What can we say
about what we say?
Do the limits of our language
delimit our world,
or meanings
our understandings?
Must a certain meaning
preclude its opposite
of necessity
– to avoid contradiction
and place logic in charge
of truth?
Mike Laidler
logic
Mythscapes
It’s entirely possible that everything we know about how things happen will remain purely academic until we find out how existence happens.
The fact of change is the big event of the ‘big bang’ and beyond, which we incorporate into our explanations as if to explain it – as if by taking it into account we have accounted for it.
Evolution, as it happens, is the effect that we presume to identify as the cause of change.
Despite our collective faith in the infallibility of logic as ‘true’ in itself, logic provides no guarantees that it will ‘externalise’ to show us truths about the world at large.
It’s a mass delusion tantamount to madness: the belief that logic cannot fail to show us the truth.
If science can admit to the incredible yet ‘finite calculable probability’ of a person being able to pass through a solid wall under certain circumstances – because objects are and are not solid – then what about the certain circumstance in which the earth is both flat and round?
We talk about consciousness as a phenomenon to be explained by the fact of life, as if we have already explained the fact of life.
We know of the phenomenon that is existence only because of what knowing brings to it.
In all the sightings of ghosts throughout the ages, duly attired in the dress of their time, has anyone ever wondered how the clothing manages to gain an afterlife?
Can a scientific explanation of the universe explain its most curious feature – its evolution, through us, of a curiosity about itself?
How can an objective account of nature, by precluding the subjective elements of conscious sensation and understanding, show us a greater truth in the lesser fact of existence?
Strictly speaking, we are but ghostly manifestations in the midst of an essentially physical universe that knows nothing of our existence – since, in the scheme of its absolute reality, our presence amounts to nothing more than a negligible flurry within an all-engulfing tide of atomic flux.
Does a mathematical proof of the universe not reflect more upon the enlarged particulars of mathematics than the particulars of the universe at large?
Presumption is the ancestor of all myth and a living part of all we take to know.
Mike Laidler
Sceptic or cynic?
If a sceptic can be seen as a liberal thinker, a challenging doubter and a seeker after truth, then the cynic is something else: a contemptuously abrasive, dismissive and pessimistic type – a wanton disrupter, even an extremist who poses a threat to civilised life – a troublesome pariah who would shun the very truth for the sake of it. Not surprisingly, in our ‘enlightened times’, hardly anyone wants to regard themselves as a cynic or be characterised as such. Even the label ‘mildly cynical’ carries pejorative overtones now that we have alienated the notion, debunked its respectability and popularised forms of post-cynicism through our modern brandings of virtue, truth, justice, authority, civility and tolerance. However, the lip service paid to ‘the right thing to do’ may conceal a Freudianesque veneer of righteous indignation –‘noble’ prejudices against the incursion of ‘inferiorities’. In sum, scepticism is seen as acceptably productive, progressive and illuminating, whereas cynicism ‘is’ unacceptably morose, dogmatic and subversive; but there is a fallacy behind these stereotypes that is hidden away within the ‘dark horses’ of human nature.
Apparently it’s fitting to confront cynicism with cynicism, whereas being sceptical about scepticism smacks of a counter-productive contradiction. Perhaps the inverted cynicism – the negative stereotyping and demonisation – serves to burnish our tarnished virtue. Yet, historically, the cynics were seekers after truth and virtue – ‘God’s’ watchdogs who stood as vanguards against the hubris of human pretentiousness. But now it’s valid to see ourselves as ‘OK alone’, complete in our self-appointed nature as ‘Homo sapiens’. So reason, once ‘a slave of the passions’, is now a liberator, enabling us to test the truth with logic, even to bring the unconscious mind into line and raise us to the authority of ‘the Gods’ – because the intellect is supreme and logic is infallible. But this gives rise to the fallacy that all is subject to the higher truths of logic, which defy contradiction – so rendering any dissent illogical and a futile throwback to more archaic now ‘displaced philosophies’ that are riddled with personal points of view, such as the uncivil cynic might indulge in for the sake of being noticed.
Mike Laidler
Logic Alone
Logic is not everything.
The idea of true or false pays homage to our biases
– as if contradiction has the power to destroy a fact.
And logical conclusions serve our pre-logical presumptions
whilst the certainties of logic blind us to our blindness.
For it is logic alone that demands of reality
that it should be logical to be realistic.
But nothing exists alone.
Mike Laidler
The maker of causes
The idea that truth will free us from contradiction owes to our belief in logic as a basis for assessing the facts. Logic has shown us a universe where up cannot be down, curved cannot be straight, one cannot be two, right cannot be wrong, facts cannot be fictions, after cannot come before etc.
However, more relativistic realisations lead us to understand that things are not necessarily either/ or – that a fact may be both one thing and another: uniform and diverse, clear and fuzzy, fixed and fluid, true and false, explicable and inexplicable – and that there are ways of understanding facts that defy the language by which we try to present our explanations as logically consistent.
Indeed our pride in being logical may actually be a source of ignorance. For instance, if we are to understand the origins of the universe we may need to rethink the logic of causality, which errs towards the embroidery of our observations of change – as if the nature of the cause explains the nature of possibility, as if the cause equates to the ensuing difference, as if nature and possibility are explicable in terms of things as they were – as if it is the possibility of change that is ‘caused’ when that possibility is, in fact, the maker of causes. Then, when the gaps in explanation gape and all else fails, we say the cause is chance, as if chance might be sufficient to explain the origin of everything, including the nature of possibility – including the possibility for chance to exist.
Likewise, no ‘cause of life’ has proved sufficient to explain the change that comes about, because whenever the change is attributed to pre-existing causes, it leaves unexplained a difference that cannot be found in things as they were – in the entirety of those unliving causes.
Mike Laidler
Goldilocks retold
Once upon a time Goldilocks chanced upon a baby bear’s bowl of porridge that was just right for the eating. Sometime later, scientists took a fresh look at the fact of a universe that happened to be just right for the emergence of life, and recognised that the necessary fine tuning of the manifold preconditions, the ‘physical constants’, seems more like a contrivance than a coincidence – a conspiracy of coincidences – so named the ‘Goldilocks enigma’ because there is no settled evidence for it beginning other than by chance. But what if both scenarios are true: chance and non-chance – the evidence for the co-existence of chance and non-chance possibilities being everywhere in the world that surrounds us? Then perhaps the enigma is actually a paradox which reflects the true state of existence – something we cannot reduce to our logical truths by which we demarcate the facts as either right or wrong, true or false, possible or impossible. Paradoxically, there is more to the fact of existence than the prerequisite of an explanation that requires itself to be logical. And it is logic, not truth, that requires the facts to be logical. Perhaps our belief in logic is holding us back – believing that logic gives us exclusive access to the ultimate truth – a truth to withstand all contradiction.
Perhaps paradox is nearer to ‘the truth’ than the logic that demands its resolution. So let’s begin with three truisms: ‘the universe’ is vast, ‘everything’ and ‘contains’ life. Given the scale and scope of it all, together with the potential diversity of planetary environments, then the right conditions for life on more than one of these planets becomes a loaded possibility. And though we see life as a novel possibility, it is explained as an effect of causes that subsist within existing boundaries of possibility. Yet the effect causes profound changes. It looks like non-living causes determine the mix of possible preconditions, but, ultimately, it is the potential for life that sets the limits. Furthermore, that potential remains a defiant mystery, regardless of how much we learn about the preconditions for life on earth, or indeed the preconditions for different types of life on different kinds of planet. Moreover, no amount of causal analysis explains how effects ratchet up the course of change, beginning in the observable differences between cause and effect. Indeed the paradox at the heart of existence is the pre-existence of its possibilities, despite their probable absence in certain forms at certain times – subsequently to ‘emerge’ in the times and events an observer chances upon, in the form of co-incidence called ‘reality’.
Mike Laidler
Logical Mindfulness
Can the logic that stems from the human mind be the test of reality, or is reality bigger than us? Is there a universal logic built into the workings of the universe by which we are able to define and relate to it? Is this the same universe that develops a mental state about itself – as exemplified by our presence as a part of that universe? Then in what mind does that logic belong if there is more to it than we can supply? Or have we taken the place of that God by determining, in the name of truth, what can, should and must be the case both for ourselves and in the universe at large? And what kind of mind is in charge of a universe like that; alternatively, what kind of universe is in charge of a mind like that?
Mike Laidler
The nature of the beast
Either we think through nature or nature thinks through us – either way, nature gains the power of thought.
Part 1: Dualities
Our presence in nature goes to show that there is more to reality than the unseeing and impersonal. Something has changed, and if that change is natural, then nature now forms a duality that is both sensible and insensible. In this duality the body retains its own needs and predilections, though like the ‘tame’ beast it can be pressed into the service of larger causes. Likewise, the dualities of change raise our schemes and intentions into powers and perversions under the influence of an emergent knowledge, or at least our version of it. We presume to identify truths, defend principles and know ourselves by espousing something that is no thing, something we see as all the more real for being more than us – whereby basic drives and noble values come to co-exist in us, and nature. Thus there is a paradox at the heart of nature: we know and so a part of nature knows, and it seems that all we know is owed to an erstwhile nature that knows nothing.
Part 2: Possibilities
We are a part of a nature that is in a process of change, in the act of becoming something more than it was. So it is possible to see evolution as something happening to nature. However, whilst it is patently obvious that thought has a presence in the universe, we are loathe to conclude that nature thinks through us, or even that will power makes a fundamental difference. Nonetheless, we introduce possibilities in the form of purposes, meanings, goals and designs that change the face of nature. Then, as a part of nature, we embody convergences of possibilities, each acting on the other and building into changes that extend the vital facts of nature into burgeoning faculties. And as nature comes to perceive itself though us, so self-perception elevates the natural into the realms of a super-nature – because nature doesn’t behave like that at its lower levels. Meanwhile, there remains the fact of what we were and still are – as animals contending with the dilemmas of our pleasures and pains. Typically, we crave food as much for the sake of pleasure as hunger, yet we make sacrifices and put ourselves under pressure to accomplish ends which place our basic needs and desires in conflict with our higher aspirations.
Part 3: Realities
In the bigger picture, the incongruous presence of personal existence in an impersonal universe is indicative of a convergence of possibilities with different natures. Thus nature changes through a series of ‘quantum shifts’ whilst losing nothing of what it was. So here we are. We look to the origins of the universe in terms of ambient possibilities of a different nature to the observable laws of physics, yet downplay the more obvious presence of animate possibilities acting upon the austere laws of nature. Nevertheless, something has obviously changed and the best example of this change is ourselves. We are both animal and animus, and the brain straddles this duality: being the insensible source of sentience, the impersonal seat of personality, the dark root of illumination, the blind cause of choice. And the mysteries of the body are eclipsed by yet deeper mysteries of the ‘known mind’ by which we presume to master ourselves, for it remains evident that the stark aloofness of our crowning glory in logic and reason can lead us to acts of wanton brutality that far surpass the savage nature of the beast. Paradoxically, our intellectual rowess is no surety against ourselves; and logic is not everything – for the nature of reality is such that we act through the auspices of other natures, binding our choices – and reason can serve any master.
Mike Laidler
Naked Emperors
Logic and reason and their derivatives in the language of persuasion and explanation, are like naked emperors in the face of truths yet to be revealed, being adorned in the semblance of their own authority, to authorise the facts that authorise them to be right in the meantime – whilst followers rally to the call: ‘Here is the reason for the facts being true’.
Mike Laidler
Philosophy Alive 