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Beneficientor
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The Evolution of Logic
« on: 2004-12-30 17:31:02 » |
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Disclaimer
Before I start writing, I'd like to apologise beforehand if what I'm going to talk about is in some way common knowledge among the CoV cognoscenti- if it's philosophical old hat.
This subject is one I've only recently become interested in, so it's quite likely that the insight I'm going to present here- which to me is new- has been covered many times before by greater minds. Quite possibly Dennett et al or any of his predecessors have covered the topic before. I haven't yet done enough research to find out, so this is a raw, unaided, unresearched piece of reasoning.
Perhaps the two most important tenets of Virian philosophy are Darwinian Evolution (extended to memetics), and rationality- the logic by which Darwinian thought is deduced. Before you can accept evolution as a fact, you first have to accept logic, which is apparently a matter of common sense.
A question that has troubled philosophers since the birth of reason (and more recently among the linguistic thinkers such as Wittgenstein, Russel etc), has been why logic is logical.
The most basic of logical languages- arithmetic- demands, for example, that 2+2=4, but why is this the case? What is a number, and why are the rules of mathematics the way that they are? Why does 2+2 not equal 9534.2657, or some other obscure figure? Can we prove why 2+2 must always equal 4 and not something else, no matter what? Is logic an aspect of the Universe- is it inextricably tied to reality, or is it something above and beyond reality- a metaphysical "Form" as Plato may have suggested.
This same kind of question can be extended to most areas of study whose basic concern is with logic. Why are the rules of logic the way they are? What is the underlying logic behind the axioms of geometry? Why does reason have any more authority over the world than illogical superstition?
How is it possible to justify rationality itself?
These are deep questions, and in my experience the general resolve has been to approach them using abstract theories of language. Perhaps it isn't possible to prove the validity of mathematics with mathematics. Perhaps an external touchstone must always be required, which itself demands a proof from outside its own system, resulting in a hopeless logical regress.
My aim here is not to resolve this question, but to make an observation. I believe that the two Virian virtues cited above (Evolution and Reason) form a self-supporting circle. I believe that Evolution is inextricably tied to the nature of reason, and it may be that Evolution can explain Logic, and not the other way round.
It's a simple idea, and that's why I think it's inevitably been discovered and elaborated on before I got to it.
The basics of the idea are this:
1. Logic is a real aspect of a given environment- the laws of physics for example.
2. Evolution dictates that any creature with a faculty of reason- the capability to analyse according to a system of logic, will be favoured by natural selection only if the rules of its logical faculties comply with those of its environment.
To put it another way, there may have been other creatures on Earth in the past who could reason logically according to different rules than us. There may have been creatures who thought that 2+2=6, however, because the laws of our particular reality insist that 2+2=4, the conclusions such creatures arrived at, whilst consistent with their own systems of logic, would have been in conflict with the reality of their environment. In a competitive situation in which one such creature and another creature whose logic was more in line with the rules of the universe were pitted against each other, natural selection would favour the "correct" thinker who would triumph and gain an evolutionary advantage over the other.
Perhaps it is misleading to ask which of two such creatures is right and which is wrong, seeing as many various mathematically consistent systems of logic can be conceived of; one can only say that one creature has an advantage over the other because the system of logic it is using is more compatible with the environment in which it has evolved. Therefore, as evolution progresses, so does logic. As creatures evolve, those whose logical system are not in line with the rules of the environment will be at a disadvantage and will die out, whereas those whose logic most closely approaches that of the environment will be the more successful.
As a further illustration, imagine that submicroscopic creatures could evolve on quantum scales (they can't of course, but bear with me). The rules of the quantum world are irregular when compared to those on the classical level in which we live. At quantum levels classically inexplicable things occur, and reality becomes fuzzy and quantised. If the quantum world were somehow magnified and exploded into our classical reality, then us humans (whose reasoning faculties have been honed according to the macroscopic classical world) would be at a distinct disadvantage. We would be completely lost, the world would seem bizarre, and our way of thinking would no longer benefit us. Classically rational people, therefore, would be at risk of extinction. Those who learned to think Quantum Logically (there have been [I think] relatively successful efforts among Physicists to formulate systems of quantum logic), however, would understand how the world worked and could exploit that understanding to their advantage.
Systems of logic, therefore, may neither be right nor wrong, just compatible or incompatible with the laws [logic] of the environment. Evolution creates agents who are ever more adapted to their environment, and, so long as the laws of physics remain constant, a universe in which thinking creatures can evolve will always produce creatures, in the end, whose logical systems immitate those of the environment.
Summarily, reason itself is an evolutionary process.
http://pascal.iseg.utl.pt/~ncrato/Math/Hamming.html is an essay by R.W. Hamming that discusses some of the topics raised here with greater authority and depth than I have.
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knives
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Re:The Evolution of Logic
« Reply #1 on: 2005-01-24 19:55:19 » |
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Hi, I just joined the group because I have always defended a new way to look at life in order to change it for the better. Even though I am 22, I just started university in my philosophy degree I wish to acquire, so I am here to learn more than to contribute but i am sure you guys don't mind teaching a hungry mind something to base his future ideas.
About the topic at hand I find it interesting you analyze it in such fashion. Reason is a faculty of any species that is to evolve into a point of dominating like we do. And I do agree that logic depends on the species as well, so it is to say that, logic comes from the ability of the species to reason, thus reasoning with the environment and acquiring logic to best suit it's needs that the environment provides for his existence. Diferent ways of logic provided diferent views for the man to see his existence in the world, such as god for instance, providing that one could see diferent gods doing the work, others saw only one god providing for the same others saw diferent gods(I hope this analogy compares to the arithmetical one used in the original post) Hence diferent forms of logic to ease the thirst for knowledge humans are aparently subdued too when living in group. Well getting this somewhere, through the evolution of society, some religions adapted, others went down with their civilizations and others merge some factors into their dominants(christianity for example). and I feel that the existence of us today is quite exquisite evidence that evolution encompasses logic as well, for as the latter expressed, logic comes from the ability to reason which the dominant species withholds in order to dominate in a certain environment, If our logic would be to suddenly change at a quantum state of proportion, we wouldn't perish, but our logic would definitively change and we would need some time to develop the logic to survive in this new environment, only if our ability to reason is not affected in any way of course.
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God is just an equation,
who equals slavery.
God is just a perception,
of people's misery.
(Mindfuckers, Victor Rivera 2004)
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Nikolai
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Re:The Evolution of Logic
« Reply #2 on: 2005-01-29 12:52:50 » |
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All thought requires context. To create models that allow us to predict events and work with our surroundings, we must first provide axioms from which to draw the necessary inferences. Since true axioms are inherently unprovable, any conclusion based on axioms is unprovable except within the concept of the axioms used in its proof. Just as "Absolute Truth" or is inaccessible due to the fallability of perception, "Absolute Logic" is inaccessible due to the fallability of reasoning: that is, at their lowest levels, all reasoning systems necessarily employ arbitrary distinctions. Two plus two equals fout not because we have evolved reasoning abilities (although reasoning abilities are necessary to perform the arithmetic), but because four is the name that we have arbitrarily given to the quantity that is the sum of two and two. There is, actually, an area of Mathematics called Fundamentals which deals with things such as proofs of elementary arithmetic operations, but for most of us - for most Mathematicians, even - the observation that two groups of two objects make a group of four objects is proof enough. A creature that believes that the combination of two groups of two objects makes a group of six objects is unlikely, as evolution would favor the inability to reason over the ability to reason incorrectly. Rather, "correct" reasoning would have developed in stages, with creatures gradually aquiring the perceptive faculties to accurately observe their environments and the logical faculties to assume axioms that accord well with what they perceive and to make more and more complicated inferences based on those axioms.
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deadletter-j
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How many Engstrom's does it take?
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Re:The Evolution of Logic
« Reply #3 on: 2005-02-02 15:07:01 » |
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I posit a new way of looking at logic - a syncretic view, to use a new word I just became enamored of.
I teach mathematics. I went nuts in terms of information flow, and began trying many new things.
I learned that students didn't really 'get' things if they were in a pure logic form - pure symbolism.
I learned that students also didn't really 'get' things if taken from a pure experimental point of view.
What did work was theoretical and experimental together. That between 'logic' and the tests of it's results lies a more complete truth.
That in fact, we are looking at a set of symbols, internally consistent, and a reality, internally consistent, and in the connections between them, we see the face of truth.
There's more to this, however I don't want to bore with long diatribes about human metastructure and information theory.
-b
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MoEnzyme
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Re:The Evolution of Logic
« Reply #4 on: 2005-11-06 16:06:49 » |
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I think of logic as an emergent element of mind; meaning that once the critical capacity for mind has been reached, logic is a naturally and frequently occuring resulting phenomenon. According to evolutionary psychology, mind is a essentially computer software, so I doubt it is actually encoded genetically, only that the capacity for it follows from various genetic encodings. beyond said capacities, it could in theory run on any computer hardware of similar capacity, however it was created, artificially or otherwise. Furthermore, I see no reason in theory, why a mind better suited for quantum living couldn't likewise be loaded into a non-quatum system and put to use, assuming there were some appropriate problems to work on.
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Mo Enzyme
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