Reason's Reasons

1

Logic can be another sense organ. As an eye sees color, logic sees inferences from premises to conclusions. Deduction is an act, like moving a limb. The act of deduction under the condition of certain premises tends to lead to sensation of certain conclusions.

2

Not reason vs. passion. In an emotional mind, reason can be the means of a passion or a passion itself—pleasing truths, painful errors.

3

Could an active mind possess reason but no emotion? Yes, though the lack of emotion would limit the mind's use to its controllers. Elimination of emotions? Largely an empirical question. What goal or emotion could motivate that project? Reason, above the obligatory red is red, is a means to ends emotional or not. Reason alone entails no act.

4

The certainty of logic. We might think of intelligence as 1 + 1 = 2. If I have an apple and another distinct apple, then I have two apples. This overlooks a mind's real work: how to invent the idea of apples and how to interpret an impression as an apple. The perfection of math becomes a mess the moment you connect it to reality.

5

In one useful sense, a building is not moving. In another sense, the building is moving because the Earth is. How can a mind's logic accommodate both? Or are building and moving the problem?

The problem is insistence that the signs, and the images of them inside our minds, have some context-free meaning. In this case, the meaning is inferred from your focus.

6

Kleene's underused logic: a ternary (three valued) logic with unknown as the third value. The interesting rows in the truth table:

A B A or B A and B

false unknown unknown false

true unknown true unknown

unknown unknown unknown unknown

This differs from binary logic in admitting not only a distinction between true and false, but between known and unknown, between belief and reality. No mystical implications.

What use? Ternary logic absorbs a worthwhile minority of errors.

if (A or B) then:

do X

If evaluation of A failed for whatever inevitable unexpected reason, then instead of aborting evaluation of the entire statement, the evaluator sets A to unknown. Now if B is true, the failure to evaluate A is academic.

Of course, you can laboriously get the same results with binary logic, but the point is that with a better logic, a mind is more robust without complicating its application. Just remember that in the expression A or B you can no longer have B depend on the full evaluation of A for a side effect.

7

The law of the excluded middle. A range of beliefs becomes subject to the law when a web of negative inferences forms between them. Most minds have many sources of belief—senses, reason, memory, language—and each may favor a different exclusive belief.

When one belief wins, the mind should not forget the presently beaten beliefs but only suppress them. If the winning belief loses its support, the mind can choose a new winner from the original competing beliefs. If the mind kept only the original winner, it would later be left believing nothing.

8

Tetralemma: the Greek four valued logic.

1. x affirm

2. -x negate

3. x & -x both

4. -(x & -x) neither

What use are the third and fourth values? In Belnap's four valued logic, the fourth value is unknown and the third value is used when redundant senses disagree. Another interpretation: a truth value for meaningless statements. Consider my dog is a terrier when I have no dog. Two valued logic deems such statements invalid, halting the entire line of thought.

9

The liar paradox: This sentence is false. Neither true nor false. All a mind's distinctions are made only to improve the effectiveness of action. Marking beliefs as true or false is no different. It cannot correspond to any real distinction in ultimate reality. No mind can reach a final classification of the paradoxical statement. So what? Neither can you ask how five sounds.

Even if a robust but never learning mind pursued the paradox's endless circle of thought, the mind would at least minimize the work's priority. A variation: This sentence is false. Useless either way. These have no magical, mystical implications. They only expose the limits of a mind's conveniences. The challenge is to make minds that can see and skip a paradox, or at least not die by one.

10

Reason advances by making the apparently unequal equal. Newton exemplified the drive to universal truth by making everything from the Earth to the heavens, in part, equal. Don't misapply this desire to morality, to finding commandments for all towards all. A set of minds bothers with an ethic precisely because it is for an us, alone.

11

Minds invent logic and impose it on reality. Beyond trivial raw sensation, nothing is comparable. Before there is an A for A=A a mind must take X≠Y, forget differences, then make X=A and Y=A. Logic can't be learned from experience because such learning presumes it.

Comments

[jordan retro 11]

Happiness does not drop from the sky ,it's to be created by our hands