Break the laws of thought: Let’s rise like phoenix from the ashes!
Next year I’ll become 50. I don’t think that will bring a big change to my life — at least I hope so!
And you, yes you and we all together, what 50th anniversary will we celebrate next year? Yes, “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”
In my view Apollo 11 has marked the historical peak of what can be achieved by mankind in our classical quest to conquer the world. Fifty years later, we are still in the role of conquerors. But we are exploring phenomena of a less tangible realm now: The digital world and what we use to call digital life.
Digital life, really? Did we really conquer any new territory there?
And: What is life in the first place, non-digital life?
Ah, did I hear you saying “I know that I know nothing”? Great answer. The Greek philosopher Socrates was the first to offer that view of the world: “I know that I know nothing”. As paradoxical as it may sound that is one piece of solid knowledge. From here my true venture starts and I invite you to use this blog text to jump right into the face of that one fascinating question:
Is life, the universe and everything a zero-sum game or not?
This question leads down to the deepest miracles of life. It leads to new answers if we honor scientific breakthroughs that lie hidden in plain sight. Any progress in insight here will be vital to solve the problems that mankind faces — in case the colonization of mars should not prove a realistic option within the next decade.
This question also touches the issue whether “human thought” can at all be reproduced by binary digital computers. What shall we make out of digitization and artificial intelligence, is it chance or risk, paradise or doom? Big ticket questions.
Even in the brevity of a blog entry that needs some base camp considerations first before we dare to tackle this Mount Everest question: At that point we return to Socrates, the man who knew nothing. Treading down the soil under his ideas for a while will give us the perfect base camp shelter for the rest of the expedition. Do you remember those school days when we were taught that our western way of thinking was shaped in ancient Greece? What´s that supposed to mean if our way — my way, your way — of thinking “got shaped”? We should claim our own way of thinking back, shouldn’t we?
That was the mission of Socrates. And actually we can´t blame him for shaping the rules of thought of future generations. Socrates never wrote down a single word! He was so radically convinced that education can´t be achieved by transferring knowledge from teacher to student that he even declined to write down any of his wisdom. He was the man who only and always talked to people.
So no big letter citations here from Socrates. We have none.
Wow. Put yourself into Socrates’ shoes and consider what that means for your ego: Could you resist the temptation to fill the bookshelves of all following generations with your name…? To turn down that option he must have been really convinced that thinking must not — and in its core can´t — be just “shaped”.
But the bookshelves of our libraries are not empty! And today our computers are full of data and of supposedly relevant information. Haven´t we learned a lot from these repositories of knowledge? Where comes this trust in science books from?
Let modern science enter the scene with names like Aristotle, Galileo Galilei, Newton. First in the row: Aristotle. Actually he was a student of well known Plato and Plato was the student of … Socrates. It is fair to describe Aristotle as the godfather of empirical science.
Aristotle in his late “meta physica” books tackles the problem that today’s physicists would call the quest for the “Great Unifying Theory”:
„In general, do all substances fall under one science or under more than one?“
And a few lines later he sets mankind onto a new journey of thought by giving his answer:
“There is a science which investigates being as being and the attributes which belong to this in virtue of its own nature. Now this is not the same as any of the so-called special sciences.“
With this line one of the biggest ventures of humankind started. From here, Aristotle defined the principles of logic thinking and engraved them into the founding stones of any new science that was to evolve since then.
This is fundamental. For over 2000 years we follow those principles of logic without being fully aware what they are in the first place.
So let’s step down the hidden ladder. Three laws are at the core of it all. Or three “axioms”, as Aristotle calls them.
First thing in in the morning when I open my eyes, I underwrite Aristotle’s axioms of acceptable reasoning without me even noticing it.
These are the laws in abbreviated form:
- Law of identity: Things must be identical with themselves
- Law of non-contradiction: A statement cannot at the same time affirm and deny the same fact.
- Law of the excluded middle (or „tertium non datur“ in Latin): A statement must be either true or false - there is no third option.
Believe it or not: Our edifice of reasoning and world explanation rests on this basis. Just add a toolbox of „if… then…“ clauses, and there you go explaining the world in ever finer causal chains.
Aristotle added exactly that: He built his 24 inference forms of „syllogism“ on top of the axioms and that gave us our toolbox of „if…then…“ hammers and chisels that we use as all-terrain tools of reasoning. Underwriting Aristotle is the magic „open sesame“ moment to understanding and handling a world of science, technology and proven checklists.
So much for climbing down the ladder to the basic laws of thought and reasoning: We looked at the baseplate of the laws of inference and saw that it is made of solid concrete, made to support our huge edifice of explicit knowledge. Maybe you are just forming your own intuitions on how this creates a picture of a causal world by way of non-overlapping, hierarchical concepts.
Now let us climb back up the ladder.
We pass by the early centuries when monks worked hard to prevent the Greek groundwork from sinking into the mud of the Middle Ages. The key fact for this epoch is: The rungs did not break. From around 1600 onward some spectacular extensions made that ladder reach into the stratosphere: Galileo Galilei introduced the experimental approach as the fundamental paradigm for science. Isaac Newton complemented the world of physics with his laws of motion to capture what is dynamic in nature. From there we were able to march up the ladder until we reached the moon.
And there the ladder ended. „Why?“ you may ask. „The computer, the internet, GPS, mobile phones, artificial intelligence… they followed suite, we reached new levels of progress since then!“
Sorry to tell you an inconvenient truth: These are all in fundamental breach of the three laws of logic. All those modern inventions exploit effects of the quantum mechanics and Einstein’s theories of relativity. Somehow we got there without climbing further rungs on the Aristotelian ladder.
Thinking along the lines of Aristotelian logic seems natural to us. But it seems more adapted to the convenience in which we love to think about the world than it is adapted to the way nature and cosmos really work. For as long as a century, scientific counter evidence has massively accumulated in the case against traditional logic. The signs of the fundamental incompleteness of the binary world of logic jumps into our faces.
Or, in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s famous words of 1921:
We must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after we have climbed up it.
Physics was first to leave classical thinking behind. The advent of Einstein’s theory of relativity and of the quantum mechanics introduced insurmountable challenges to any and every traditional way of explaining what we see. Today, we are used to just call it the „non-classical view on physics“.
This view forces us to question all three laws. I’ll try the shortest possible path to guide you through this.
The first law: It tells us that we are on safe ground by assuming that objects that we talk, think and reason about have a reliably stable, self-identical nature and meaning. But empirical evidence tells us that when we get to the bottom of „things“ this is not true. Einstein informed us that any matter can be converted into energy: E=mc². Quantum mechanics added a blow in demonstrating that there are always two concurrent perspectives on any „thing“ — namely the particle and the wave perspective. And even worse: What we like to call „things“ is at least as much defined by its context relations as it is by its own intrinsic characteristics. Example: An electron is „something“ quite different when it moves freely through a fog chamber as opposed to when it plays its role inside an atom. The atom is a larger whole. That „whole“ is more than the sum of its parts. The „parts“ are more than mere building blocks of the whole. And no object is just what we think it is. That’s the message of all those weird experiments in quantum mechanics.
The second law, the law of „no contradiction“: Do you know the paradox of „Schrödinger’s cat”? Google it if this doesn’t ring a bell. But do not get frustrated trying to understand it. Basically nobody understands it — at least not in the classical Aristotelian way in which we are used to think! „Schrödinger’s cat“ tells us about an experimental setup which brings a cat into the combined state of being dead and alive at the same time. Wow, not a joke. All experimental evidence tells us that the world is fundamentally composed of such weird states where “logically” mutually exclusive states are possible at the same time. Second law is done with.
The third law — the excluded middle: Quantum mechanics and Schrödinger’s cat send it down the drain as well.
Game over. Our most current account about the fundamental laws of the universe put every single axiom of logic in conflict with what we know about the structure of nature. We happened to ignore this because it’s so utterly convenient to think as we were trained to think. The ladder ended, the chain of “if…then” lost its firm hold. Ooops!
This is the perfect storm.
At that point I make a cut. The story turns out to be longer and I’ll tackle it in steps. Here is the link to the second part.
Thanks for bearing with me!
