True nature of logic
- Shanks
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True nature of logic
Just because something has happened a certain way every single time we have taken an observation, is it guaranteed to happen the same way the next time?
If an apple is seen to fall down from a tree a million times, is it guaranteed to fall down a million and one-th time?
No, there is no surety it will. Similarly, even if gravity and other modern scientific laws are observed to be true a trillion times, there really is no guarantee it will be true the next day. We just assume it always will. But there is no law in this universe that guarantees that. It seems a basic assumption of science is: there are some basic laws that will always be true
But it is only an assumption, the universe doesn't guarantee it, God doesn't guarantee it.
I think what this means is that, literally everything, is logically possible, and we can never 100% rule out any possibility. Science cannot rule out God, nor can it rule out that I will wake up tomorrow in the body of a lioness. Science only has observations, it doesn't have the rulebook of the universe.
It is based on an assumption, and there is no reason why that assumption must be true.
And this makes me feel scared sometimes. Think. There is no guarantee you will be rewarded for your hard work. No guarantee, even if everything happens right, that you will live a good life. Even if everything happens in your favor scientifically, well there's always a chance the universe says "screw science" and just give you immeasurable suffering randomly. In fact there is no reason why that can't happen, we just assume it won't.
Worst of all, we toil hard, see our friends and family and others work hard, suffer, and pin everything they have on this one basic assumption, which has no reason to be true. For example, a father working his ass off to pay medical bills for his disabled daughter could wake up to find his daughter dead for no reason. Everything he has in his life could crash all in one moment. There is no reason why it can't happen. And it isn't even a game of probability, because probability assumes that past events are linked to the future events, and can be used to make predictions of the future.
But in reality, every event possible must be, "logically", equally likely, since we have no real laws to tell them apart, only the assumption that what happened in the past will also happen the same way in the future. Only an assumption, nothing else.
- Shanks
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Re: True nature of logic
What this also means, is that a truly logical being will never do anything because it doesn't have any concrete laws to rely on and it cannot logically justify why past observations must be linked to the future either. Equivalently, it may do anything it wishes because there is no reason why one set of actions is better than another. So no reason why doing nothing is better than doing something. They are all equally good options for it. The universe is lawless to it unless it figures out some new information.
Then it means human being are not completely logical beings either. As I type this, I rely on the same assumption that I talked about earlier, and consider this course of action better than others. My actions therefore are completely irrational. There is no way to justify them. It is just that I have a desire, and I'm hoping the said assumption is true and will help me fulfill my desires, even though I cannot logically justify it. My human instincts want me to believe that there is a pattern. In fact my instincts developed like this in the first place because there was a pattern, and because it contained a link to predicting the future. There is still no way to guarantee that the patterns always work, or will continue to work, but biological systems discovered that their best bet to survival was working under the assumption that it will mostly work.
So, we ultimately act based on desires: The unsatisfaction with our current state of being. Science and logic are just ways we devised to help with our desire for a favorable change of state. They mostly worked, because the universe didn't change its laws for whatever reason, and will hopefully (or maybe not) continue to do so. But ultimately human scientific analysis is not logical, it is all at its core based on the assumption that patterns repeat in the future and will continue to do so. And there is no reason to take that assumption and do all the analysis based off of that, but we do it because of our desire, which is irrational and hence a being without desire will simply do nothing (or equivalently, it will do anything at random).
So human beings are not perfectly logical spectators of the universe, instead, to a perfectly logical spectator, they are something completely random, one possibility among countless others, since there are no laws bounding the universe for the perfect spectator who is devoid of desire and can only think logically.
By the way, while we base our lives on this assumption, the possibility that this assumption will always hold is also a scary one. If the universe only follows a set of laws forever, then anything which those laws don't permit cannot happen. In that case, God might not exist, there may not be an afterlife, there may not be a greater purpose, since our laws don't imply any such things. So I like to hope that the laws will break at some point, maybe after my death, maybe at the end of time. And then what will happen? The possibilities are endless, and all equally likely to us, as we don't have information to distinguish different possibilities.
I don't like any of this. As a kid, I learned optimism from the grown ups. I always thought that they had secret knowledge I didn't, which made the world simple and not so complicated, and that's why they were not as puzzled by all these things as I was, and so they could focus on simpler things like money and prestige. But now, I feel that people just have learnt to ignore all this. We are taught to be logical so we can pass exams, do well in our jobs, etc. But nobody really knows why all this works, yet they don't even bother with this question. It is because we really have no answers. We are 100% in the dark, yet everybody pretends, or perhaps even believes that we aren't. And being 100% in the dark is scary. It is also exciting, as in the event that the laws break down, the possibility of bad things is the same as possibility of incredibly good things, and so is the possibility of everything else.
Maybe we wake up after death in a perfect world tailored to our needs and which fulfills all our desires.
Maybe it's eternal hell.
Maybe it's neither, maybe we never wake up at all.
And countless other possibilities, all equally likely.
- LuckyR
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Re: True nature of logic
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Re: True nature of logic
HiShanks wrote: ↑November 7th, 2022, 7:17 am What is logic? I think it is making observations of the universe, and then finding patterns in these observations to guess the future events in the universe. But what guarantees that a pattern that is true today will not break down tommorrow?
Just because something has happened a certain way every single time we have taken an observation, is it guaranteed to happen the same way the next time?
If an apple is seen to fall down from a tree a million times, is it guaranteed to fall down a million and one-th time?
No, there is no surety it will. Similarly, even if gravity and other modern scientific laws are observed to be true a trillion times, there really is no guarantee it will be true the next day. We just assume it always will. But there is no law in this universe that guarantees that. It seems a basic assumption of science is: there are some basic laws that will always be true
But it is only an assumption, the universe doesn't guarantee it, God doesn't guarantee it.
I think what this means is that, literally everything, is logically possible, and we can never 100% rule out any possibility. Science cannot rule out God, nor can it rule out that I will wake up tomorrow in the body of a lioness. Science only has observations, it doesn't have the rulebook of the universe.
It is based on an assumption, and there is no reason why that assumption must be true.
And this makes me feel scared sometimes. Think. There is no guarantee you will be rewarded for your hard work. No guarantee, even if everything happens right, that you will live a good life. Even if everything happens in your favor scientifically, well there's always a chance the universe says "screw science" and just give you immeasurable suffering randomly. In fact there is no reason why that can't happen, we just assume it won't.
Worst of all, we toil hard, see our friends and family and others work hard, suffer, and pin everything they have on this one basic assumption, which has no reason to be true. For example, a father working his ass off to pay medical bills for his disabled daughter could wake up to find his daughter dead for no reason. Everything he has in his life could crash all in one moment. There is no reason why it can't happen. And it isn't even a game of probability, because probability assumes that past events are linked to the future events, and can be used to make predictions of the future.
But in reality, every event possible must be, "logically", equally likely, since we have no real laws to tell them apart, only the assumption that what happened in the past will also happen the same way in the future. Only an assumption, nothing else.
Logic is about truth evaluation of statements and propositions. Because of semantic issues it has some elements of epistemology, and the question you ask about statements on the future does sometimes occur in formal logic, although it is really an epistemological one. .
There are two opinions in academia. One holds that statements about the future are evaluated in the same way as inductions. That means the resolution of a statement can only be probabilistic unless the statistical likelihood is null, in which case the statement is false. If the statement is also the conclusion of a proposition, the premises must also be valid
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inductive_reasoning
The other opinion holds that the above perspective is technically accurate, but unreasonable as a method of evaluation for natural language. Generally speaking, if a future event is so likely to occur that one would not reasonably hold it not to happen, then the statement should be evaluated as true, because it is for all intents and purposes the event is certain to occur. Those wishing to define the level of certainty consider the context in which it is stated, now frequently referred to as the statement's DISPOSITION. The common example is the sun rising tomorrow.
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Re: True nature of logic
?Sorry, I should have stated the counterargument to the second opinion.ernestm wrote: ↑November 8th, 2022, 7:31 amHiShanks wrote: ↑November 7th, 2022, 7:17 am What is logic? I think it is making observations of the universe, and then finding patterns in these observations to guess the future events in the universe. But what guarantees that a pattern that is true today will not break down tommorrow?
Just because something has happened a certain way every single time we have taken an observation, is it guaranteed to happen the same way the next time?
If an apple is seen to fall down from a tree a million times, is it guaranteed to fall down a million and one-th time?
No, there is no surety it will. Similarly, even if gravity and other modern scientific laws are observed to be true a trillion times, there really is no guarantee it will be true the next day. We just assume it always will. But there is no law in this universe that guarantees that. It seems a basic assumption of science is: there are some basic laws that will always be true
But it is only an assumption, the universe doesn't guarantee it, God doesn't guarantee it.
I think what this means is that, literally everything, is logically possible, and we can never 100% rule out any possibility. Science cannot rule out God, nor can it rule out that I will wake up tomorrow in the body of a lioness. Science only has observations, it doesn't have the rulebook of the universe.
It is based on an assumption, and there is no reason why that assumption must be true.
And this makes me feel scared sometimes. Think. There is no guarantee you will be rewarded for your hard work. No guarantee, even if everything happens right, that you will live a good life. Even if everything happens in your favor scientifically, well there's always a chance the universe says "screw science" and just give you immeasurable suffering randomly. In fact there is no reason why that can't happen, we just assume it won't.
Worst of all, we toil hard, see our friends and family and others work hard, suffer, and pin everything they have on this one basic assumption, which has no reason to be true. For example, a father working his ass off to pay medical bills for his disabled daughter could wake up to find his daughter dead for no reason. Everything he has in his life could crash all in one moment. There is no reason why it can't happen. And it isn't even a game of probability, because probability assumes that past events are linked to the future events, and can be used to make predictions of the future.
But in reality, every event possible must be, "logically", equally likely, since we have no real laws to tell them apart, only the assumption that what happened in the past will also happen the same way in the future. Only an assumption, nothing else.
Logic is about truth evaluation of statements and propositions. Because of semantic issues it has some elements of epistemology, and the question you ask about statements on the future does sometimes occur in formal logic, although it is really an epistemological one. .
There are two opinions in academia. One holds that statements about the future are evaluated in the same way as inductions. That means the resolution of a statement can only be probabilistic unless the statistical likelihood is null, in which case the statement is false. If the statement is also the conclusion of a proposition, the premises must also be valid
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inductive_reasoning
The other opinion holds that the above perspective is technically accurate, but unreasonable as a method of evaluation for natural language. Generally speaking, if a future event is so likely to occur that one would not reasonably hold it not to happen, then the statement should be evaluated as true, because it is for all intents and purposes the event is certain to occur. Those wishing to define the level of certainty consider the context in which it is stated, now frequently referred to as the statement's DISPOSITION. The common example is the sun rising tomorrow.
Advocates of a strict definition of truth in formal logic get into deeper semantic, or more properly stated, 'semiotic' issues. They are concerned that the dispositional properties of the symbols are not explicitly stated, and therefore loosening the definition of truth in this way enables subjectivism.
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Re: True nature of logic
logic is the tool by which knowledge is sistematically organized, and information is conveyed and discussed.
It is the most reliable and effective tool we have, but not the only one, and not always the best.
But logic has no intrinsic ontological value. Because something is logical, it does not mean that it is true or "real" in the-world-of-things, real. Or vice versa.
And if you think that logic has the intrinsic power to "reveal the true nature of things", well, okay, as long as you are aware that it is a legitimate but arbitrary, irrational, and fideistic axiom
- Pattern-chaser
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Re: True nature of logic
I think it is nothing to do with our observations, but that logic is a way of checking or testing our thinking/thoughts, to confirm their correctness and suitability-for-purpose.
"Who cares, wins"
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Re: True nature of logic
No. The emphasis of completely wrong.
Logic is about an analysis of language and need not consult any observations of nature, or patterns in the universe.
It's about reasoning, validity and inference. It's more to do with how we express and describe cohernently.
For example the logic of atheism is about the lack of validity of the means used by theists to demonstrate their creed, not not a claim about the non existence of a thing that cannot exists. It is about the the logical rejection of a poor demonstrated claim for which no observations of god can be made.
Logic in computer circuits represent a complete self referral system of circular arguments as related to pre-designed circuits and algorithms. It's not about making observations. But about predicting with certainty the outputs from known inputs.
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Re: True nature of logic
Yes, logic is more about testing or confirming our patterns and practices of thought, not those thoughts themselves.
Boolean logic is one logic; formal logic — the sort that uses all those symbols that I can never get the hang of — is another. But "logic" is also more general, as you describe above.
In computer logic, outcomes are predictable and certain, barring unusual external influence such as airborne transient glitches, and the like. But "logic" is rarely used to describe Boolean logic, except by computer-professional nerds like me.
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Re: True nature of logic
The short answer is that logic (a priori) is produced by a human mind. A subjective mind (subjective idealism). As such, the most secure form of reasoning is deductive logic (a priori). Yet deduction has many inherent paradoxes. Two quick examples would be the unchanging nature of deduction and mathematics in a world of change. And the metaphysics (abstract a priori concepts) of numbers themselves.Shanks wrote: ↑November 7th, 2022, 7:17 am What is logic? I think it is making observations of the universe, and then finding patterns in these observations to guess the future events in the universe. But what guarantees that a pattern that is true today will not break down tommorrow?
Just because something has happened a certain way every single time we have taken an observation, is it guaranteed to happen the same way the next time?
If an apple is seen to fall down from a tree a million times, is it guaranteed to fall down a million and one-th time?
No, there is no surety it will. Similarly, even if gravity and other modern scientific laws are observed to be true a trillion times, there really is no guarantee it will be true the next day. We just assume it always will. But there is no law in this universe that guarantees that. It seems a basic assumption of science is: there are some basic laws that will always be true
But it is only an assumption, the universe doesn't guarantee it, God doesn't guarantee it.
I think what this means is that, literally everything, is logically possible, and we can never 100% rule out any possibility. Science cannot rule out God, nor can it rule out that I will wake up tomorrow in the body of a lioness. Science only has observations, it doesn't have the rulebook of the universe.
It is based on an assumption, and there is no reason why that assumption must be true.
And this makes me feel scared sometimes. Think. There is no guarantee you will be rewarded for your hard work. No guarantee, even if everything happens right, that you will live a good life. Even if everything happens in your favor scientifically, well there's always a chance the universe says "screw science" and just give you immeasurable suffering randomly. In fact there is no reason why that can't happen, we just assume it won't.
Worst of all, we toil hard, see our friends and family and others work hard, suffer, and pin everything they have on this one basic assumption, which has no reason to be true. For example, a father working his ass off to pay medical bills for his disabled daughter could wake up to find his daughter dead for no reason. Everything he has in his life could crash all in one moment. There is no reason why it can't happen. And it isn't even a game of probability, because probability assumes that past events are linked to the future events, and can be used to make predictions of the future.
But in reality, every event possible must be, "logically", equally likely, since we have no real laws to tell them apart, only the assumption that what happened in the past will also happen the same way in the future. Only an assumption, nothing else.
The most fundamental problem is that while deduction is a priori, it takes a conscious mind to compute the formula and understand it. Hence it requires the experience of having an experience to produce its results. So when we talk about the true 'nature of things', a priori logic is not really a priori at all. It requires experience to understand it. Perhaps think of it like time and relativity. Logic could be a similar kind of optical delusion.
To that end, logic has its limitations, as most everything else in a world of existential finitude. It's just a tool that helps us make some 'sense' of the world. A pretty effective tool, nonetheless. Very practical. However, one could still ask, what kind of 'sense' is that? Is logic itself just a means to some end? What is the true nature of reality?
A human being is part of a whole, called by us the “Universe,” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest— a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.---Albert Einstein
― Albert Einstein
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Re: True nature of logic
You think exactly like I do that's crazy...I'm sorry...Shanks wrote: ↑November 7th, 2022, 9:12 am Extension to above:
What this also means, is that a truly logical being will never do anything because it doesn't have any concrete laws to rely on and it cannot logically justify why past observations must be linked to the future either. Equivalently, it may do anything it wishes because there is no reason why one set of actions is better than another. So no reason why doing nothing is better than doing something. They are all equally good options for it. The universe is lawless to it unless it figures out some new information.
Then it means human being are not completely logical beings either. As I type this, I rely on the same assumption that I talked about earlier, and consider this course of action better than others. My actions therefore are completely irrational. There is no way to justify them. It is just that I have a desire, and I'm hoping the said assumption is true and will help me fulfill my desires, even though I cannot logically justify it. My human instincts want me to believe that there is a pattern. In fact my instincts developed like this in the first place because there was a pattern, and because it contained a link to predicting the future. There is still no way to guarantee that the patterns always work, or will continue to work, but biological systems discovered that their best bet to survival was working under the assumption that it will mostly work.
So, we ultimately act based on desires: The unsatisfaction with our current state of being. Science and logic are just ways we devised to help with our desire for a favorable change of state. They mostly worked, because the universe didn't change its laws for whatever reason, and will hopefully (or maybe not) continue to do so. But ultimately human scientific analysis is not logical, it is all at its core based on the assumption that patterns repeat in the future and will continue to do so. And there is no reason to take that assumption and do all the analysis based off of that, but we do it because of our desire, which is irrational and hence a being without desire will simply do nothing (or equivalently, it will do anything at random).
So human beings are not perfectly logical spectators of the universe, instead, to a perfectly logical spectator, they are something completely random, one possibility among countless others, since there are no laws bounding the universe for the perfect spectator who is devoid of desire and can only think logically.
By the way, while we base our lives on this assumption, the possibility that this assumption will always hold is also a scary one. If the universe only follows a set of laws forever, then anything which those laws don't permit cannot happen. In that case, God might not exist, there may not be an afterlife, there may not be a greater purpose, since our laws don't imply any such things. So I like to hope that the laws will break at some point, maybe after my death, maybe at the end of time. And then what will happen? The possibilities are endless, and all equally likely to us, as we don't have information to distinguish different possibilities.
I don't like any of this. As a kid, I learned optimism from the grown ups. I always thought that they had secret knowledge I didn't, which made the world simple and not so complicated, and that's why they were not as puzzled by all these things as I was, and so they could focus on simpler things like money and prestige. But now, I feel that people just have learnt to ignore all this. We are taught to be logical so we can pass exams, do well in our jobs, etc. But nobody really knows why all this works, yet they don't even bother with this question. It is because we really have no answers. We are 100% in the dark, yet everybody pretends, or perhaps even believes that we aren't. And being 100% in the dark is scary. It is also exciting, as in the event that the laws break down, the possibility of bad things is the same as possibility of incredibly good things, and so is the possibility of everything else.
Maybe we wake up after death in a perfect world tailored to our needs and which fulfills all our desires.
Maybe it's eternal hell.
Maybe it's neither, maybe we never wake up at all.
And countless other possibilities, all equally likely.
- Shanks
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Re: True nature of logic
Woah. Good to knowMAYA EL wrote: ↑January 7th, 2023, 11:21 amYou think exactly like I do that's crazy...I'm sorry...Shanks wrote: ↑November 7th, 2022, 9:12 am Extension to above:
What this also means, is that a truly logical being will never do anything because it doesn't have any concrete laws to rely on and it cannot logically justify why past observations must be linked to the future either. Equivalently, it may do anything it wishes because there is no reason why one set of actions is better than another. So no reason why doing nothing is better than doing something. They are all equally good options for it. The universe is lawless to it unless it figures out some new information.
Then it means human being are not completely logical beings either. As I type this, I rely on the same assumption that I talked about earlier, and consider this course of action better than others. My actions therefore are completely irrational. There is no way to justify them. It is just that I have a desire, and I'm hoping the said assumption is true and will help me fulfill my desires, even though I cannot logically justify it. My human instincts want me to believe that there is a pattern. In fact my instincts developed like this in the first place because there was a pattern, and because it contained a link to predicting the future. There is still no way to guarantee that the patterns always work, or will continue to work, but biological systems discovered that their best bet to survival was working under the assumption that it will mostly work.
So, we ultimately act based on desires: The unsatisfaction with our current state of being. Science and logic are just ways we devised to help with our desire for a favorable change of state. They mostly worked, because the universe didn't change its laws for whatever reason, and will hopefully (or maybe not) continue to do so. But ultimately human scientific analysis is not logical, it is all at its core based on the assumption that patterns repeat in the future and will continue to do so. And there is no reason to take that assumption and do all the analysis based off of that, but we do it because of our desire, which is irrational and hence a being without desire will simply do nothing (or equivalently, it will do anything at random).
So human beings are not perfectly logical spectators of the universe, instead, to a perfectly logical spectator, they are something completely random, one possibility among countless others, since there are no laws bounding the universe for the perfect spectator who is devoid of desire and can only think logically.
By the way, while we base our lives on this assumption, the possibility that this assumption will always hold is also a scary one. If the universe only follows a set of laws forever, then anything which those laws don't permit cannot happen. In that case, God might not exist, there may not be an afterlife, there may not be a greater purpose, since our laws don't imply any such things. So I like to hope that the laws will break at some point, maybe after my death, maybe at the end of time. And then what will happen? The possibilities are endless, and all equally likely to us, as we don't have information to distinguish different possibilities.
I don't like any of this. As a kid, I learned optimism from the grown ups. I always thought that they had secret knowledge I didn't, which made the world simple and not so complicated, and that's why they were not as puzzled by all these things as I was, and so they could focus on simpler things like money and prestige. But now, I feel that people just have learnt to ignore all this. We are taught to be logical so we can pass exams, do well in our jobs, etc. But nobody really knows why all this works, yet they don't even bother with this question. It is because we really have no answers. We are 100% in the dark, yet everybody pretends, or perhaps even believes that we aren't. And being 100% in the dark is scary. It is also exciting, as in the event that the laws break down, the possibility of bad things is the same as possibility of incredibly good things, and so is the possibility of everything else.
Maybe we wake up after death in a perfect world tailored to our needs and which fulfills all our desires.
Maybe it's eternal hell.
Maybe it's neither, maybe we never wake up at all.
And countless other possibilities, all equally likely.
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