Personal hypothesis:

People all undertake rational actions; they only seem irrational if you fail to rationalise their primary motivations, the driving force for such an undertaking.
23:05
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I love those moments when it feels as though everything clicked together within my head: Eureka moments. You may be thinking about one thing, and suddenly unrelated stuff leaps up out of nowhere, giving you answers to problems that you may have almost given up on, sometimes, problems that you were not even thinking about in the first place.

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Theoretical definition of arts and science based on the mindset of the practitioner:

- Art is reason applied without limits, geared towards an ideal and guided by the practical.

- Science is reason applied within a framework, geared towards the practical and guided by an ideal.

Why? Both art and science do involve the use of reason. In science, it is intuitively understandable by any respectable science student. The commonplace usage of Occam’s Razor, used to eliminate unlikely propositions, that alone probably shows how much science depends on reason.

In art, reason is also required: the conceptualisation and application of an idea or a theme towards any medium of art demands both reasoned judgement towards appropriateness in the fulfilment of the idea/theme. For example, if you are going to create a painting on the Last Supper, it is illogical to include scenes of warfare or modern technology that simply is not in line with the theme. If you are painting an abstract art themed around sadness, it is only appropriate to utilise dark colours that is more suited towards the mood. Reason has an inevitable and intrinsic involvement in the creation of an art work.

Reason is used without limits, allowing practitioners to work from the limits set by themselves, rather than defined externally (by nature) as in science. In terms of content, artists can work from first principles, from assumptions, or from actual reality: almost anything in terms of content can be subject to changes, without much bearing on the quality of the art work itself. The Harry Potter universe, for example, is built around the assumed premise that the practice of magic truly exists. Working from this first principle, everything else is built up into a believable framework in which the story is constructed, ultimately becoming one of the most creative stories of modern times.

Art is geared towards an ideal, towards the attainment of perfection. All art is begun with some idea in mind, and bringing this idea across to viewers in the right manner in the goal of the artist. Yet because of practical application of the artist’s vision in reality, art is always limited by the medium of the art, even though the vision itself has no such limits. For example, I can imagine creating the perfect sphere mentally, and set out sculpturing it, yet despite all the best tools I can bring to bear, the sphere will probably never be as perfect as what I originally envisioned it to be. Practical aspects thus guide how artistic talent is applied in reality.

Science, on the other hand, is geared towards the exploration of the practical. In both experimental and theoretical science, you aim to discover a practical aspect of the universe; your data, experiments and ideas are all oriented as such, defined by the framework set by nature’s laws. However, ultimately, the experiment or theory attempts to attain an ideal in accuracy, either in experimental data or law formulation, a goal of almost every practitioner of science. Science is therefore guided by this mindset of idealism, despite its practical nature.

As with all definitions of art and science, I suspect mine is flawed in some manner: please kindly leave a comment if you can find any counter-examples.

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Consider this paradox:

- My purpose in life is to find purpose

Obviously, this paradox reveals two key possibilities: either there is no purpose in life, or there is a purpose in life known to everyone. Since the latter is quite false, and by Occam’s Razor, we would have crossed it out as a possibility anyway, it is very much likely that the former is correct. There is no purpose in life, which means Creationism is wrong, for to create something requires a reason for the creation. It also means life is inherently meaningless, to the chagrin of the human race who likes to deceive themselves otherwise.
23:42
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