| | George,
You wrote. "You will note however, that Objectivists always welcome any kind of reformation of theistic dogma that includes a greater amount of 'rational enlightenment' being injected into religion; because this is an incremental step in the right direction."
I do know, having recently attended a lecture by William Dembski on Intelligent Design, and I actually feel sad for Dembski in that he could use his incredible intellect for far greater purposes than justifying religion in the name of science.
I want to understand how highly intelligent people can remain theists. How does one shut off an entire area of one's mind - and not just any area, but the most important from a theistic perspective - without suffering a psychotic breakdown. But, you know, I might be onto something, because many of the theists I know have strong passive-aggressive tendencies. Our minds are simply not wired to tolerate contradiction.
Jenna,
You and Feynman are talking about the scientific application of reasoning, and in that context, as I have noted more than once here, I agree.
The word language is shorthand for natural language, but since I am comparing and constrasting it with formal and symbolic logics, I need to make a distinction. Incidentally, what you and Feynman are talking about involves informal logic, which is significantly, although not completely, at least in my book, different from symbolic or formal.
You write that "logic by itself without grounding in reality only goes so far, as I've expressed via the Buridan's Ass discussion on your website." This begs the question by presupposing limits as to how one should define reality. I see what you're saying here, but I want to point out again that I am not approaching this discussion from a "common sense" perspective, suitable for quick-and-dirty, cut-and-dry application. If I need to solve a programming problem involving the identity of a variable in a function, I could care less about the underlying logic of identity as a concept in all available logical contexts. That's not the point of my initial post.
Exploring logic is fun and challenging for me, as it is for others. Just think for a moment about the popularity of games, like Sudoku and crosswords. Moreover, depending on how you define a puzzle, natural language is a puzzle or game. Wittgenstein, who Rand disliked, became famous within philosophical circles (pun not intended, but deserved) for his thoughts on private language. Note, too, that John Searle, who I know you've read, makes the same argument for irreducible mental activity by declaring first-person experience the defining factor of consciousness and the single prohibiting factor against mapping mind to brain.
But let me ask you as I asked someone else earlier: Which part of reality should one exclude from logic, and why? Reasoning, that pervasive and sometimes annoying thing we do with our brains, is more or less a hodgepodge of logical methodologies. Reasoning is an informal informal logic.
And, here we can see a very strong connection between informal logic, in the form of natural language, and symbolic logic, in the form of a programming language. Reasoning is more or less analogous to a set of algorithms (also called functions or methods). Searle calls the computer the perfect metaphor for the brain, and I agree. I should send you this article I found last night from the latest Scientific American edition called "The Limits of Reason." It's written by a co-founder of information theory named Greg Chaitin. In it, he stacks three diagrams of input to output showing that physics, mathematics, and computer science all use the same rules of reasoning.
Bill,
I think we can agree to disagree on some points and agree on others.
Everyone,
As with many of you, I have read most of Rand's writing, and I consider her, at heart, a philosopher. She was a philosopher whose ideas have the power to transform our lives now, on a practical level, in a dozen different ways. But these are ways of thinking. They are not intrinsically applicable to specific needs. She was looking for practical application, but, to get there, she knew that she had to think at the most abstract level (e.g., epistemology, metaphysics, metaethics, etc.) Her ideas do transform our daily lives, but they have the equally important initial effect of making reality crystal clear to us by exposing the filth of sacrificial, communalistic, guilt-infested cultural mentalities. My pursuit of knowledge for its own sake is not inconsequential or meaningless or - I'm still laughing at this one - idiotic, and it has, if you notice, been labeled all of these things throughout this discussion. From my perspective, these insulting labels do not only apply to me, but to Aristotle, Rand, Russell, Wiener, and everyone else throughout history and alive today, even at RoR (even you!), who have dared to ask questions and delve beneath the surface of what their generations considered worthy of labeling reality. Were it not for their contibutions, we would not have the logical tools and the rational mindset to think and act as we do today. Most importantly, we would not have the choice.
UK
|
|
