collected thoughts

originally here :

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6848697754173091840/

This is about how we think. Much comes from work in the late ’70s. As with most useful things, once you know, they seem to be common sense. Academics who loathed it, silenced others who understood. Ironically, I owe more to the one who was most distressed.

It’s much easier to respect people if you have some idea how they think. The popular view failing to distinguish between the mind and thinking believes that our brains are logic machines. This desperately under-estimates, even degrades humanity

Logic is vital but it is only a tool. Logicians have struggled to work out how to apply logic to change. The paradox of the arrow illustrates this. If you try to describe its flight without using circular words such as momentum, change or movement, it’s quickly obvious that movement denies logical description. You can go on splitting movement indefinitely, making no end to the task

What we do is as simple as it is clever. We see intermittently. By observing before and after and observing qualities that have not changed and those that have, using logic to compare before with after, we deduce that despite not fully seeing it, change has happened. We get to grips with causality this way. Bits of glass were once a window, broken by a brick

The process is possible because our consciousness is timeless, enabling us to remove time references (which may cause consciousness) from before and after to make the deduction. We have never not been now.

Logic cannot describe change but we use it to recognise and engage with it. Efforts using ‘Deontic logic’ fail because they try to turn a tool into part of what it is working on. It is desperately futile trying to tack time references onto before and after

Another issue is that the logic used by many academics who believe it is master of thinking is classical logic. But our brains use electricity and electronic logic differs in the way it handles the connective ‘or’- what they call ‘the excluded middle’. This is crucial. (Other connectives are: ‘and’, ‘not’ and ‘implies’)

In classical logic, ‘or’ includes the possibility both could be true. In language we use ‘either’ to change the ‘or’ into its electronic equivalent when it will not let a situation where both are true. In an electric circuit, things are ‘either’ on or off. They can’t be be on and off

This post has covered how important logic is as a tool in our thinking but assuming logic is exclusive master of how we think is wrong. It has noted how important it is in recognising and engaging with change and, for the geeks, the classical logicians’ thinking logic is the sole key are doubly wrong in that electronic logic lies beneath words and consciousness

However, the classical logicians’ use of ‘or’ hints of something else. It is in words we use, a foil to logic, the non-logic in our heads.

We think using words and that strange ‘or’ where it can mean ‘one and the other’ as opposed to electronic logic, where ‘or’ must mean ‘either one or the other’. This contradictory situation suggests two huge things: the existence of non-logic and something about the link between synapses flashing away, to memories, words, feelings and beliefs.

The Second Paradox of Reason, evidence of non-logic, applies. We reserve mental effort of applying logic only to sensory input and information we feel is necessary to live our lives. An overwhelming quantity of input is shuffled off in the form of non-logic into memory which we may, very likely never will, dip into when deemed necessary

This vast, chaotic sea of non-logic contains permission for contradiction… just as it can be accessed by our consciousness so it engages with the place where only electronic logic may apply. The logic of electrical impulses engages, maintains and creates non-logic. Classical logic is enabled by consciousness.

Non-logic is accessed by consciousness. Loadings on words enable us to be unconsciously contradictory while genuinely believing what we think is the soul of pure sanity and reason. Our ability to make mistakes is a form of freedom from the iron grip or despotism of electronic logic.

Words can mean much more than we think. The way meaning behaves is strange and liberating. Creativity is unconscious. It is rooted in the phenomenon resulting ideas are not the sum of the ideas that they came from. The same applies to meanings and also to the utility of invention, despite the determined way the process happened. In this way, there is freedom in determination.

It is easy to recoil from such seeming complexity to find wisdom in Milton’s observation of the fallen angels:

“In discourse more sweet
(For Eloquence the Soul, Song charms the Sense)
Others apart sat on a hill retired,
In thoughts more elevate, and reasoned high
Of Providence, Foreknowledge, Will, and Fate-
Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute,
And found no end, in wandering mazes lost.
Of good and evil much they argued then,
Of happiness and final misery,
Passion and apathy, and glory and shame:
Vain wisdom all, and false philosophy!”

On the other hand, philsophers possess a certain form of vanity, that tempts fate.

We have three domains. Conscious thought, memory (all memory is unconscious) and the domain of electronic logic where words and classical logic have no place. Consciousness is a tiny scrap; memory stands between it and the mechanics of the brain.

The key to all this is consciousness enabling access to memory, a grasp of causality and perspective on time without which we could not be timeless. Every time I hear a linguistic philosopher, I despair that the plunging depth of the unsophisticated shallowness of intelligent, educated people should generate such appalling ignorance.

Humans so debased are in danger of being considered worthless.

Most of the foregoing covered old ground from a different perspective. The new part was observing Electronic Logic appears to apply in the mechanical working of the brain where Classical Logic applies in conscious thought… but with non-logic smuggled in through loadings of words.

What we intend is not always what the words mean. Non-logic can influence how we think through the loading of words because words relate to one another. (We can only identify contradiction, not imagine it).

In this way, words can associate with one another in thinking, oblivious to consciousness. This process can create a three dimensional internal view of the World, its rights and wrongs along with moral, social and political objectives. To consciousness all this seems intuitively true, right and correct… without realizing these beliefs are the result of a construct smuggled into their thoughts by loaded words creating what they believe.

Once installed, this strange creature takes possession. Its primary objective is survival. Like a cuckoo chick, it eliminates any beliefs that might threaten its becoming the sole ‘loved one’. Although consciousness is denied the right to question this construct, it is quite capable of defending the creature that enslaves it to the death, on the basis that once all competing beliefs have been wiped out, ‘I think, hence I am’ still applies. Reduced to the ultimate servility, consciousness becomes the willing and ardent slave of this mental cuckoo.

People so wretched are called ideologues

That chaotic place, between where electronic logic solely applies and the classical logic of conscious thought, is perfect for ideological possession to take hold. Non-logic puts delusion, fantasy, and ignorance itself on the same level as perspective, fact and expertise. In such a place opportunities to exploit uncertainty, fear and a yearning to ‘make sense’ of things abound for the cuckoo to build a fake reality. What you think makes you who you are; that you think makes you.

So possessed, people are not themselves – literally. That is because they are slaves to something they let take over. The survival imperative secure, the second one is to spread the word to make others build the same mental prisons and turn into their own prison warders.

Sticks and stones may break my bones… but words can silently destroy humanity. Ideologues live in a mental prison unaware they made it themselves. Question them and that cuckoo will tell them it is you who is all things bad and inhuman. I can think of nothing more desperate, pathetic, gross and socially dangerous.

I have covered what many academics would extend to a lifetime of scribbling. But if only a few words are useful, far better than the unspeakable negativity of modern Academic Relativism. Thank you for your patience.