School

Academia carries culture like caninity carries rabies.

Money

700 Billion or 700 Trillion no longer sound like the large amounts of money they did in years past.

In 1916, less than 100 years ago, there was exactly one billionaire, JD Rockefeller. Now a billion dollars flows out of the US mint like it was so much cow manure.

That it may be. Money is easy to find and products harder to come-by, we're in for inflation. That can be good and bad; but if our economy needs constant inflation to survive we have a problem - and looking at the growth in the money supply since 1970 versus the population growth compared to the same period in 1870 - 1910 we've got a major problem on our hands - US money is becoming worthless.

Part of me says HURRAY - money is the root of much evil, if it becomes worthless then people will stop pursuing it. Part of me, like many of you, may be scared by this.

Whatever is of fear is sin.

Don't be afraid. What power does the world hold over you but death? Of what value would you be to the powers of this world dead?

If the answer to this is lots, then don't be surprised when it comes, but be blessed, remember that Zechariah was killed in the temple.

If the answer to this is none, then don't worry. But pray to become like Zechariah whom the prince would have killed.

Axiomity

Continuing the discussion of Logic without Axioms

A big question sitting out there in the minds of the anti-historical is "what does logic without axioms look like?"

As no surprise to many, no doubt, it looks like rhetoric for that is the disdainful name given to it by our pseudo-culture. But it takes many forms, and starting with a list is sometimes a good thing.

Law - The laws of people ("You may not bring an elephant into a licensed bar") is a reasoning system without axioms. There are different laws in different lands, and the enforcement of laws and the standards of enforcement and the methods of interpretation, etc., differ from people to people, from land to land, from time to time. In the United States we have a "highest law" - the constitution - but that too is fungible. We have treaties and amendments that occasionally change the substance of the "highest law" and court rulings that fail to change the wording of said laws, but succeed in changing their meaning daily. We are, in that sense, Oligarchical Collectivists in that we can change the meaning of words willy-nilly. 2+2 sometimes equals 5 and sometimes equals 4.

The force of law is literal violence - failure to accord with the law results in torture, imprisonment, fines, injunctions and sometimes death. This law is then normative in a relative sense, normative in the sense that if you don't obey it the enforcers of the law will come and get you. "In the day that you eat of it you will surely die."

Capital - In capitalist society, the practice of getting a good deal is extremely important - you need to pay as little as possible in order to get as much as you can in order to sell it for as much as possible in order to have a profit left-over. This rule, the rule of capitalism I call it, requires cunning and the practice of that cunning is the skill called negotiation. If two people know the rule, the negotiation is harder. Understanding the universal application of the rule is the skill of a good negotiator - someone who can give and take information with the right grains of sand in order to come out "ahead".
The force of the law of capitalism is loss. Failure to living in accord with it makes one poor, downtrodden, sometimes destitute and dead. The extent of this law is limited by the first group of laws - the literal laws of the state. This law, then, is also normative in the sense that if you don't obey it, the enforcers of the law will come and get you, that is, they will make you destitute or make you conform.

In an oligarchist society, the need for "progress" as a rhetorical tool for negotiation is critical. In negotiations there are, generally, winners and losers according to the law of capitalism. Ishmaelites might think of them as "Takers" and "Leavers". However, the destitution of the destitute can become a problem - it must be solved. For if the destitute fail to continue to lose at their negotiations, from whom will the winners gain their profit? There are two answers to this question and they are our other two rhetorical tools in use today.

War - when the losers need an explanation for their losses, they can either look at the winner across the table or they can be directed to look elsewhere. Simultaneously, when the loser-class becomes better at negotiations, the opportunity for winning becomes diminished. Both rhetorical needs are served by War. War expands the class of losers ad-hoc - whenever there is a need for more losers, one conquers them, kills them and subjects them to losing. At the same time, the "losers-at-home" can regard themselves as becoming winners, reaping the rewards of the conquered nation(s). Lastly, the losers are willing to continue to make sacrifices for "the war" because they are led to believe (by negotiation) that winning it will lead them to becoming the winners themselves.

The law of war is obviously also the law of force. If you fail to obey it, you will become conquered, enslaved and possibly killed. We see all around us the activity of the law of war today.

Science - The law of war is limited by the physics of our planet. There are just these continents, just this arable land, just this water, just this coal, just this oil, just this air. There is a lot of it, no doubt, but as the number of winners and losers increase and the losers continue their learning-to-be-winners-at-negotiation the need for Progress is inevitable. Progress takes many forms for science. First is improving the ability for the winners to win and maintain their winning position. Second is the ability for losers to lose more gracefully and come back more quickly. Third is the ability to wage war more effectively.

These logics - Law, Capital, Science, War - are the eternal logics of civilization. We have seen them since the time that Cain killed Abel or that the Inuits made their trek north to escape the onslaught of it (civilization).

There are, perhaps, pre-existing laws, the laws of God so to speak. These are the basic laws that may have, in a sense, been formative in the development of our human laws - at least that's a story we like to tell now. Everyone to live must eat and excrete, be kept reasonably warm and procreate. These human characteristics were handed to us by evolution or God, however you like to think of it. We can imagine, I expect, different kinds of life-forms - that have no need of eating, reproducing or being warm. We imagine, I suspect, rocks being eternally "alive" in some sense. (No, we don't know what life is without food and reproduction, I think.) Humans eat other (the remains of, in general) living things. Not so with all living things. Some living things can metabolize non-living things. Perhaps we could alter ourselves to do this, I don't know.

In any case, the penalty for breaking the laws of evolution or God is death, clearly enough. To live we must eat. To eat we must kill. Our situation is, in that sense, pre-destined. We can't help but be what we are - we don't choose our births. Although we can imagine developing different laws altogether - different laws of human society, different laws of science, different laws of war, our situation is vampiric.

The notion of "Logical Law" does not appear here, except perhaps as a footnote to the law of negotiation, as a precursor to war and science. But if there are logical laws, then, they were not given to us, as it were, by God or evolution. God never said "Thou shalt deduce p from q in these circumstances." That would no doubt have been interesting. Instead we have been given choices - we choose how to deduce, what to deduce when, etc. And these laws of logic which we have created are idolized, and rightly so, by the minions of civilization. For as a negotiation tactic, it's important to be able to control the language of the conversation which are the terms under which the negotiation can happen at all. If these terms are idolized - made into Gods themselves - they become unquestionable in the mind of the minion.

But do the makers of idols believe in the Gods? There's a story that Abram's father was an idol-seller. Abram destroyed the idols in his father's shop and blamed it on one of them in it. His father rightly noted that idols can't do that, they're made of stone, not alive. "Why do you worship them, then?" said Abram. Platonism is this kind of idol-worship, really. We make laws and pretend they were given to us from eternity by the Gods themselves. But we know them to be powerless, smash them and watch what their fathers do.

The Epidemiology of Bias

Think of social/political/religious and psychological factors as
"diseases" infecting our rational processes. (This still assumes that
there is an underlying "rational" process which is really what's at
issue here.)
Let's say we have a population and we want to estimate the likelihood
of infection of any given individual (theorem, piece of information,
etc.) (not of a particular individual, but purely of the chances that
any one of them might be infected).
There will be "factors" affecting our estimation in some ways. Here
are the factors I see (admittedly limited by my perspective) - height,
width, depth, time.
________________

The height of the problem is this:

How dependent on our lower-level abstractions are our higher-level
abstractions. I mean this:

Say theorem N depends on theorem M, M depends on L, ..., B depends on A.

Let's imagine that our acceptance of some, possibly all, the theorems
is infected, we don't know how much, by social/psych factors.

If we were to estimate the "damage" done to N based on the infection
of (A ... M) we could come up with some kind of number (it would be a
wild guess) as to "how infected N is based on the probability of
infection of (A .. L)".

If we estimate the damage to be "random" 50/50 chance of produce a
false theorem at every step, we get roughly 0.006103515625% chance of
N being "true". If we estimate that higher, say 80%, we still get a
very small likelihood that at the level of 14 "theorems high" that the
result is "true".

It seems to me that the further the distance between the base axioms
(in this case A) and the proved theorem (N) the greater the likelihood
of infection across the entire ratiocination.

Let's call this the "remoteness" problem.

"The longer your string of reasoning, the more likely it will include
factors that are infected." I think it's a corollary of Murphy's Law.


______________

The width of the problem is this:

How many different disciplines and axioms (or axiom-systems) are
affected by this problem?

Let's say there are 100 "scholarly disciplines". Of them, a certain
number are likely to be infected by social/psych factors.

We can't say which, since to say which would be to be in a position to
decide which of our reasoning methodologies are socially determined,
which would, in turn, presume to give us an answer to which ones are
not.

We can, however, make an estimate. We might say "The more scholarly
disciplines we have, the more likely that some of them will be thusly
infected."

We'll call this the "sprawling" problem.

_________________________________

The depth of the problem is this:

What is the extent of the infection? "How bad is it?" It may be that
some "truths" are only lightly infected by the social factors
surrounding them and don't transmit them to other areas. It may be
that they are massively infected beyond salvage and they are
constantly causing infections in other areas.

Likely the depth of infection may be related to their height, BUT it's
possible that some of the worst infections are at the root (we would
liken this to having the disease itself in the population of
individuals we're deciding whether or not they're infected, or perhaps
there is a "carrier" parent who infects the entire population by
exposure, but that parent is not itself showing symptoms.)

It may be that some of the infections get worse - that small
infections then become carriers, etc.

We'll call this the "deepness" problem.

_____________________

The temporal aspect of this problem is also multi-dimensional:

SPREAD:
The problem grows. Disciplines increase the number of "bits of
knowledge" in them as a matter of practice. We "learn more things",
"derive more theorems", etc. These increase our height, width and
depth as particular "bits of knowledge" all carry with them the
possibility that they may be "infected". Thus the ancient wisdom "The
more we know, the less we know."

MUTATION:
The nature of the infection may be changing. "Cancer" is "one thing"
but there are varieties of cancer. 'AIDS' is one thing but there are
varieties of the infection. Influenza is one thing, but there are
varieties of it, etc. What if influenza could become cancer? How
would we "doctors" identify the problems?

REACTION:
A cure proposed for one issue may cause more problems elsewhere.
People die of leukemia, but they also sometimes die of the treatment.
Quinine is effective as a prevention for malaria. But if you take too
much it kills you. That is to say, as we involve ourselves in the
problem of "fixing the problem" we may cause more disease.

INTERACTIONS:
While a cold may not kill someone, a person with chronic heart disease
can die of a cough caused by the cold. So too in knowledge,
interactions of different kinds of pathology - religious AND political
AND economic views tend to be behind the Gay Marriage debate, for
instance. Some interactions are new, as new problems are created by
us, the thinkers.

We'll call this the "complexity" problem.

____________________

In short, the problem of the fallibility along the lines of deepness,
sprawling, remoteness and complexity of thinking(s) is pervasive in
human "rational" activity. I think it turns out that our epistemic
situation is worsened by progress.

__________________

The "skeptical solution to the skeptical problem" is thought by some
to be worse than the disease.

But I think this is roughly right - there is no standard of
rationality and any attempt to say that there is is just denial or
political play.

Pretending there are no stones in the field will not make it easier to
plow, though.

If we recognize we have problems, though, we can usually find a way to
work around them.

"The cure" is to swallow the pill - there is no "better logic", no
"correct way of reasoning", no "absolute truths", no "pure empirical
facts", etc. There are only possible pathogens and apparently healthy
activity and various degrees of each. More and less useful ways of
talking and thinking, different standards of usefulness, different
standards of goodness, and no one to decide among them.

Rational Revisability of Logic

Science is provisional in this sense - while we are striving to find "The Absolute Truth", we are also aware that the world via new discoveries, and consequenctly changing ideas can cause us to rationally revise our theories based on new evidence. They can even, occasionally, cause us to want to be more tentative with our judgements in light of various complications regarding a theory.

For instance, with Quantum Mechanics we have many "interpretations of the formalism" from which we have no obvious way to choose. This could change. Our empirical situation might change, our understanding of the mathematics and geometry of the matter might change. We may discover new techniques or new relevant data from other areas that might help us decide among them.

However, what we do know is that we currently don't possess a good "interpretation of quantum mechanics" - good in the sense of there being a definitive reason to choose it from amongst the options. There are many other ideas floating around in "the standard model" that have a similarly tenuous nature. (Godel's theorem, for instance, raises many questions of interpretation.)

For these "tenuous" parts, we objectively give science a pass - we allow it to continue until the matter is decided hoping for the best, sometimes expecting the worst - and we consequently suspect attributing "absolute truth" to those tenuous aspects of our knowledge, recognizing that we may have to revise our ideas. It may turn out that there is a better formulation of quantum physics that someone simply hasn't thought of that would have all the same empirical results but was deterministic. It may turn out that there are better logical and mathematical laws under which Godel's theorem is not derivable.

Those ideas that are "most closely associated with philosophy" also tend to be the ones about which we suspend our judgement. We don't assert that the "standard model" implies the existence of God because we're willing to suspend our judgement about the nature of causation. But we don't assert that the standard model denies the existence of God either. We don't assert that Godel's theorem is "absolutely true" because we don't assert that all the unproved axioms which allow its derivation are themselves known firmly, mostly because the arguments for them tend to be "philosophical" rather than definitive.

The ability to rationally revise our ideas based on evidence is a core scientific value. It is one of the many things that is intended to separate science from non-science.

This revise-ability needs to include our notion of rationality, which is said to be defined by Logic. Logic is the study of the quality of inference - validity, truth preservation, etc. To study this with an eye toward providing a framework in which good inferences are generally made and bad inferences are generally not made is to have a pragmatic view of it. We want our "rules of inference" to allow us to make good inferences - be flexible enough to cover new situations while conservative enough to prevent us from flying wildly off the deep end, so to speak.

If our logical systems were not thusly revisable, what would we call them but philosophy? They would become dogmas, there would be schools, and they would have no grounds by which to decide the matters. Those schools would be motivated primarily by political, economic, religious and psychological factors that have nothing to do with the matter at hand and which would be decidedly anti-science. I think this is the condition we find our philosophy in today.

(Anecdote: A boy at a funeral hears that the dead man is going to a house where there are no friendly neighbors, no roof, no floor and no door. The boy exclaims "Pappa, they're bringing the dead body to our house!")

In philosophical logic we have schools. Intuitionism and Platonism being the "most largely populated" of them, but like democracy, strength in numbers doesn't determine the justice of the matter, only who wins. There are many sub-opinions and even completely conflicting opinions. And, as in politics, the subjugation of the minority views only tends to create disharmony and strife, eventually revolution. The current "malaise" in philosophical logic should be regarded as the symptom of this irrational subjugation. Progress in philosophical logic is being stilted not by lack of interest, but by the inability of the practitioners to treat it as a science - as open to development and even major paradigmatic change - this despite the fact that the tenets of the various schools are the closest to "philosophy" of any scientific practice - the unproved axioms of (insert your variety of logic here).

How can we move forward? The political aspects (and here I mean to include the psychological, political, religious and economic aspects) of logic have already dominated the field, for millennia. Is there any way to remove those aspects of the science that are "inherited" from these political factions and move forward and somehow revive this science, make it more than the mere rhetoric it (effectively) is today. If we could identify them, obviously, different factions might disagree on which ideas were purely political and which ideas weren't.

I submit that there is no removing the purely political from the supposedly rational in this essential science by any rational means.

Any 'rational means' would presuppose an adequate definition of the term "rational" for which the science of logic is searching. If we presume an answer to this question, it would likely have to come from these pre-rational ideas that are the motivating factors in our logics today - politics, religion, economics, psychological idiosyncrasies.

For instance, I started this note by appealing to the scientific notion of rational revise-ability. Good scientific theories, I say, are rationally revisable. If we took this to mean also Logic as a science is rationally revisable, we could use this as a standard for picking a logic - we would pick a logic that allowed us to revise its standards as necessary. But that wouldn't be our only criteria. And many people would object even to this criteria as it, no doubt, wouldn't fit their own political, religious, economic or psychological paradigm. As a result, the only real way to regard my idea of science as rationally revisable beliefs, is as part of a political program (which in my case is obvious enough).

But will the others in the game admit their bias?!

Doubtful, but I'm open to revising my opinion.

Robbie Lindauer

Behind every great war...

is a great woman.