Truth

Katerina Witt

 (I could not find a suitable picture of Ludwig Wittgenstein so I got one from my date with Katerina Witt.)

Although we have all grown up idolizing Wittgenstein, his assumption of a world of facts is a metaphysicsal construct that sort of assumes what it was to prove, at least in the dim-light-bulb factory of my head.

Propositional logic applies to propositions. Period. A true proposition corresponds to a Fact in the world, at least we hope so.
However, there are no "true" facts in the world - "true" in the same sense as propositions are true.
Wittgenstein wants a Fact to stand for what-is-the-case, which is the surrogate for "true" in the logic of non-propositional worlds.

OK. But how does one finds these happy, happy facts?

We have religion and politics. Consider them. In politics, in a political party, we may have millions of adherents, each of whose belief system varies from that of their fellows in small degree or in large degree; they may contain contradictions.
Indeed, our own beliefs may contain contradictions, for as Christians we believe in love and peace, but as political Christians , we believe in force and compulsion... and that is the way of all flesh.

How does one describe these belief systems? Obviously if they contain contradictions, they cannot correspond to a Fact of the world in the Wittgenstein sense. Even if they differ in varying degrees, it is difficult how to see they correspond to any Fact.

Any reality may have a logic. Propositions have propositional logic. Then there are facts of the world and Wittgenstein tried to speak of what was almost unspeakable: the underlying Facts of the world. These Facts have their own logic, and their "truth value" is defined as "what-is-the-case"

It really does not work.
I also think Wittgenstein's Logical Atomism is responsible for his ability to envisage a clean and pure Fact - sort of like Descartes' clear and distinct ideas - which stands in Being as a tangible and non-volatile What-Is-The-Case.

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Intellectual Infrastructure

I do not have quite enough functioning Intellectual Infrastructure to make a reasonable post on the Inauguration and the Womens' March quite yet. I know everybody else does... even Madonna who jumped into the Violent Scenario mosh pit by talking about exploding White Houses.

So sad.

However, Kellyanne Conway to the rescue.

Yahoo
Merriam-Webster trolls Kellyanne Conway for calling falsehoods ‘alternate facts’
https://www.yahoo.com/celebrity/merriam-webster-trolls-kellyanne-conway-190640412.html

Kellyanne Conway made headlines this weekend for rebranding the White House’s false information about Donald Trump’s inauguration crowds as “alternative facts.” So, the social media team behind the Merriam-Webster Dictionary felt the need to clarify the definition of the word “fact.”

Linking to a trending topic page for Conway’s quote, Merriam-Webster tweeted, “A fact is a piece of information presented as having objective reality.”

A fact is a piece of information presented as having objective reality. https://t.co/gCKRZZm23c

— Merriam-Webster (@MerriamWebster) January 22, 2017

On Saturday, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer scolded reporters during a press briefing for spreading what he deemed falsities about Trump’s inauguration, according to CNN. “This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period,” he said, despite contrary findings from aerial photos, Nielsen ratings, and Metro reports on subway riders in Washington, D.C.

During a Sunday interview on NBC’s Meet the Press, Conway defended Spicer’s false claims as “alternative facts.”

“You’re saying it’s a falsehood, and they’re giving — Sean Spicer, our press secretary, gave alternative facts to that,” she said. Host Chuck Todd countered, “Alternative facts are not facts. They are falsehoods.”

Ms. Conway seems to be a Presidential-Election-Campaign-Manager-Autistic savant, sort of like the Rain Man of politics. She is a wiz at the campaign stuff, but a bit hazy when matters diverge from reading polls and getting out voters.

Furthermore, if Alternative Facts is acceptable ontologically and philosophically, then Alt-Right would seem to be next in line clamoring for acceptance.

Almost as bad as exploding White Houses.

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The Fly In The E-Mail Fly Bottle

I was lucky enough to get an email from Powderfinger  the other day, and like a miracle of winter, it was a conundrum that assaulted me with its puzzling powers.

In the coming days, DO NOT open  any message  regardless of who sent it to you with  an attachment called:

 

BLACK MUSLIM IN THE WHITE HOUSE.

It is a virus that opens an Olympics torch that burns the whole hard disk of your computer.

 

Directions: You should send this message to all  of your contacts.

It is better to receive this e-mail  2 dozen times than to receive the virus and open it.

 

If you receive a message called BLACK MUSLIM  IN THE WHITE  HOUSE even if sent by a friend, do not open  and shut down your machine immediately.

I told him how jealous I was that in the midst of winter I stumble across a quasi-Bertrand-Russell-type paradox. I mean, sort of like "the set of all sets which are subsets of themselves" and what have you.

I mean, isn't this a superlatively enigmatically Wittgensteinian trek leading the fly from the 4-dimensional Klein bottle of paradox?

Of course, I read it as:

Do NOT open any message with the phrase
BLACK MUSLIM IN THE WHITE HOUSE
in it.

and that is a bit diff from an attachment, but it was great: an email containing "black muslim in white house" warning me not under any circumstances to read an email with the phrase "black muslim in the white house" in it!

It was like "This sentence is false."
If the sentence is false, it's true, and if it's true, it's false.

Similarly, if I heed the warning in the email, then I cannot heed the warning in the email....
I have already read it!

Wonderful. Not quite Russell's paradox, not worthy of Whitehead's study, but a gem none the less.

The Proof Of The Phoney Beggar

I had a post 'Tis The Season To Be Marley in which the following occurs:


"She filled out some detail for me of the whole affair of her trip to Chicago two years ago in even more ghastly detail:

"I mean, Montag, you could look through the windows and see white people with their little girls all dressed up for Christmas tea, and right next to you outside there was a young black mother with three kids sitting on the sidewalk, holding a sign saying 'Help me feed my family.' "

She did not think I could take the Real Dickensian, the horrible irony of Wealth against Grinding Poverty. She thought I would start dreaming of the arrogance of the masters of the world who built the Tower of Babel. I might act up rough, and go all prophet, denouncing Dives taking tea while Lazarus starves."


Someone tells me the story of the beggar lady who, as 6 o'clock comes, straightens up, puts her cane over her shoulder and struts home to her place in the suburbs: a case where an able-bodied person is shamming disability and poverty and making a good living at it.

I sort of stared at them when they finished.
I mean, what does one say?

What does one say when confronted by someone who argues from one specific case to a general normative law?

There are beggars;
There is at least one phoney beggar;
Therefore, all beggars are phoney.

I mean, the overpowering smell of the illogical nature of it all.
Dr. McCoy - Bones, if you will - often disagreed with Mr. Spock about his emphasis on logic, but I think even Bones would say that it is most definitely "Illogical!"

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When Is A Question Not A Question?

When does Life begin?

If there is a "spiritual" marker  -  such as, say, the moment when a newly conceived human life receives a soul  -  and yet that event is hidden from us, then the question above is equivalent to "When may we see that which we may not under any circumstances see?"
As such, it is not a question, but a contradiction with a "?" at the end.

If there is no "spiritual" marker, then everything depends upon a functional definition of "beginning of life". This would seem to be open to an unlimited number of subjective definitions, and the question above is seen to be equivalent to asking for a consensus opinion, which in itself may become obsolete in time and practice... have we not seen the consensus of time of death involved in organ donation become suspect due to supplies and demands?
Or the question may be equivalent to "Pick the one white marble out of a bag containing an infinite number of marbles." coupled with a suspicion that somehow some undefined force will guide our hand unerrantly in this choice.
At this point, it is no longer a matter of defining life, but of defining the force which encompasses the entire process of question and marble-picking. At this point, the original question is seen to be not the "real" question after all.

This type of things hurts the head on a Sunday morning.
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The Paradox of Medicare

 Reading http://www.tnr.com/blog/plank/106198/why-does-the-tea-party-adore-ryan

Ryan’s Medicare plan has been through many iterations, but in all of them the single-payer system in which Medicare exists today would be replaced with a voucher system that would gradually shift medical costs onto senior citizens. A “public option” incorporated into one version of Ryancare would likely outperform private-sector rivals on cost control (government-provided health care always does), but there’s a real question whether Congress would allow a mechanism by which that public option could pass those savings on to consumers. (When a public option was up for debate in Obamacare, Congress worked mightily to cripple its inherent market advantage.)

If it is manifestly true to the Congress that a public option has a market advantage, then it is logical to use that advantage. However, the Congress decided to not use the advantage. Then that becomes a disadvantage.
To whom?
Well, certainly not to the members of Congress.
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Intelligent Design vs. Goal-Directed Trial and Error

A wonderful paper has been published, and I myself am thrilled because it takes a whole group of things I had thought were well defined and articulated, and then shows then up for the mess of pottage they actually were. I call it "Wasserman-Blumberg" for the paper in American Scientist:

http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/id.9347,y.2010,no.3,content.true,page.1,css.print/issue.aspx

Designing Minds

How should we explain the origins of novel behaviors?

Edward A. Wasserman, Mark S. Blumberg

In its essence:

The basic argument of intelligent design was famously set forth in the watchmaker analogy of William Paley in 1802: The complexity and functionality of a watch imply a watchmaker; analogously, the complexity and functionality of living things also imply a designer, albeit one vastly more potent than a mere watchmaker. This argument rests on a simple analogy between the design of human artifacts and the design of natural forms...

 Discussions of design are prominent in the writings of evolutionists from Darwin to Dawkins...
 A century later, Richard Dawkins pursued the issue of design and divided the world... into [things] " that really are designed (submarines and tin openers)" {and those which are not]...

What did Dawkins mean when he wrote of things that “really are designed”? In The Blind Watchmaker, he provided a clear answer: “All appearances to the contrary, the only watchmaker in nature is the blind forces of physics….A true watchmaker has foresight: He designs his cogs and springs, and plans their interconnections, with a future purpose in his mind’s eye” [emphasis added]
Such uncritical acceptance of purpose and foresight in human design may well be unwise. After all, do we really know how door hinges and can openers were created?

There follows a brief yet insightful discussion of new behaviors and how they came about, including Dick Fosbury's invention of the "Fosbury Flop" method of high jump in the 1968 Olympics.

It is a lovely article in that it does what all good, critical thinking does: it shows that both sides of a dispute have not grasped the true complexity of the item under dispute; both sides have simplified the situation to fit into agreement with their already existing attitudes. Since all of us do this, we should greet this type of clarification with loud sighs of relief, and chants of "They're jolly good fellows, and so say all of us!"

(As a spoiler, I would add that the article ends with the observation that novelty does not necessarily occur with purposeful design, but it re-inforces the importance of teleology, or goal-directed behavior and the ability to formulate a goal or telos.)

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Reason and Education

Our world is not actually rational. What is it, then? I mean, what is it when we pretend rationality? Looking at the Libyan War, which I assume is over now, indicates that we use reason and logic to not only establish rules, laws, and norms, but also to escape from them (Geneva Conventions).

Escape seems to be fairly easy, for example ignoring the EPA and basic human health concerns in the case of hazardous hydrofracking, when we have a large pay-off. If we do not have a pay-off, we can also rely on a dysfunctional education wherein the long struggle to laws, rules, and norms is ignored and left to be forgotten.

When Education fails, we become reasonable rodents, prey of the viciously rich.
Education is not Propaganda. The aim of Education is to strip Propaganda of its bejewelled tiara of deceit.

More later, especially Geneva Conventions and our Wars o' the Week.
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Troy Davis Execution

The story from the Prosecutor's perspective is here:

http://likethedew.com/2011/10/06/troy-davis-the-prosecutors-view/

It contributes to the fascinating spectacle of how we perceive reality... we pretty much choose an emotional stand, then choose the facts and details we wish out of the infinite number of potential details, then run with it... and I'm talking about both sides of any issue, not just the one I opposed. I do the same thing all the time.

Reason, Logic, and Rationality are the Intelligent Combine-Harvesters we use to work the wheat fields of the universe, and without them, we would have to find a way to deal with infinity... that is, a way other that saying things like "God told me to run fer President", for example. That is one way of dealing with infinity, but it sucks.
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Quantum Logic 2

Everything I dreamed about the other night has been done, and precisely I was dreaming about some form of a "fuzzy" logic, wherein a truth value may have a range, such as from 0 to 1 and taking on fractional values.
Sort of.

What I actually have in mind is a logic where any given truth value "V" takes on a range of values that are also "rules of generation" of cellular automata. As we step through "time" and apply these rules to create a new step of the cellular automaton, we are generating a different truth value snapshot.

Following this approach, and using a two dimensional  basic grid to generate a cellular automaton, with 2 colors, white and black, we might say that the cellular automaton that results in all white squares is true and that which results in all black squares  is false, and the 254 others are the other truth values, some repetitive and some chaotic.

So what? What good is a two-dimensional truth value? How many dimensions of truth are there?
Some would be static, such as all white and all black; some would be various patterns, endlessly repeating; and some would be complex and chaotic, forming new patterns and never repeating.
Some would be "interesting" while others would be bland. Some would be "enchanting" and some would be "fascinating". It seems to enmesh the human being into the web of the logic.

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Quantum Logic

I woke up thinking about Quantum Logic and Professor Hilary Putnam.
I woke up thinking about many-valued logics, too.

I woke up thinking that the truth values, True and False, were similar to the basic buildings blocks of matter, essentially being electrons and protons of opposite charges.
I woke up thinking, however, that just like electrons and protons, True and False are made up of more basic particles, just as atomic particles are composed of energy, quarks, neutrinos, pions, and what have you.

So with my first cup of coffee I was wondering how that would work out. A proposition "X" may be true-1, or true-2, or true-3 (we leave the interpretation of this undefined), yet "X" remains with a truth value of True. The semantics and interpretation of such propositions - always True - becomes a bit different.
Is this merely a move away from many-valued logics to something nonsensical? Maybe. However, it gives the logicians their certitude and the semanticists their wealth of intensions and extensions.

The rules of logic define a space of truth values (not propositions, for they are generated by other means), and there are structures like cellular automata, where true and false step through the logic inherent in the propositions of interest, and create regions of coherence and/or chaos.

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