If there are limits to rational thinking, does that mean that there are limits to what we can know at all or just limits to what we can know rationally? In other words, are there ways of discovering and knowing things, perhaps even truths, other than rationally?

If so, we would need other ways of thinking that can still produce improved understanding. So then, if reasoning isn’t available, what other ways of thinking might be helpful?

A book that I’m currently reading suggests that a lot of thinking is not conscious, and so not rational, yet is still useful for bringing understanding and guiding human experience. This suggests that, if we could tap into that somehow, we could extend our understanding in some ways.

Perhaps one way to tap into this is through artistic expression. By this I mean the creation of art that conveys meaning. Generally the meaning is explicitly determined by the artist, in that they start with an idea or emotion and then deliberately craft something that conveys it. Other times, the meaning comes out of the creation process.

Could it be that such work can expose an internal reasoning process and make it explicit? Perhaps not in the sense of rationally derived arguments, but in a different way that still sheds light and advances understanding.

An example might be in approaching the “hard problem” of consciousness, in which at least one researcher has suggested that some good thinking about consciousness has been done in artistic work, specifically movies and fictional writing. As these works explore what it means to be conscious (something for which science has no real definition), they advance the understanding of the hard problem through means other than rational thought.

This is just one example. For me, another example might be the use of photography as a means of conducting internal “conversations”. I’ve found that process to be helpful in developing insights about human relationships, the sense of wonder, and similar topics.

I think these concepts are sometimes called something like “epistemological art”, but don’t know if they have been linked with neuroscience. At any rate, it seems like a fruitful way to consider topics at the edge of rational scientific understanding, a key idea in this blog.