Category Archives: Logic

Search versus Research

26 Wednesday Jan 2022

Posted by in Anti-scientific, Critical Thinking, Logic

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Please do not confuse your Google search with my doctoral degree.

So proclaims a t-shirt of mine; one of my favorites, I should add.

In this age of anti-vax infantilism, few things can set my teeth on edge as some uneducated buffoon declaring, “I’ve done my research!” (Some “unprofessional” language is going to appear in this blog post. So prepare yourselves.)

“I’ve done my research!” No, in point of fact, you have not, you ridiculous turdwaffle. Because it is damned near a mathematical certainty that you have never done any REsearch in your entire life. You did an internet search, at best, and counted yourself special for having done so.

The company name “Google” has become synonymous with an internet search engine in much the way the company Xerox became synonymous with a photocopier, long after the company itself had lost any real dominance in the field. They were knocked of their thrown by Canon, in particular, yet photocopying remained “xeroxing,” even unto this day. Google, despite its despicable and absolutely ruthless pillaging of its users’ privacyi has yet to suffer such a well deserved fate, but time may yet tell. In the meantime, I will resort to common usage, and speak of “googling” something, without necessarily speaking of Google itself. (You’ll know which one I speak of by whether or not the word is capitalized &/or comes with a gerund.)

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Learn The Language

27 Monday Dec 2021

Posted by in Logic, Process Philosophy, Relationalism, Whitehead

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To review a point I have made in the past:

  • A scientist is someone who engages in inquiry to discover new facts
  • An engineer is someone who engages in inquiry to discover new applications for known facts.
  • A technician is someone who engages in inquiry to maintain known applications.

We can add to this the mode of inquiry which characterizes philosophy

  • A philosopher is someone who engages in inquiry in order to discover new meanings, and fully understand old ones.

Philosophers aren’t alone in this latter form of inquiry, but as I am a philosopher that is what I am working from. (Arguably, the philosopher’s position is more generalized and abstract than, say, that of the novelist.) I highlight the above so that we may take a poke at that most maddening and obscure subject, the meanings of Whitehead’s terms, (mostly) in his philosophical works. Because you’ll never learn the thinker’s meanings if you do not first learn the thinker’s language. With Whitehead, this means two things. First, you must “get inside” the structure of the man’s thinking, a step the overwhelming majority of scholars have categorically refused to do. The second is that you must disabuse yourself of the notion that, just because Whitehead uses a term that you find familiar, Whitehead is therefore using that term in a way that is familiar to you. This latter is the part that really drives some people – most especially myself – absolutely bananas.i We’ll approach these in order.

Now, while the second issue can drive one over the edge, I will add that the first one is pretty frustrating as well. In point of fact, it really, really annoys me. I mean, it REALLY annoys me. Let me illustrate it with a non-Whiteheadian example.

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Biggest Mistake

27 Monday Sep 2021

Posted by in Emergence, Logic, Metaphysics, Process Philosophy

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“Biggest mistake of my life.”

“Worst mistake I ever made.”

I can’t speak for other cultures, but phrases such as the above and others akin to them are fairly commonplace in American conversation, particularly when the topic involves the foolish choices made when we were young. While often accompanied with an eye roll and a shake of the head in signs of regret, there is just as often a tinge of wistfulness as well, a longing for a return to that kind of vivid recklessness and the electrifying sense of being alive that was at its core.i There is certain legitimacy to that longing – even, and even especially, for the mistakes – at the metaphysical level. For every act of creation is, in an important sense, an error, a mistake, a “failure” to follow the “correct” path. So it is worth a moment to take a look at such things.

Before going any further, I want to dismiss one kind of mistake that is grotesque in its calculated refusal of any possibility of creativity. That is the kind of action “celebrated” by the despicable Jackass films and shows. These aren’t errors of any kind. They are acts of willful stupidity pandering to the lowest element of human character, “entertainment” predicated on laughing derisively at others for pulling absurdist stunts devoid of any talent or art. These programs are simply an extension of the “Good Ol’ Boy’s last words” jokes.ii There is nothing interesting or amusing about such behavior or the people who wallow in it.

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Complexity – It Ain’t Simple (part 2 of 2)

30 Monday Aug 2021

Posted by in Complexity, Logic, Mathematics, Philosophy of Logic

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The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, Seek simplicity and distrust it.”

– Alfred North Whitehead, The Concept of Nature (end of chapter VII.)

Ultimately, the only way we know how to measure the complexity of some process or phenomenon – beyond excruciatingly vague and unhelpful statements like, “this is really complicated” – is by measuring how hard it is to solve the mathematical equations used to characterize the problem. All the rest, even when palpably, indisputably true, is just hand-waving. Sometimes hand-waving makes us feel better, because we need to burn off the energy pent up in our frustration. But it never really tells us anything. On the other hand, we really do have some effective means of measuring how hard it is to solve some mathematical equation or other, and we’ve refined such measures significantly over the past fifty years because such measures tell us a great deal about what we can and cannot do with our beloved computers (which includes all of your portable and handheld devices, in case you weren’t sure.)

Some problems simply cannot be solved. This even despite the fact that the problems in question seem perfectly reasonable ones that are well and clearly formulated. (Actually, being well formulated makes it easier to demonstrate when a problem cannot be solved.) Some problems can be solved, albeit with certain qualifications, while still others are “simply” and demonstrably solvable.i However, saying that a problem is “solvable” – even in the pure and “simple” sense (notice how I keep scare-quoting that word) – doesn’t mean that it can be solved in any useful or practical sense. If the actual computation of a solution ultimately demands more time &/or computer memory space than exists or is possible within the physical universe, then it is unclear how we mere mortals benefit from this theoretical solvability.ii It is these latter considerations that bring us into the realm of computational complexity.

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Complexity – It Ain’t Simple (part 1 of 2)

24 Tuesday Aug 2021

Posted by in Logic, Process Philosophy, Whitehead

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Some sixty-one years ago, the American philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine wrote a famous essay, “On Simple Theories of a Complex World.” Actually, referring to this as a “famous essay” is a tad redundant, since Quine is one of those people who only ever wrote famous essays. But setting that observation (bordering on sour grapes) aside, Quine goes on to observe the difficulty in saying just what does qualify as simplicity. He further observes the legitimate psychological and formal reasons while theory builders so ardently crave simple theories: the simpler the theory, the more readily it can be employed in our various cognitive activities. Of course, too simple a theory leaves us with no purchase on the world what-so-ever. “God willed it” is about as simple a theory as you can come up with, but it is also as singularly useless a theory as anyone could ever imagine; it provides absolutely no insight, a complete absence of predictive power, and only an illusion of emotional comfort for those readily distracted by vacuous hand waving.

A “Rube Goldberg” machine.

Quine was writing more than a decade before the emergence of computational complexity as a sub-field of abstract Computer Science, in which upper and lower bounds for kinds of complexity (and thus, conversely, forms of simplicity) was even formulated. But we do now have a variety of ways to address Quine’s concerns about how to characterize complexity and simplicity. I’ll say more about this in a moment. What I want to start with a more controversial proposition: Namely, Quine got it backwards. In a very real sense, it is the world that is fundamentally simple and our theories that are complex.

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God’s Name

28 Wednesday Jul 2021

Posted by in COVID-19, Critical Thinking, General Philosophy, Logic, Religion

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I see yet another story bemoaning the death of a willfully stupid fool who not only denied the reality of the COVID-19 virus (SARS-CoV-2) but also declared that he would place himself “in God’s hands”, both to avoid catching the disease, and then survive it once caught. Well, God appears to have been too busy trying to wipe a grease stain off those hands to attend to this gentleman’s demands, because said individual got sick, suffered, and died gasping for air while intubated.

I’m going to step outside my usual zone of operation and address a few words at those staggeringly vain individuals who imagine it is their unique privilege to tell God what to do. Now, as a proper Whiteheadian, I do believe that the term “God” has minimal reference and conceptual content. Not even remotely enough to form the kind of center of meaning that one might go to church to celebrate. For that, one must move well beyond Whitehead and into the process theology that owes its source to Charles Hartshorne. Much of this latter, though not all by any means, is also rooted in various interpretations of Christianity. And while even this is beyond the scope of my primary interests, I’m actually going to address my remarks to the vastly more conservative field that tends to identify as evangelical or fundamentalist. (While there can be overlaps, the two groups are NOT the samei.) I’ll spare you any fatuous declarations as to either the reality of these people’s God, the truth of their concept(s), or the validity of the Bible. In fact, I’ll be taking these things as given. Rather, what I want to show is that a certain class of behavior that they publicize as evidence of their devout faith is, by their own standards, a gross and indefensible sin. It is not hard to show.

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The Infinite

22 Thursday Jul 2021

Posted by in Logic, Mathematics, Ontology

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I don’t anticipate any explicitly Whiteheadian considerations this time around, but all my thoughts are informed by my Whitehead scholarship, so you never know. What I want to talk about here is the idea of infinity. I say “idea,” rather than “concept,” because even within the relatively constrained bounds of formal mathematics infinity is not one thing. Outside of the bounds of mathematics matters are significantly worse, little or since no effort is made to constrain such talks, or even render it potentially intelligible, with formally legitimate techniques.

Speaking of “outside the bounds,” the ancient Greek word for the infinite is “apeiron” (ἄπειρον), which translates as “unlimited” – the “a” being the negation (“un”) and “peiron” meaning limited or bounded. Clever as they were, the Greeks lacked our additional 2,300 years of mathematical study, so the idea that one can have something that is infinite (unbounded) – for example, the length of the perimeter of a geometrical figure – i.e. a perimeter that exceeds any possible length, measurable either in practice or the ideal, that is nevertheless bounded by an easily measured finite figure (a circle, for example) would never have occurred to them.i But the figure above, the Koch snowflake, is precisely such a figure. (Details can be found HERE. As is my wont, I skip the technical details which will take up more text than this blog post.)

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Computation, Complexity, and Why is The Rum Always Gone? (2)

16 Friday Jul 2021

Posted by in Logic, Philosophy of Science, Whitehead

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Some tasks, processes, “computations,” are too difficult to do in any practical context. Some are so intrinsically hard that, even while they don’t seem especially difficult, God herself could not do them. The first is the problem of computational complexity, the other of computability/solvability. The former, complexity, emerged from the latter, computability, because the problem of computability was more obvious to mathematicians who’d never seen, much less actually used, a computer. But after Alan Turing presented his own abstract model of a computing “machine” (the “Turing Machine,” or TM) to prove the existence of unsolvable mathematical problems, the difference between what could be solved in theory (computability) and what could be solved in practice (complexity) came into view, and methods were developed to investigate the latter as well as the former. This is all by way of summary of, and pointing forward from, the previous post.

Mechanical Turing Machine

There are theoretical &/or partial work arounds, ways of tricking out the game, for both complexity and computability. For complexity, it is unclear whether the trick can be realized in practice. For computability, it is unclear whether the trick (which is only a partial trick, really) is even physically possible. Still, I’m going to talk a little about both – in the preceding order – and finish with some comments on how these theoretical considerations can be manifested in our considerations of what does and what does not constitute legitimate scientific inquiry, and a few comments closing the circle on analysis versus ontology.

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Computation, Complexity, and Why is The Rum Always Gone? (1)

14 Wednesday Jul 2021

Posted by in Logic, Process Philosophy, Whitehead

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Were it ever the case that there was another person as peculiar as myself, who would study topics like Whitehead’s philosophy of process and theory of computation at the same time (over a period of decades), such a singular individual might speculate about the connection between the theory of computation and Whitehead’s process of emergent actual occasions. The latter bears some real analogies to a real, completed computation: the data (Whitehead actually uses that term) that combine via a process of integration into the holistic completion of an occasion/computation has a variety of structural similarities. This is made more interesting by the fact that Whitehead was writing long before theoretical concepts of computation emerged in anything like a developed form in Alan Turing’s work in the mid-to-late 1930’s.

An example of the Nazi “Enigma” machine.

The analogy fails catastrophically, of course, after even a little examination. The theory of computation offers nothing in the way of insight into the continuum of possibility; it is hopelessly finite in every character; it does not even imagine a difference between analysis and ontology. Whitehead’s process philosophy transcends all of these distinctions. But – and this is key – that is because Whitehead looks at both analysis and ontology, and notes the distinction. The theory of computation only looks at analysis. Still, while it goes no further, as far as it does go is broadly applicable to any activity where analysis is involved. So that is what I want to talk about here. As always, I’ll avoid technical details; working through even a trivially simple computation in pure, “Turing Machine” (TM) form, is an exercise in tedious details that would stress even the most detail oriented individual to the breaking point. Books on theoretical computation, and computational complexity, are so readily available for the curious that I’ll not even trouble to make a list (which could, by itself, consume the 1500 words I otherwise try to limit myself to.) But neither will I say anything that I can’t cite multiple sources to justify.

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Strains, Planes, and Flat Loci

22 Saturday May 2021

Posted by in Emergence, Logic, measurement, Mereology, Metaphysics, Process Philosophy

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A running joke that Dr. Auxier and I incorporated into our booki was the phrase, “skip to page 337.” The pagination reference is to the Free Press edition of the corrected version of Whitehead’s monumental work of metaphysics, Process and Reality (“PR” hereafter.) Page 337 of PR is the start of the fifth part of the work, his rather poetic discussion on “God,” beyond the more concrete arguments of the preceding 337 pages. By “concrete” it should be understood that Whitehead’s “God” is not some religion inspiring big daddy in the sky that you go to church to beg candy from. Uneducated rumors to the contrary not withstanding, Whitehead never invented words. But at many points in his tome on “speculative philosophy” (his preferred term for what others call “metaphysics”) he needed to identify an “omega point” which served as the entirely impersonal foundation for the rational structure of the world as well as the “font of creativity.” He called this “God.” Were he inclined to use non-English words, a better choice might have been the Greek “arché” (αρχη). But Whitehead was Whitehead, and that was never going to happen, and so it did not.

Setting aside for the moment the question of “God,” there are some important issues in the material that the people skipping over to pg. 337 are, in fact, skipping over, in their stampeding rush to gin up a “Whiteheadian” theology. There are two things I want to talk about that are left all but untouched in the secondary literature on Whitehead, one of which is interesting and the other is downright revolutionary. These things appear in the pages that many scholars ignore when the skip to pg. 337. They are what Whitehead called “strains” and “flat loci.” I’ll address these in order. But first I’ll devote a paragraph to the work on natural philosophy that Whitehead developed in the years preceding PR.

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