Monthly Archives: August 2014

Logic and the World

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SelfAwarePatterns is an excellent blog if you’re interested in science, philosophy and similar topics (which covers pretty much everything). Earlier this week, its author, a self-aware pattern named Michael Smith, wrote about the nature of logic. He quoted several brief definitions of logic, including one by Gottlob Frege (1848-1925), one of history’s greatest logicians. According to Frege, logic is “the science of the most general laws of truth”, to which Mike Smith responded:

Gottlob Frege’s definition seems closest to my own current personal intuition about it, namely that logic represents the most fundamental relationships in our universe. These relationships are so fundamental, that we can take them and extrapolate truths using them, and often we’ll be right.

After reading this, I began writing a comment but quickly saw that my comment was turning into a post of my own. And since I need to keep this blog going in order to continue raking in the big money, here it is: 

Whenever I try to understand what logic is and how it relates to the world, I end up thinking about the status of Aristotle’s three fundamental axioms of logic: the Law of Identity (A = A); the Law of Non-Contradiction (it is not the case that A and not A), and the Law of the Excluded Middle (either A or not A), where “A” represents a statement like “Snow is white” or “I’ve never made a single penny writing this blog”.

The Law of Identity seems to reflect how the world is without question, partly because it’s supremely uninformative. As Bishop Butler said: “Everything is what it is, and not another thing”. I’m not sure the Law of Identity states a fundamental relationship, since self-identity isn’t much of a relationship. There is only one party involved. But it seems undeniable that A equals A, whatever A happens to be.

The Law of Non-Contradiction seems to reflect how the world is too. It’s exceedingly hard to imagine how things could be otherwise in our universe or any other universe (e.g., “Vitamin C is ascorbic acid and yet it isn’t.”). Despite this difficulty, some enterprising logicians have accepted dialetheism: the view that the very same proposition can be both true and false. That seems plainly wrong. Can we step into the same river twice? Well, yes, we can (“It’s the mighty Mississippi”) and no, we can’t (“The Mississippi had different water in it yesterday”). But which answer is correct depends on what you mean by “same river”. It’s the same river it was yesterday in one sense, although it’s not the same in another sense.

How about a self-referential statement like “This statement is false”? To be fair, that’s the kind of sentence dialetheist logicians are interested in. If “this statement is false” is true, it’s false. But if it’s false, it’s true. That is certainly weird, but is the sentence in question really both true and false? I don’t think so. It seems to me that it’s a badly-formed sentence. Its apparent meaning contradicts our natural presumption as speakers of a language that speakers don’t undermine their own claims (i.e., give with one hand and take back with the other). In this case, it seems best to follow the doctor’s advice when the patient said “It hurts when I do this”. The doctor, of course, answered: “Don’t do that”. Or in this case, don’t say stuff like “This statement is false”. Just because we can put certain words together doesn’t make it a proper sentence.

Then there’s subatomic physics. Light is a field of waves and also a stream of particles! The evidence indicates that light acts as if it’s a wave in some cases and as if it’s a particle in others, but saying that it acts the same way at the same time makes no sense. To me anyway. It’s better in this case to infer that our everyday concepts of “wave” and “particle” aren’t adequate to describe the nature of light. But that doesn’t mean light is a counterexample to the Law of Non-Contradiction.

So far, so good for classical logic accurately representing the universe. Things get more complicated, however, when we consider the Law of the Excluded Middle. Personally, I don’t buy it at all. The idea is that every proposition is either true or false. Unless we define “proposition” as “a bearer of truth or falsity”, there are lots of propositions that aren’t clearly true or false. There are vague propositions, for example. Has George lost enough hair to be considered bald? What if he lost one more hair, or 500 more, or 50,000 more? Where is the line between being bald and being hairy? And there is the matter of probability. For example, according to the principle of quantum superposition, “a physical system – such as an electron – exists partly in all its particular theoretically possible states simultaneously”. Is an electron here or there? Most physicists think it’s a matter of probability. An electron could be here and it could be there, but it’s not definitely anywhere until it’s measured or otherwise interfered with.

Concerns about vagueness and probability have led to the creation of alternative logics. So-called “many-valued” logics reject the Law of the Excluded Middle. “Fuzzy” logic replaces it with a continuum of values, ranging from true to false and allowing points in between. We might instead reject the Law of Contradiction and accept that some well-formed declarative sentences, like “George is bald”, are both true and false. “Paraconsistent” logics do that. As Mike Smith pointed out in his post, there is even “quantum” logic, which tries to deal with the peculiar laws of quantum physics.

There is good reason, therefore, to believe that Aristotle’s three axioms are somewhat misleading if they’re taken as an attempt to state fundamental features of the world or even relationships between the world and language (or thought). We should agree that the Law of Identity applies to the world (in fact, it applies to every possible world). After that, we’re in a gray area. There is no denying that the world is what it is (as that annoying phrase “it is what it is” seems to call into question – after all, what isn’t what it is?). Furthermore, we learn logic by paying attention to the world and use logic to navigate the world, but logic, I think, is better understood as “the science of the laws of discursive thought” (James McCosh, 1811-1888) than as a general description of how things are.

The New Islamic State (aka ISIS or ISIL)

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I haven’t been paying much attention to the latest crisis in the Middle East. That’s the one involving the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) or the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). The Levant, by the way, includes Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, Israel, Cyprus and part of southern Turkey.

As of now, the Islamic State is more of a military force than a nation. They’re fundamentalist Sunni Muslims, mainly funded by sympathizers in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey. Their apparent goal is to create a new Muslim empire or “caliphate”. So far, they control significant portions of Iraq and Syria. Lately, they’ve been putting extreme pressure on the Yezidis or Yazidis, a Kurdish-speaking ethnic group in northern Iraq. The Yezidis aren’t Muslims. They practice an ancient religion related to Zoroastrianism. To protect the Yezidis, the United States is now carrying out airlifts and airstrikes. President Obama doesn’t see a quick end to this latest conflict or American involvement.

Here are excerpts from an article by Patrick Cockburn in the London Review of Books:

As the attention of the world focused on Ukraine and Gaza, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) captured a third of Syria in addition to the quarter of Iraq it had seized in June. The frontiers of the new Caliphate declared by ISIS on 29 June are expanding by the day and now cover an area larger than Great Britain and inhabited by at least six million people… In a few weeks of fighting in Syria, ISIS has established itself as the dominant force in the Syrian opposition….The Caliphate may be poor and isolated but its oil wells and control of crucial roads provide a steady income in addition to the plunder of war.

The birth of the new state is the most radical change to the political geography of the Middle East since the Sykes-Picot Agreement was implemented in the aftermath of the First World War. Yet this explosive transformation has created surprisingly little alarm internationally or even among those in Iraq and Syria not yet under the rule of Isis. Politicians and diplomats tend to treat Isis as if it is a Bedouin raiding party that appears dramatically from the desert, wins spectacular victories and then retreats to its strongholds leaving the status quo little changed. Such a scenario is conceivable but is getting less and less likely as Isis consolidates its hold on its new conquests in an area that may soon stretch from Iran to the Mediterranean.

The very speed and unexpectedness of its rise make it easy for Western and regional leaders to hope that the fall of ISIS and the implosion of the Caliphate might be equally sudden and swift. But all the evidence is that this is wishful thinking and the trend is in the other direction, with the opponents of ISIS becoming weaker and less capable of resistance…

With weapons taken from the Iraqi army and the seizure of Syrian oil and gasfields, ISIS no longer needs so much outside help. For America, Britain and the Western powers, the rise of ISIS and the Caliphate is the ultimate disaster. Whatever they intended by their invasion of Iraq in 2003 and their efforts to get rid of Assad in Syria since 2011, it was not to see the creation of a jihadi state spanning northern Iraq and Syria run by a movement a hundred times bigger and much better organised than the al-Qaida of Osama bin Laden.

Calling the rise of ISIS or ISIL “the ultimate disaster” for the United States and Europe sounds more like overstatement than British understatement, but the creation of a fundamentalist Islamic state that aims to forge a new Muslim empire intolerant of religious minorities certainly isn’t good news. The vacuum we created by getting rid of Saddam Hussein seems to be filling up. 

A Guide to Reality, Part 14

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It’s been more than three months since I wrote about Alex Rosenberg’s The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life Without Illusions. I left off part of the way through chapter 8, “The Brain Does Everything Without Thinking About Anything At All”. Having read the book once before, it’s been difficult going through it again, but I’m now going to finish chapter 8.

The principal thesis of Rosenberg’s book is that since the universe is nothing more than subatomic particles, much of what we take for granted about the world is illusory. In the case of the human brain, this means that the brain does its work without anything happening in the brain being “about” anything at all.

Rosenberg asks us to consider a computer:

Neither the … electrical charges in the computer’s motherboard nor the distribution of magnetic charges in the hard drive can be about anything, right? They are just like red octagons. They get interpreted by us [as stop signs or whatever] [187].

Electrical engineers and computer programmers assign meanings to a computer’s low-level states (“on” or “off”, or 32767, or the letter “w”), but those states have no meaning in themselves. It’s only because people are able to assign meanings to the states of a computer and then interpret those them that those states can be about anything, just the way a red octagonal sign with “STOP” on it only has meaning for those of us who know how to read a traffic sign.

But doesn’t that mean that the physical states of a computer can be about something? Doesn’t our interpretation of those states imply that those states are meaningful?

Rosenberg doesn’t think so. Earlier, he discussed how brain cells function as input/output devices. Now he compares the brain itself to a computer:

The brain is at least in part a computer. It’s composed of an unimaginably large number of electronic input/output circuits…The circuits transmit electrical outputs in different ways, depending on their electrical inputs and on how their parts… But that it is at least a computer is obvious from its anatomy and physiology right down to the individual neurons and their electrochemical on/off connections [188-189].

But if what’s inside a computer isn’t about anything, and your brain works like a computer, what’s inside your brain isn’t about anything either. It’s merely an enormous bunch of interconnected cells that have no intrinsic meaning. That’s Rosenberg’s conclusion.

To clarify his point, he then offers an analogy. The image in a still photograph doesn’t move. But string many photographs together, project them on a screen and you’ve got a motion picture. The motion we perceive in a movie, however, is an illusion. Creatures whose physiology worked faster than ours would simply see a succession of still pictures, not actors or objects in continuous motion. In similar fashion:

The illusion of aboutness projected by the neurons in our brain does not match any aboutness in the world. There isn’t any….There is no aboutness in reality [191].

So, despite what introspection tells us (or “screams” at us, using his term), our thoughts aren’t about anything either:

Consciousness is just another physical process. So, it has as much trouble producing aboutness as any other physical process. Introspection certainly produces the illusion of aboutness. But it’s got to be an illusion, since nothing physical can be about anything [193]. 

But doesn’t that mean The Atheist’s Guide to Reality isn’t about anything? Why bother reading it then?

Rosenberg’s answer is that his book isn’t “conveying statements”. It’s “rearranging neural circuits, removing inaccurate disinformation and replacing it with accurate information” [193]. But, we might ask, isn’t information “about” something? And isn’t the distinction between accurate and inaccurate information dependent on the idea that information can be about something in a more or less satisfactory manner?

At this point, I can’t remember why Rosenberg is so interested in convincing us that there is no real “aboutness” or what philosophers call “intentionality” in the world.

It’s certainly puzzling how our minds are able to assign meaning to and find meaning in the world. Being appreciative of science, I can accept that there is nothing in the universe but quarks, leptons and bosons when you get right down to it (or their component parts if there are any), but there are also arrangements of those things. Some of those arrangements are meaningful to us and some aren’t. The fact that scientists might and probably will explain our experience of aboutness in biological terms, and then in terms of chemistry, and then in terms of physics, doesn’t change the fact that Rosenberg’s book and the words I’m typing are about something.

When I started writing this post, I didn’t know if I’d work through any more chapters in The Atheist’s Guide to Reality (although if the universe is as deterministic as Rosenberg thinks – and I tend to think – that was decided some time ago). But now what I think I’m going to do is skip the next three chapters. They’re concerned with purpose (an illusion), the self (also an illusion), history (it’s blind) and the other social sciences, especially economics (they’re all myopic). Chapter 12, the final chapter, is called “Living With Scientism: Ethics, Politics, the Humanities, and Prozac as Needed”. That seems like a good place to stop.

General Sherman Has a Blog

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J J Brownyneal, “a resident of Indiana with an interest in history”, has a remarkable blog devoted to General William Tecumseh Sherman’s Civil War years. The entries are based on Sherman’s correspondence and other papers and are being posted in chronological order.

The first entry, for December 1, 1860, was posted on posted on December 25, 2010. It’s a letter Sherman wrote to his brother when Sherman was living and working in Louisiana. Abraham Lincoln had been elected but not yet sworn in as President:

The Convention will meet in January, and only ‘two questions will be agitated, Immediate dissolution, a declaration of State independence, and a General Convention of Southern States, with instructions to demand of the Northern States to repeal all laws hostile to slavery and pledges of future good behavior… the moment Louisiana assumes a position of hostility, then this becomes an arsenal and fort.

Let me hear the moment you think dissolution is inevitable. What Mississippi and Georgia do, this State will do likewise.

On August 2, 1864, Sherman was outside Atlanta. An entry for that date (posted today) includes his messages to other Union officers, with remarks like these:

If you have any negro regiments fit for duty I would like to have them in front of Nashville…

Losses in battle and sickness from work and weather is beginning to tell on the strength of my army.

Too many citizens manage to come to the front. Be even more stringent than heretofore. Grant no passes beyond Chattanooga, and only the smallest possible number that far.

Another entry for August 2 features a letter Sherman wrote to his wife:

I have for some days been occupying a good house on the Buckhead Road about 4 miles north of Atlanta but am going to move in the morning nearer to the Right to be nearer where I expect the next battle….

Somehow or other we cannot get Cavalry. The enemy takes all the horses of the Country and we have to buy and our People won’t sell. [Major General] Stoneman is also out with a cavalry force attempting to reach our prisoners confined at Andersonville, but since [Maj. Gen.] McCook’s misfortune I also have fears for his safety….

No Recruits are coming for the draft is not till September and then I suppose it will consist mostly of freed slaves & bought recruits that must be kept well to the Rear. I sometimes think our People do not deserve to succeed in War. They are so apathetic….

Atlanta is on high ground and the woods extend up to the forts which look strong and encircle the whole town. Most of the People are gone & it is now simply a big Fort. I have been a little sick today but feel better. Weather very hot.

By all accounts, Sherman was an excellent officer, although some of his actions in the South might qualify as war crimes today (his role in our treatment of the American Indians probably would). Of course, he also helped end a terrible war that was begun in order to protect and propagate an economic system based on the subjugation of millions. Fierce Patriot, a new biography of Sherman, has just been published and I plan to learn more about him by reading it.

One last thing: That scary burning of Atlanta depicted in Gone With the Wind wasn’t Sherman’s doing. It was Confederate General John Bell Hood who ordered the burning of both public buildings and military supplies on the night of September 1st, as his troops and some residents left the city.

Sherman’s army occupied Atlanta on September 2nd. All remaining civilians were ordered to evacuate. Later, on November 15, when Sherman moved on toward Savannah, he ordered the city’s remaining war resources, including a train depot, to be burned. According to a site called About North Georgia (probably not a regular purveyor of Yankee propaganda), Sherman’s burning of Atlanta was “significantly less than Hood’s Burning of Atlanta”.

Górecki on the Turnpike, Not the Turntable

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While leisurely gliding home on the New Jersey Turnpike this rainy afternoon, I gave up on the rock album in the CD player and tried the radio. Listener-sponsored, free-format rock? I don’t think so. Classic rock? Definitely not. Fortunately, Columbia University’s WKCR was playing something beautiful. It was a slow-moving work featuring a soprano and orchestra. If I’d heard the piece before, I didn’t remember what it was.

After 20 minutes or so, a young woman with very precise diction softly announced that we had been listening to Henryk Górecki’s Symphony No. 3, Opus 36, the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs. The orchestra was the London Sinfonietta and the soprano was Dawn Upshaw.

When I got home, Wikipedia kindly revealed that Henryk Górecki was a 20th century Polish composer. He wrote the piece in 1977, but neither he nor it became famous until 1992 when the very recording I’d heard was released. The album went to the top of the classical charts and has now sold more than one million copies, “vastly exceeding the expected lifetime sales of a typical symphonic recording by a 20th-century composer”.

Regarding its surprising commercial success, Gorecki once said: “Perhaps people find something they need in this piece of music…. Somehow I hit the right note, something they were missing. Something somewhere had been lost to them”.

One interesting aspect of this story is that, although Polish critics considered it a masterpiece, Gorecki’s Third Symphony didn’t fare well at all when it was first heard outside Poland, at least partly because it was a departure from his earlier dissonant compositions:

During the late 1970s and early 1980s, recordings and performances of the work were widely criticised by the press outside Poland.The symphony drew hostility from critics who felt that Górecki had moved too far away from the established avant-garde style…The world première … was reviewed by six western critics, all of them harshly dismissive. [One wrote] that the symphony “drags through three old folk melodies (and nothing else) for an endless 55 minutes”. Górecki himself recalled that, at the premiere, he sat next to a “prominent French musician” (… probably Pierre Boulez), who, after hearing the twenty-one repetitions of an A-major chord at the end of the symphony, loudly exclaimed “Merde!”

Nevertheless, the 1992 recording caught fire and may now be “the best selling contemporary classical record of all time”. (Maybe I’ll even buy a copy for cruising the Turnpike.) Since this is the age of Spotify and YouTube, however, a base financial transaction is no longer necessary in order to hear great music in the comfort of your own home:

A final note from Wikipedia: The popular success of the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs “has not generated similar interest in Górecki’s other works”. Thus, even in the world of contemporary classical music, it is possible to be a one-hit wonder.

Henryk Górecki died in 2010 at the age of 76 in Katowice, Silesia, Poland.