Post 28. 04/10/2018 continued . . .
EnFormAction & Enformation
Review of Philosophy That Works by David M. Wolf
Modern philosophy has lost a lot of its old street smarts, from back in the day, when Socrates accosted citizens in the forum with leading & probing questions. It's now mostly an ivory tower profession, except for a few aggressive atheists who debate touchy questions publicly. In this blog, I'm only concerned with refining my own personal philosophical world view. So, I'll break-off the book review here, because I want to go into more detail comparing & contrasting David Wolf's ideas with my own. But those minutia may be of interest only to me, and possibly to Mr. Wolf. FWIW, I'll list some relevant quotes from the book, along with my Enformationism-colored comments :
1. “a simplistic true and false outlook on reality remains the commonplace of civilization : this is the level of thinking that has produced the crisis.” The crisis-provoking Either/Or dichotomy is what prompted the BothAnd principle as my response. Fuzzy Logic is BothAnd reasoning. It's similar to Quantum Superposition, and to the quantum computer logic that goes beyond binary, to include all values between 1 and 0.
2. “that truth itself doesn't even exist, that everything we regard as true is merely useful.” All truths in the real world are somebody's opinion, and their truth-value is relative to absolute Truth, which is G*D's opinion. Only G*D's Truth is 100% true, and we can only find glimpses of it in our partial understanding of reality (e.g. Plato's Cave). Provisional facts are context dependent.
3. “Law of Excluded Middle.” Modern Science was based on a search for absolute, mathematical, truth. And in pre-computer days the closest we could come to the purity of math, was in ideal logical dichotomies, such as 1 or 0, all or nothing, Either/or. But quantum computing allows us to sample the continuous analog logic of the physical reality that our senses detect, and our languages reflect. (Boolean logic)
4. “Brain-dead systems . . . reveal a common, unified cause of hatred, killing, and conflict . . .” Such Either/Or, you're-with-us-or-against-us belief systems draw a line in the sand over which we fight.
5. “truth is roughly equal to words like 'useful', 'reliable', 'adequate' . . .” Scientific truth is not about "what it is", but "what it does". For example, scientists speak of Energy, as-if they know what it is, when all they know is what it does.
6. “meta language”. The realistic BothAnd principle unites the True/False dichotomy into a continuum of contingent facts, by ignoring the binary logical shortcut of Excluded Middle. Thus, it provides a pragmatic method of conveying meaning in human terms, instead of G*D's absolute language of mathematics.
7. “It is a handy decision procedure, but rigid and limiting, as we shall see, too limiting for a postmodern world.” Postmodern philosophy went too far in the opposite direction from Modernism, claiming that all things are relative. But only human understanding is relative. G*D's mathematical knowledge is absolute, and we can only approximate it.
8. “what exists, being itself, is what we might otherwise refer to as information . . .” In my own thesis, mathematical Information is the substance of material Reality5 .
Post 28 continued . . . click Next
Quantum theory is relativistic & probabilistic, whereas Newton's theories were absolute & predictable. Newton's worldview was on the macro scale of the naked eye, assisted by weak technologies. QT goes beyond the limitations of human senses, into the micro and cosmic scales of reality. There, we see intimations of ultimate reality, but only via mentally constructed models (theories).
Observing a quantum system requires acting upon it, which triggers a reaction. Hence, observation is inter-action, a new relationship. Quantum systems interact with each other randomly, hence the total system is neutralized, canceled out, for the moment. But human probes come from outside the system in question. So the observation is intentional, and the reaction is meaningful.
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