"But every error is due to extraneous factors..."

(such as emotion and education); reason itself does not err."--Kurt Godel, 29 November 1972

This raises an interesting issue, not the least of which is related to the hubris of the neoconservatives and the Bush Administration (who are firmly convinced their reasons are sound, and extraneous factors alone render their conclusions less than clear at the moment; although that is a perversion of both reason, and Godel's meaning, but then....).

Are "emotion" or "education," or any other like factors, really "extraneous" to "reason"? If they are, aren't we simply defining reason (since no one can bring "reason" into the laboratory and examine it, or even place it within the domain of logic and mathematics, to validate it) as a product of human imagination, because we define it by excluding whatever one wants to consider 'extraneous'? And yet reason is a product of those 'extraneous' factors (as it is the product of imagination, itself a product of emotion). Can it be a product of them, withot partaking of them?

Presumably we could recognize reason without these "extraneous factors:" we call it logic and mathematics, Godel's fields of study. But, as his famous Incompleteness Theorem shows, such formal systems are capable of producing statements they are not powerful enough to validate (a theorem that gave Wittgenstein fits, by the way, and which he refused to accept as valid). But the interesting question is this:

Is reason a human creation (i.e, a product of human imagination?), or does it exist apart from human understanding, as an entity in the universe? The inquiry would begin here: is "thinking" recognizable apart from education and/or emotion? Because surely thinking, while it involves reason, also involves imagination. And which is greater: imagination, or reason? Which gave birth to which, in other words?That is, could an emotionless computer with no education, but merely input programming and data, ever do anything recognizable as "thinking"? Can we, in other words, ever "reason," without "thinking"? And can we accurately say that reason is never wrong? Even if we postulate it, can we ever show it to be true? Or is this the statement our formal system of reason (whatever it is) is not powerful enough to validate?

If reason doesn't exist apart from us, how can it ever be free of error, free of "extraneous factors"? And if it does exist apart from us: where is it?

Paradoxes abound.