h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Because im using one to make notes of what Strontium is saying.

"OK, the congruence of a tilt and a spillage might seem rational to you. However, to me it is just physicality and we could not know about it in the absence of observation. For me, that makes it contingent and therefore not rational."

OK, toxx - what do you make of Paiget's famous observation of children up to the age of 7, and volume? For those unfamiliar with this, it is that children see a certain amount of liquid filling a high, narrow container, and then observe the liquid poured into a wide container. They conclude there is less liquid because the level in the container is lower than the level in the preceding container.

"This highlights the Systemic nature of human existance it is next to imposible to completely absolve ourselves and those close members of our families and freinds we view as 'good people' from complicity in many of the worlds ill's. To be fair some are more culpable than others. But I remember asking my dr for an antibiotic for a chest complaint and being quite insistant despite his reluctance."

The same problem arises with sick certificates, SD. GPs hand them out because they say they are not in a position to assess the job the patient is doing and so whether or not the patient is capable of work, given their complaint. This gives rise to employers clamping down on sickness absence for all employees because of the general amount of sickness absence. This evolves into people who are what the rest of us might term 'genuinely' ill being sacked because dismissal becomes measured by the quantity of sickness absence rather than the quality of it, as the employer is not medically qualified to assess 'quality' and relies on GPs to do this.

What this (and the penicillin example) do is demonstrate the psychological phenomenon of 'risk shift' which led, among other examples, to planes crashing because no-one in the cockpit questioned the pilot's decision. This has been remedied by major airlines by introducing a cockpit culture whereby all personnel in the cockpit are encouraged to query any decision by anyone they feel uncomfortable with. Fine where you have 4 or 5 people in a small space; not so possible when whole sections of society shift risk onto each other.

Hi there, HS. It's a fair cop! I've been keeping quiet on the psychology of this topic because I know too much about it. May I point to 'Mental Models' by Phil Johnson-Laird, with whom I agree almost 100%, as he knows! The main point is that logic is not a psychological component of human thinking, but a category we use to describe certain kinds of reasoning, after the fact. It is a descriptive term for what we sometimes (rarely) do and not a recipe for doing it.

The acquisition of the various 'conservations' by young children is interesting. The usual story is that they are strongly influenced by perceptual cues in the environment such as the height of the column of liquid. Gradually they come to understand that if no liquid is added or lost, the quantity must remain the same. Oddly, volume conservation and those of number etc are aquired in an invariant order at different times. Therefore, children are not grasping a necessary underlying principle or (heaven help us!) reinventing the first law of thermodynamics. Experience with relevant materials can speed up development in these areas, as research with older kids having learning disabilities has shown. The latter progress more slowly so it is easier to disentangle the influences on their progress. 'Normal' children acquire the 'conservations' even if not deliberately encouraged to do so. Hence the effect of training is 'masked' by normal development.

toxx

Another interesting psychological point, HS. Your description of 'risk shift' leads me to recall the phenomenon of 'risky shift'. Such a similar term which applies to the tendency to take greater risks when a group is making the decisions, rather than an individual. Clearly, this militates against organising cabin crews to make group decisions. They would somehow have to remain as competing individuals.

toxx

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I think you're partly right.




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I agree; thus you can never really trust people.




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Hmmm... But you can see yourself reflected in the eyes of others by talking about yourself and seeing what they think--as I am doing here.




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Not really--I don't see my mom as having made a mistake; just her luck of being born to parents who'd converted to Catholocism. As for my dad; hmmm. You may have a point. I guess I do want to avoid his apparent inconsistancy.




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Hmmm...




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Makes sence.




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If you allow to much arbitrarity, though, you end up just contradicting yourself and achieving nothing.




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I agree; perhaps you suspected that from some of my earlier posts. I think they are wrong, though, in thinking that suffering can be escaed simply by eliminating all desire.




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It is better to have risks that are within your control than risks under the control of others or random chance.




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Gut impulses/emotions are needed to select postulates; after that pure logic should take over.

Pertaining back to the start,
I think it's important these days, for religious followers to accept that the concept of God in many ways is becoming outdated, a figure by whom we will come to be judged and ultimately created us to live for this purpose.
I think it belittles people's sense of self-worth, and it denies a sense of overall meaning.

The New Testament Bible in particular, seems to suggest that the lives we live in themselves are somewhat worthless. If genuine, you can live a life of sin, and repent and the very last moment only to accepted into God's kingdom.

What does anyone think?

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I think you've got a valid point.

Surely if we knew what people thought then it would be impossible to trust people? Trust is an act of faith, or maybe a weighed judgement.

"Gut impulses/emotions are needed to select postulates; after that pure logic should take over."

Logic is what a man believes it to be. To a cannibal, cannibalism is logical. To a Frenchman, the eating of frogs legs is quite OK. You can't use pure logic for non mathematical concepts. Take the case of an amputee who felt pain in his amputated arm because he couldn't open his fist. Neuroscientist Vilayanur S. Ramachandran found the answer to the problem. A box was made such that the good arm could be reflected and take the place of the amputated arm. The patient was then told to unclench his fists. After seeing the image of his hand open, the pain went.



Alji

Hi, Alji. You're using the term 'logic' in a very loose way there - but fine as long as we both know what you mean. Cannibalism is neither logical nor illogical in anything like the strict sense of the word. It may, or may not, be reasonable; ditto the eating of frogs' legs.

I wonder what you mean by 'non-mathematical' there. 'Either it is raining or it isn't' doesn't seem to me to have much of the mathematical about it, yet the statement is logically axiomatic!

toxx

Ah its polarisation. It could be not quite sleet or not quite hail, but also not quite rain .

Pure logic as sole means for determining how to live seems a little optimistic to me though. For a start logic doesn't have a constructive side, its just a way of checking. It doesn't really have any way to compare weightings of concepts either. Also you have to reduce the world into concepts you can deal with logically, which can be a very wooly business.

Forgot to say, Alji. Susanne from Germany shares our birthday. Can this be significant?

toxx

Yo, Bouncy. Logic is a formal concepts - a matter of the form of statements. 'Either X or not X' is logically axiomatic whatever X happens to be. Quantified logic allows us to talk about 'Some X' or 'All X'. Modal logic allows us to add terms like 'necessarily' as in 'Necessarily - if all X is Y, then some Y is X'.

"I wonder what you mean by 'non-mathematical' there. 'Either it is raining or it isn't' doesn't seem to me to have much of the mathematical about it, yet the statement is logically axiomatic!"

By 'non mathematical', I mean those things or concepts which can't be measured!


Alji

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Depends what your origional postulates are.

Actually, I don't see anything inherently wrong with cannibalism in some cases.

Alji. I don't think that's a particularly helpful way of looking at logic and maths. We don't measure whether someone is male or female - yet we have two possible values, just like 'true' and 'false'. Those are enough to do Boolean logic and, indeed, to perform certain kinds of statistical tests. That would be a sort of categorical discrimination, if not a measurement. 'A is bigger than B' isn't a measurement as such, yet we can use it as a premise in logic. For example, we can conclude that B is smaller than A. Then we can talk about precise dimensions.

Sorry bud, but I don't really understand what you're getting at or I suspect that you have it wrong.

toxx

Lem. I agree! Let us say you are in a small band of starving people and one of your number is accidentally killed. I can't see that it would be wrong for the rest of you to eat him, rather than die of hunger. I suspect just about anyone would feed their children in this way rather than allowing them to starve.

toxx

"I don't think that's a particularly helpful way of looking at logic and maths. We don't measure whether someone is male or female - yet we have two possible values, just like 'true' and 'false'."

No Toxx, we have three, true, false and 'I don't know about this one!'. You are using a very narrow definition of the word 'measure'.

BTW - Intuitionistic logic.
In intuitionism, you cannot in general assert the statement (A
or not-A) (the principle of the excluded middle); (A or
not-A) is not proven unless you have a proof of A or a proof
of not-A. If A happens to be undecidable in your system
(some things certainly will be), then there will be no proof
of (A or not-A).


Alji

A or notA is a tautological truth. It doesn't require proof.

Noggin