This is inaccurate. It is a caricature, but it is not sufficiently far from the truth.
The truth is that people who style themselves Rationalists believe that FEELING something to be true is never sufficient.
That might be true. I’m not sure.
But then I got to thinking of Scientism, and this I DO definitely believe to be true: the core belief of the Scientistic disciple is that matter exists, and is absolute. Something, however we define it, has to be physically and measurably final. It can be Superstrings, Fields of various sorts, or some as-yet undiscovered physical “bit”.
Because if matter in some form is NOT absolute, then consciousness almost necessarily has to become a part of reality. Perhaps even absolutely necessarily. Certainly, this is what von Neumann argued, without being able to say what exactly that meant, or what the final end result might be for our philosophies and self understandings.
Consciousness might be defined as “an ordering principle”. That might be good, or severely lacking in some way. But let’s run with it.
Picture a beam of light sent out by a star 50 million years ago. In principle, we can interrupt that beam of light anywhere on its journey and it consists both of discrete photons, and a continuous wave. In some respect, does this not make the light “conscious”, as I have defined it? It is ordered, continuously ordered, and ordered at far past the speed of light.
I have in the past called Free Will “non-statistical coherence”, but might here expand that definition to include Consciousness itself.
I’m not sure what I am saying, and I am running late as usual, but do with this what you will. I will keep germinating, without quite knowing what sorts of blooms I am sending into the world.