[Vision2020] News Article, Mental Illness, Fixation of Belief Discussion

[thansen@moscow.com]

And this is important to use on the Vision2020 listserve because . . . ?

Tom Hansen

> Re:  Immutable Laws of Logic?
> 
> It may surprise you but some of the those conventions called the laws of
> logic have changed.  Parts of Aristotle's class logic was found to be in
> error by George Boole (the assumption that a defined class has a member
> implicit in one of Aristotle's argument testing rules).  Other more advanced
> concepts in the restricted predicate calculus and unrestricted predicate
> calculus have been advanced and changed in the last 150 years, e.g. Gödel's
> Proof.  Like science, logic does advance by rooting out false statements
> and/or discovering new truths.  While it is not immutable, it is the best we
> have now.
> 
> The grammar of a language does change.  However, the notion of what
> constitutes a believing in contradiction, e.g., believing in a statement and
> its negation at the same time does not appear to have changed since the
> earliest recorded writings as far as I can tell.  What also appears not to
> have changed is that the mentally ill and the religious (partial
> redundancy?) sometimes do not recognize a contradiction as a deterrent to
> belief in a creed.
> 
> If some fool wants to believe in a creed that contains contradictory
> statements, there is nothing anyone can logically do to stop them.
> 
> In the secular world such persons are often referred for treatment if the
> consequences of their contradictory beliefs reach a certain level of danger
> to society.  Treatment is many times successful.  In the religious world
> less alarm is raised by contradictory creeds unless the consequences are
> like those which came from Jim Jones, David Koresh, et al.  Treatment of
> religious delusions have a much lower success rate than treatment of secular
> delusions.  (Brian Mitchell is one example.)  The treatment rate is lower
> because a fantasy is impossible to disprove with finality.  Despite there
> being no unequivocal evidence, some still believe that there are real
> unicorns or leprechauns.
> 
> There is a newer logic -- fuzzy logic.  The same basic logical conventions
> apply to fuzzy that have always applied, except that the properties defining
> class membership is allowed to be less precise than that in the stricter
> predicate calculi -- as such properties are in ordinary language with its
> vagueness and ambiguity.
> 
> You can call me narrow minded.  Possibly true.  But I am willing to consider
> any set of non-contradictory non-meta-lingual statements as a possible
> belief.  (Meta-lingual and mixed sets are more complicated.)  Of the
> infinite number of such sets, most are rejected on the basis of evidence.
> Some are left as pending possibilities depending future evidence.  Some are
> conditionally accepted given present evidence.  I submit that such an
> attitude is much more open minded  and mentally healthy than that which you
> appear to espouse.  I agree that the universe is very complicated.  I submit
> that those sharing my view have done infinitely more to forward the
> understanding of  those complexities that those who believe that a set of
> statements containing a contradiction is an acceptable belief.
> 
> My weakness in your eyes is that I cannot "stretch" myself to believe in
> positions that contain contradictory statements.  But to do so would be
> delusional -- one form of mental illness.  Apparently you have no such
> reservations.  If you did, the belief system you so zealously push and in
> which you seem to have such a powerful, blinding ego involvement would be
> greatly altered.
> 
> Many children have imaginary playmates or imaginary friends with various
> desirable attributes, that they sometimes think of as real, and to whom they
> "talk" to for various reasons.  Most outgrow these delusions.  If they
> don't, they are considered mentally ill.  The same situation is
> indistinguishable from belief in of Santa Claus, Mother Goose, the Easter
> Bunny, and alleged gods.
> 
> Again, let state the obvious in hopefully clear language.  I do not believe
> in any set of statements which contain or from which can be internally
> derived a given statement and its negation -- a contradiction.
> 
> If you do believe in such sets of statements as possible beliefs, then admit
> it.  (And please do not rejoin with the view that certain objects are beyond
> the pale of language then contradict yourself by talking about them.)
> 
> In that case those, if any, who are following this discussion can decide for
> themselves which point of view is likely to be true.
> 
> 
> Did you sleep through the History of Philosophy?  I am not a rationalist but
> an empiricist.  Rationalists were those that believed in immutable truths
> discoverable by logical processes as opposed to observational processes
> (prone, unfortunately to error) alone.
> 
> 
> Wayne
Fox

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