Logic ridicules love, and love smiles knowingly at the whole foolishness of logic.
Logic ridicules love, and love smiles knowingly at the whole foolishness of logic.
"Contrariwise," continued Tweedledee, "if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic."
"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."
"An ounce of history is worth a pound of logic."
Think with your Heart Feel with your Mind
Arithmetic is where the content lies, and not logic; but logic prompts certainty, and not arithmetic.
The individual variables x, y, z,... now make a semiformal appearance, performing the function in logic that pronouns perform in ordinary English, the sentence "She is blonde", cognate to the proposition "x is blonde", both she and x specifying something but specifying that thing indeterminately.
Aristotelian logic is massive and marmoreal, but every monument accumulates graffiti.
The world of shapes, lines, curves, and solids is as varied as the world of numbers, and it is only our long-satisfied possession of Euclidean geometry that offers us the impression, or the illusion, that it has, that world, already been encompassed in a manageable intellectual structure. The lineaments of that structure are well known: as in the rest of life, something is given and something is gotten; but the logic behind those lineaments is apt to pass unnoticed, and it is the logic that controls the system.
Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindbogglingly useful [as the telepathically translating Babel fish] could have evolved by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.
The argument goes something like this: "I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."
"But," says Man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. Q.E.D."
"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
"Oh, that was easy," says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed at the next pedestrian crossing.
Within the categorical syllogism, ordinary language represents the ordinary flow of inference. Two premises are given; there is a plash of insight, and one step undertaken. The mind hops right along, not quite knowing where it is going but getting there nonetheless. On the right, a checklist does its work. The logician's clamp retains its force of old, but the inferential steps involve no more than the substitution of symbols for symbols, with the anchor of inference embedded in identities. Inference now proceeds from one identity to the next; no plash of insight is involved, only the solid satisfying ratcheting sound of symbols being substituted for symbols.
Be careful what you say. It comes true. It comes true. I had to leave home in order to see the world logically, logic the new way of seeing. I learned to think that mysteries are for explanation. I enjoy the simplicity. Concrete pours out of my mouth to cover the forests with freeways and sidewalks. Give me plastics, periodical tables, TV dinners with vegetables no more complex than peas mixed with diced carrots. Shine floodlights into dark corners: no ghosts.
SETH said: Logic deals with exterior conditions, with cause and effect relationships. Intuitions deal with immediate experience of the most intimate nature, with subjective motions and activities that in your terms move far quicker than the speed of light, and with simultaneous events that your cause and effect level is far too slow to perceive.
"If we limit ourselves to thinking in terms of realities, facts, and knowledge, we have got the future all wrong because it is made, not of certainties, but of dreams. The future does not exist in the physical world but is present in our thoughts and dreams only....Far too many companies search for the future in the rear-view mirror, because that is where certainties are found. There we find the part of reality that can be verified. The strict scientific model of logic is a trap that prevents us from looking ahead."
The problem with smart people is that they like to be right and sometimes will defend ideas to the death rather than admit they’re wrong. This is bad. Worse, if they got away with it when they were young (say, because they were smarter than their parents, their friends, and their parent’s friends) they’ve probably built an ego around being right, and will therefore defend their perfect record of invented righteousness to the death. Smart people often fall into the trap of preferring to be right even if it’s based in delusion, or results in them, or their loved ones, becoming miserable. (Somewhere in your town there is a row of graves at the cemetery, called smartypants lane, filled with people who were buried at poorly attended funerals, whose headstones say “Well, at least I was right.”)
Until they come face to face with someone who is tenacious enough to dissect their logic, and resilient enough to endure the thinly veiled intellectual abuse they dish out during debate (e.g. “You don’t really think that do you?” or “Well if you knew the <insert obscure reference here> rule/law/corollary you wouldn’t say such things”), they’re never forced to question their ability to defend bad ideas. Opportunities for this are rare: a new boss, a new co-worker, a new spouse. But if their obsessiveness about being right is strong enough, they’ll reject those people out of hand before they question their own biases and self-manipulations. It can be easier for smart people who have a habit of defending bad ideas to change jobs, spouses, or cities rather than honestly examine what is at the core of their psyche (and often, their misery).
“We cannot be both the world's leading champion of peace and the world's leading supplier of the weapons of war”
I believe that we are neither a "self" nor "not a self," but that we are awareness residing as a body. This is the sort of apparent paradox about who we are that may not be solvable within the framework of what we call "Aristotelian two-valued logic" -- the logic system basic to all of Western analytical thought. In the two-valued logic, we frame our reality with questions like "Are we mortal or immortal?" "Is the mind or soul part of the body?" or "Is light made of waves or particles?" But none of these have "yes" or "no" answers. The exclusion of a middle ground between the poles of Aristotelian logic is the source of much confusion. Other logic systems have been suggested in Buddhist writings; the great second-century dharma master and teacher Nagarjuna introduced a four-valued logic system in which statements about the world can be (1) true, (2) not true, (3) both true and not true, (4) neither true nor not true -- which Nagarjuna believed was the usual case -- thereby illumination what is known as the Buddhist Middle Path. According to Nagarjuna, the Buddha first taught that the world is real. He next taught that it is unreal. To the more astute students, he taught that it is both real and not real. And to those who were furthest along the path, he taught that the world is neither real nor not real, which is what we would say today.
. . . The slogan "You are entitled to your opinion" is so often repeated that is near impossible for the brain of a modern Westerner not to have absorbed it.
Like many other views that have at times enjoyed universal assent, however, it isn't true. You don't really have the right to your own opinions. And the idea that you do, beside being false, is forever being invoked when it would be irrelevant even if it were true.
But love is many things, none of them logical.
If pressed to supplement Tweedledee's ostensive definition of logic with a discursive definition of the same subject, I would say that logic is the systematic study of the logical truths. Pressed further, I would say that a sentence is logically true if all sentences with its grammatical structure are true. Pressed further still, I would say to read this book.
In elementary school, in case of fire you have to line up quietly in a single file line from smallest to tallest. What is the logic? Do tall people burn slower?
If scientific reasoning were limited to the logical processes of arithmetic, we should not get very far in our understanding of the physical world. One might as well attempt to grasp the game of poker entirely by the use of the mathematics of probability.
Life would have no consequence, If all I saw made perfect sense. Life would not be magical, If all I saw was logical. So I question all I see, To try and solve the mystery. I've been living under delusion, Led astray by my confusion.
The Army has carried the American . . . ideal to its logical conclusion. Not only do they prohibit discrimination on the grounds of race, creed and color, but also on ability.
The man who bases his actions on independent thought; who reflects and considers before doing anything, and whose judgments are arrived at through logic, is the man who will go farthest today.
The logic of worldly success rests on a fallacy-the strange error that our perfection depends on the thoughts and opinions and applause of other men. A weird life it is to be living always in somebody else's imagination, as if that were the only place in which one could become real.
The meaning of song goes deep. Who in logical words can explain the effect music has on us? A kind of inarticulate, unfathomable speech, which leads us to the edge of the infinite, and lets us for a moment gaze into that!
"Humans suffer from self-centred notions as to the nature of life. Humans assume that alien life forms should conform to standards that match our own, including logic and morality. Even among humans, morality is ignored when expedient. Why should we expect more from an alien life form than we demand from ourselves?"
There's a Mr. Hyde for every happy Jekyll face, a dark face on the other side of the mirror. The brain behind that face never heard of razors, prayers, or the logic of the universe. You turn the mirror sideways and see your face reflected with a sinister left-hand twist, half mad and half sane.
You can go through your whole life telling yourself that life is logical, life is prosaic, life is sane. Above all sane. And I think it is. I've had a lot of time to think about that. And what I keep coming back to is [her] dying declaration: 'So you understand that when we increase the number of variables, the axioms themselves never change.'