Reason and sanity

"... reason does not lead to sanity" (G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy)

Why does reason not lead to sanity?

Sanity could be defined as a perception of things as they are.

This is arrived at not directly by the sensing of data, in the same way that the presence of heat is determined by direct sensation, but by the inputting of the data into a system of reasoning that processes the data to produce the overall picture.

In principle, sanity is the natural and inevitable output of reason. This is almost a tautology: breaking leads to breakage; addition leads to a sum; reason leads to rationality, which is sanity.

Why does reason not lead to sanity in practice?

It should in principle, but in human beings the faculty of reason is compromised in three ways:

1. Incompleteness of data

2. Misapprehension of data

3. Processing errors.

Reliance on reason alone will therefore never lead to sanity. Sanity requires an error-correction module to adjust for the defects of the system and bring the output in line with reality.

The error-correction involves intuition and a direct, uncanny apprehension of the overall truth of a situation.

Without this, when reason makes a mistake, it has no way of knowing it has done so.

Large-language models can construct impossibly clever and rational arguments and produce output than an eight-year-old can plainly see is wrong. They have all the data in the world and still make elementary errors. They have no sense of truth as a fact or measure. Everything is probabilistic speculation.

Reason trapped inside an entity with no intuition, with no direct, uncanny apprehension of the overall truth of a situation will produce insanity, not sanity.

When I listen to conspiracy theorists and other assorted crackpots, they have an implacable logic but no sense; flawless syllogisms with nonsense output; a self-contained worldview that has nothing to do with the world; the perception of their own sanity whilst being wholly insane.

This is the ego: entirely logical and entirely insane.

God is entirely logical and entirely sane.

Having incomplete and flawed data and no flawless reasoning mechanism, I need the deus ex machina, the God from outside the mechanism, to plug the gap.