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I'll avoid trying to reply to this. The Roman poet Juvenal quipped "But who will guard the guardians?" referring to one of the main problems of any republic. Pl

I'll avoid trying to reply to this. The Roman poet Juvenal quipped "But who will guard the guardians?" referring to one of the main problems of any republic. Plato had one suggested solution, and the US founders had another. Today we have something quite different than either had imagined. One key question for "civilization" has usually centered around the extent to which enough children can learn to reach beyond their genes to embrace ideas and behaviors that have been invented for the better. Another key question revolves around the trade-offs between individual choices vs "smartest choices". This reflects the distribution of talents, outlooks, skills, knowledge, etc in any population. And also the distribution of what various people need to "feel whole". (These are often at odds with larger organizations of societies.)

da02 9y ago
I think I'm beginning to understand. Thanks again for the replies. I'm going to have to think a lot of about what you have written. (My apologies if I kept mis-interpreting you and going off on the wrong tangents.)
- alankay1 9y ago
  When Neil Postman was a grad student he followed Marshall McLuhan around for a few months. One thing he noted was that McLuhan -- when argued with or when asked a question never directly replied, but just came out with another one of his zinger "koans". Neil said he finally realized that McLuhan was not concerned about whether people were agreeing with him or even understanding him, but was most aimed at getting them to think at all! I've never been able to pull this off, but McLuhan had a real point. Socrates had the idea (via Plato) that there "was truth" and careful thinking would get everyone to the same place. (Much of science has this assumption (if you throw in a lot of experimentation and debugging as part of the careful thinking). In any case, a reasonable explanation in science is not in the form of sentences. One of the key ideas here is that modern understanding is a lot more than changing from one set of sentences to another. (This is a huge problem for humans because for tens of thousands of years and more there were no significant differences between our models and our sentences.) Now some of our models can't be reasonably represented in sentences, but for many cases we still have to use sentences to point at the models (or don't even use the models at all). To me, the consequence of all this is that most of the work needed to be done on thinking about important difficult problems is not primarily "logic" (in the sense of dealing with premises, operations, and inferences) but "extra-logical" (trying to understand contexts and boundaries and models and tests before trying to do anything like classical thinking). I often try to point out in talks that modern thinking is "not primarily logical" and this is what I'm driving at.
  - da02 9y ago
    > modern thinking is "not primarily logical" and this is what I'm driving at. Is that because "logical" thinking makes sense in one context, but fails in a better context? (ie. Pink vs blue: Change the context, understand it, and then later the knowledge is found?)
    - alankay1 9y ago
      Yes, it's not the apparent logic in the operations that counts but the choice of definitions (and these include the definitions of the operations). I wrote a paper for the "Mind-Body Conference" in 1975 that discussed this. The idea is that "reasonable things" are done within "stable neighborhoods of 'truth' " that can be thought of as regions whose boundaries are the definitions. Inside we pretend the definitions are true, while the larger view from above knows the neighborhood is arbitrary. This is an old idea (e.g. Euclid). The "modern" part of it is that the definitions are not assumed to be true outside the neighborhood. This is simple and powerful because the results are larger worlds that can be compared to others and to phenomena and experiment (and without setting up dogmas and religions). Because of the way human minds work, there will be tendencies to think the definitions are "actually true" (and so the logic inside the boundaries) if they and the conclusions are appealing. But the form of this knowledge helps keep us saner if we are diligent about drawing the maps and boundaries correctly. Much of science has this character, and the model helps to understand what it means to "know" something scientifically. Science is a negotiation between "what's out there?" and what we can represent inside our heads via phenomena on the one hand and the "boundaries and neighborhoods" on the other. Einstein's nice line about "math vs. reality" hits it perfectly ("As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality."). Newton's Principia was a huge step along these (and many other lines). He completely separates out the math part in the first large parts of the work. And only then does he start looking to see how the math models map onto observed phenomena. To say it again, Science is partly about being very careful about how the definitions map to "out there". In terms of context, if you are aware that you are in contexts -- the first step! -- and aware and careful about the ones you are using -- the next steps! -- there is a chance that "reasonable thinking" might happen.

da02 9y ago

I think I'm beginning to understand. Thanks again for the replies. I'm going to have to think a lot of about what you have written. (My apologies if I kept mis-interpreting you and going off on the wrong tangents.)

alankay1 9y ago
When Neil Postman was a grad student he followed Marshall McLuhan around for a few months. One thing he noted was that McLuhan -- when argued with or when asked a question never directly replied, but just came out with another one of his zinger "koans". Neil said he finally realized that McLuhan was not concerned about whether people were agreeing with him or even understanding him, but was most aimed at getting them to think at all! I've never been able to pull this off, but McLuhan had a real point. Socrates had the idea (via Plato) that there "was truth" and careful thinking would get everyone to the same place. (Much of science has this assumption (if you throw in a lot of experimentation and debugging as part of the careful thinking). In any case, a reasonable explanation in science is not in the form of sentences. One of the key ideas here is that modern understanding is a lot more than changing from one set of sentences to another. (This is a huge problem for humans because for tens of thousands of years and more there were no significant differences between our models and our sentences.) Now some of our models can't be reasonably represented in sentences, but for many cases we still have to use sentences to point at the models (or don't even use the models at all). To me, the consequence of all this is that most of the work needed to be done on thinking about important difficult problems is not primarily "logic" (in the sense of dealing with premises, operations, and inferences) but "extra-logical" (trying to understand contexts and boundaries and models and tests before trying to do anything like classical thinking). I often try to point out in talks that modern thinking is "not primarily logical" and this is what I'm driving at.
- da02 9y ago
  > modern thinking is "not primarily logical" and this is what I'm driving at. Is that because "logical" thinking makes sense in one context, but fails in a better context? (ie. Pink vs blue: Change the context, understand it, and then later the knowledge is found?)
  - alankay1 9y ago
    Yes, it's not the apparent logic in the operations that counts but the choice of definitions (and these include the definitions of the operations). I wrote a paper for the "Mind-Body Conference" in 1975 that discussed this. The idea is that "reasonable things" are done within "stable neighborhoods of 'truth' " that can be thought of as regions whose boundaries are the definitions. Inside we pretend the definitions are true, while the larger view from above knows the neighborhood is arbitrary. This is an old idea (e.g. Euclid). The "modern" part of it is that the definitions are not assumed to be true outside the neighborhood. This is simple and powerful because the results are larger worlds that can be compared to others and to phenomena and experiment (and without setting up dogmas and religions). Because of the way human minds work, there will be tendencies to think the definitions are "actually true" (and so the logic inside the boundaries) if they and the conclusions are appealing. But the form of this knowledge helps keep us saner if we are diligent about drawing the maps and boundaries correctly. Much of science has this character, and the model helps to understand what it means to "know" something scientifically. Science is a negotiation between "what's out there?" and what we can represent inside our heads via phenomena on the one hand and the "boundaries and neighborhoods" on the other. Einstein's nice line about "math vs. reality" hits it perfectly ("As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality."). Newton's Principia was a huge step along these (and many other lines). He completely separates out the math part in the first large parts of the work. And only then does he start looking to see how the math models map onto observed phenomena. To say it again, Science is partly about being very careful about how the definitions map to "out there". In terms of context, if you are aware that you are in contexts -- the first step! -- and aware and careful about the ones you are using -- the next steps! -- there is a chance that "reasonable thinking" might happen.