attend to channels of meaning they have not been trained to trust, and to value outcomes—like increased intimacy, resonance, or mutual safety—that cannot be easily audited or justified. From a post-rational perspective, the claim is not that knowledge exchange is insufficient, but that it rests on unspoken relational preconditions: trust, goodwill, emotional regulation, and the capacity to stay present during disagreement. Authentic relating practices aim to make those preconditions explicit and trainable. The tension arises when a culture that defines “real communication” as information transfer encounters a practice that insists that how we relate is not ancillary to truth-seeking, but constitutive of it.