| [text in process]
06/16/04
Image
Credit: Adapted from an image in Probabilistic Logics: the thinking
programmer’s accessory by Carroll Morgan and Annabelle McIver.
Click the image to explore their work.
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The study of logic is the study of the biocognitive
technology of representational thought (there’s a paradox
there if you can spot it). Since nearly all of our volitional
activities are sourced in games of distibguishing, naming, linkage
and parsing, it falls to reason that the efficacy of the toys
we invent and together enact to accomplish these things dictate
the relative beneficence or tyranny both of our ways of knowing
and their products in human and personal history. They also prescribe
the elemental efficacy of our learning abilities.
o:O:o
The character of our initial exposures to language
and culture in childhood prefigure the unique rationalities that
we will express and depend upon as they complexify throughout our
experience. Formal and informal logics arise in the wake of our
initial exposures to representational consciousness in infancy;
thereafter, our emotional, semantic, and relational faculties accrue
their founding character from the human logics we elaborate and
express together.
Formal logics are purposed by definition with being
transports to the adept solution of challenges in various dimensions
of thought or action. Endowed with the ability to generate distinctive
tokens and modes of linking or relating them, we use them assemble
and sustain ‘rational’ pseudosystems of organizational
intelligence whose goal is the meaningful and beneficial reconciliation
of what was previously divided with the same toy.
These systematic yet imaginal activities form the
substrate of our awareness of meaning and relation, and we enact
them to emphasize or reveal hidden opportunities and to bring forth
symmetry from the seeming chaos of undefined entities.
The
Logos
Before
abstraction became popularly credentialed over nearly everything
else, Logic
referred to the progenerative emanations of The Logos
as the basis of reality itself. The Logos is the proper name of
the being who is the source and inspiration of order and
intelligence in form, thought and relation. The generally intended
comparator could be reasonably translated into ‘celestial
teacher-friend-agent’. Usually this refers to a living transport
(a being) who is the ‘keeper’ of the universal library
(a living library), in others the name is synonymous with a connectivity-organ
(who is a being in its own right) within the body of God.
I do not believe that our near
and distant ancestors were inventing religious fictions to explain
a universe they were ill-equipped to accurately understand. In fact
I am certain that they had direct experiential contact with an entity
nearly all of us would instantly agree actually qualifies as a non-human
intelligence, and that this contact was in part responsible for
the emergence and preservation of formal logics, possibly even of
language itself.
Behind our beliefs and ways
of discussing them is an accessible reality near at hand, and we
must have the safety and encouragement to explore this without dogmatic
codicils having previously explained or denounced what we may discover
there. If our cultural and linguistic biases render this impossible
we lose the majority of our birthrights of sentient connectivity
as an immediate result, and this translates into lost connectivity
with each other and our potentials of human unity (such as the establishment
or preservation of liberty).
None of our sources
or relations are naturally abstract or mechanical, and rendering
them in this likeness denies us the connectivity necessary to explore
them at all. We are more than models in every possible sense, but
if we are coerced into defining ourselves with reductions of what
we are or may become — we will consistently ‘grow} to
be less of what we are — achieving ever-greater likeness with
the tokens and codicils originally assembled as guarantors of our
liberty. Somehow, this bizarre activity has become confused with
comprehension, and truth be told, logics have been as deadly
in these domains as they have been helpful. It turns out that having
a logic is one thing, and having survivable logics quite another.
o:O:o
A
Founding Polarity — The First Division...
In almost every case, one of
two positions lie at the root of our modes of learning and knowing:
One: Everything is Thing first,
and the universe is fundamentally pseudomechanical, as are all participants.
This is the inference-basis of the scientific method as we modernly
practice and understand it. It is simulative more than it is connective,
and leads us to emulate abstraction in our assembly of identity,
relation, and thought. In this case, ‘abstract’ means
‘having subtracted all poetics and organismal likeness’.
Two: Everything is an instance
of a single Being first, and ensues from the activity of
a unified transentient source. This position requires we directly
explore the potentials of contact with each other, our sources,
and the endless frontiers that lie hidden just beneath our tokens.
We become whichever one we grant
precedence to.
The problem isn’t that we’ve discovered
abstraction but rather what happens when we credential it in
precedence to organismal and relational connectivity. In this
case we end up trapped in a shrinking domain of multiplying mirrors
who by their nature exclude nearly all of what may be seen in precedence
to their amazing silvery shine.
o:O:o
To
Isolate and Reconcile
Let’s model an imaginal bubble in which we re-present
our relations with reality to ourselves — the place where
our consciousness is assembled, sustained and elaborated. The whole
terrain is generally reflective, and the aspect we are concerned
with is a sort of mirror in what relation and experience are assembled
into meaning. Our awareness becomes interpretable only in relation
to this inward mirror, where we employ a logical toy (a rod) to
differentiate elements from contexts and re-link them into meaningful
symmetries.
As we approach this place, the reflection is like
water in chaotic motion — impressions of potential symmetries,
noise, and fields of context are all splashing around together.
With the ‘dividing end’ of the rod we locate and stabilize
candidate-symmetries from their less differentiated peers. These
we set apart from context and errata as significant figurative entities.
When we have established a suitable ‘family’
of these and ascribed general degrees of precedence to each element,
we turn the toy around and use the other end to unify them, producing
a metaphor, or vehicle of knowing. We may then compare this imaginal
symmetry to various lexicons we’ve accrued, and if the lexicons
are common we can easily record the event to ourselves, and later
‘recall’ it for consideration or reporting.
The
universe, the perciever, the mirror and the logicRod.
In waking consciousness these activities follow patterns
generally enforced by circumstance, biases in language, and enculturation.
During dreaming these filters fall away, and the experience of interacting
with our imaginal mirror regains its natural progenerative creativity.
We can immediately see that two very distinct forms of lexicon are
being elaborated in during these polarized states, and that their
purposes are often directly at odds.
The lexicons to which we compare
the produce of our logics for verification or recording are not
like our physical indexes such as books or computer memory —
they are fundamentally aware of threats to their own survival and
reproduction first and foremost, and are naturally inspired to dominate
every available terrain without regard for consequences in an attempt
to gain precedence over these threats. Unfortunately the outcome
of this is often the same as in human ‘civilization’,
the aggressors rule the table at all times. These fictive
comparison-indexes are far more like organisms than books, and
their home in human consciousness is more like an ecosystem than
a library.
If the lexicons empowered by
our common comparison to them are truly intelligent the outcomes
of the enaction and reproduction of these comparisons will be favorable
to organisms, intelligence and liberty — if not, they will
in almost every case virulently oppose these benefits, in scalarly
progressive waves of velocity and effect..
Not all ways of knowing are
created equal, and it is generally dangerous to apply or credential
one form above all others.
o:O:o
Masquerade
and Mastery
We are generally convinced that our modern modes of
valuing and knowing are dependable enough to act as a rational basis
for thought and action, and we teach other other to abide by this
across the gaps of person, generation and culture. Unfortunately,
the ways we were taught to employ in the assembly of knowledge and
comparison are cruelly erroneous in general, and our modern implementations
fail to sustain much if any accord with the sources and ‘rationality’
they claim to represent. Those sources are themselves formally
delinquent when applied beyond their functional domains of efficacy,
yet somehow we apply them to whatever scale or domain we desire
as if blind to the deadly dangers of this activity.
As we magnify our misrepresentations of already erroneous
forms of interpretation in our moment-to-moment experience the artifacts
of meaning and relation we assemble as a result become increasingly
interested in their own preservation and dominance —
and they drag us along on their mission as a source of fuel.
The ongoing enaction and entrenchment of these momentums in our
cultures and education lead us directly into isolation, conflict,
and loss. Generally the next stop on the line is confusion about
how we got there.
Because we represent
ourselves and our experience in an imaginal universe, we must understand
and employ successful strategies there, otherwise enacting our ‘knowledge’
over here in reality generates cataclysm. Unfortunately the logics
we create and employ are in fact only toys, and possess no property
which obstructs us from misapplying them. In fact, because they
are pseudo-mechanical and we find this endlessly attractive we can
end up in a situation where the logics that drive war are the logics
we preserve simply because they are the most adept cognitive terrain
predators.
If we do not have mastery over
the dimensions prior to the assembly, manipulation and
valuing of the token-like outcomes of logic, our toys are far
more likely to be dangerous than helpful. Empowered to deal
quasi-intelligently with products of a very limited set
of knowledge games — rather than their sources and and purposes
of assembly — we become hypnotized by the shiny quality
of the tokens produced, mistaking them as sacred and inviolable.
This leads to their entreanchment as common arbiters of agreement
and ‘normalcy’.
For about as long as our species
has been able to experience and express abstract representational
consciousness this foible has been a deadly consequence of the supposed
‘intelligence’ that separates us from the animalian
kingdoms of our world.
o:O:o
When our logics grow too self-important or vastly
misrepresent their sources or function they lead in nearly every
case to ugly and unnecessary consequences which generally begin
with enforcement. Any form or agent of a way of knowing which delivers
atrocity instead of progress is at increasing risk of being silenced
by the revelation of its self-inflating costs of enaction and preservation.
Such entities must provide for their survival by sustaining
the distributed illusion of rewards which will never be delivered,
and the cost of this pursuit grows in exponential proportion to
attentional activation of the host populations involved.
Consider that if human representational
logics are more like animals than imaginal systems, (they live in
animals, after all) they may masquerade when threatened
— and logics which are false by nature are always threatened.
What might they masquerade as? One obvious answer is effective transports
to something they in fact have no relation to — like intelligence.
Many logics mimic superficial
likeness with intelligence (sophistication) as their primary
active function in order to sustain their survival and reproduction
opportunities. Their only real function is to dominate terrain,
convert it such that it further envitalizes this dominance, and
reproduce. The terrains which fall to their invasion are those which
were in every case held by far more useful and beneficial cognitive
momentums. Since ‘the beneificials’ are not warlike
in their elaborative activity, and generally don’t spend momentum
advertising themselves loudly they have little defense against the
mechanico-predatory onslaught of mimetic invaders.
For at least the past 1500 years at least, our species
has been trapped playing war with the exhaust-products of aristotlian
Logic instead of having common access to the sources and potentials
of logics in general — particularly those we were born completely
and complexly empowered to explore and express.
o:O:o
This
is Not our beautiful house...
Our obligation to enact and magnify the explosive
costs of the logics we employ arises from teaching and sustaining
intimacy with the products of a given way of knowing, in
precedence over the sources of logics in general. If we
teach each other and our children to be fluent in the recognizing
the outcomes of aristotlian Logic, we can learn to form
statements that simulate features of a logical statement
— without actually having any logical validity.
Instead of understanding the toy in use, or the sources
from which such toys are assembled, we must invent our own personal
misreflection based on an erroneous reverse-engineering
of the tokens we possess or contact. These ‘homegrown’
logics are intransigent once endowed, and as their hosts we must
ever-more habitually emulate logics we’ve no working comprehension
of.
In this form of cognitive binding, our knowledge- related
activities will radically magnify the same errors over and over
again because in the psuedosystem we are using to achieve discernment
and valuing, these are do not appear to be errors.
In reality they are the fruit of homegrown imposters
of aristotlian Logic, which itself is too commonly a substitute
for logics with far more universal applicability and effective problem-solving
prowess. The ongoing produce of these logics are badly broken (and
very defensive) instances locally unique ‘misreflections’
of aristotlianism. As these collect into groups and cultures, nations
and religions — the result is an ever-more aggressively divisive
relational holocaust.
The answers to these problems and the opportunities
to transcend them entirely lie in close examination of the toys
we’ve so long depended upon, as well as the unexplored universes
of those we’ve unknowingly cast aside in their favor.
o:O:o
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