Tag: logic

On Mediation, or: Why I Let an AI Write My Last Post

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…and this one. A clarification that is also a demonstration. If anything, the Americanisms should give it away.

The Preamble as Method

A previous post—the one with Foucault, Arendt, Sontag, Fish, Mill, and Girard all lined up like theoretical ammunition—was drafted entirely by ChatGPT after a conversation about the Dershowitz piece before it. I fed it my argument about moral contamination and asked it to expand the thesis with additional thinkers. It obliged. I posted it unedited.

I mention this not as confession but as method. If my core claim is that truth equals rhetoric—that there is no unmediated access to reality, only constructed positions negotiated through language, power, and interpretation—then having an AI mediate my argument while I mediate its output is not a bug. It’s a feature.

The question is never “who really wrote this” but “what work does this text do, and under what conditions?”

This is a non-foundationalist position. There is no neutral ground from which to assess claims. There is no Logic floating above rhetoric, no Reason untouched by affect, no Truth prior to its articulation. What we have are competing rhetorical constructions, each shaped by interests, histories, and power arrangements, each claiming—to varying degrees of honesty—to represent something beyond themselves.

The game is not to transcend this condition. The game is to stop pretending we ever could.

What I’m Actually Arguing

Let me be direct about what those two posts were defending, since the theoretical apparatus apparently obscured more than it clarified.

I am not arguing that:

  • Age of consent laws should be abolished
  • The French intellectuals were right to sign those petitions
  • Association with Epstein is irrelevant
  • Analysis automatically immunizes anyone from moral judgment

I am arguing that:

  1. Liberal discourse routinely launders emotional and political commitments as self-evident logic, then treats anyone who exposes this process as morally suspect.
  2. Legal thresholds are negotiated rhetorical compromises, not mathematical truths. They reflect harm minimization, cultural anxiety, enforcement pragmatics, and historical contingency. To analyze their construction is not to advocate their abolition.
  3. The “moral contamination reflex” treats inquiry as confession—not because the inquiry threatens truth, but because it threatens the claim that certain positions are simply Logic Itself rather than one rhetorical construction among others.
  4. Guilt by association is both a logical fallacy and sometimes a reasonable heuristic. The trick is admitting which one you’re doing at any given moment, rather than claiming your heuristic is deductive proof.

These claims are rhetorical positions. They are not transcendent truths. But neither are the positions they critique.

The Hypocrisy I’m Diagnosing

When someone argues that a 16-year-old capable of choosing abortion should be capable of choosing sex, they are making a rhetorical move. The argument has gaps—abortion concerns bodily autonomy in ways that sex with others does not; capacity for one decision doesn’t automatically transfer to capacity for another; power dynamics matter.

Fine. Point those out. Explain why the analogy fails.

But what actually happens is different. The argument is not refuted. The arguer is diagnosed. Making the argument becomes evidence of desire. Analyzing it becomes evidence of endorsement. Logic is treated as circumstantial proof of guilt.

This is not because the argument is uniquely dangerous. It’s because it threatens a stabilizing fiction: that our current legal thresholds are both pragmatically necessary and philosophically coherent. They are the former. They are not the latter. And the moral panic that greets anyone who points this out is not about protecting children. It’s about protecting the claim that our compromises are something more than compromises.

The same pattern plays out with Epstein associations. Some people knew him socially or professionally in contexts that had nothing to do with his crimes. Some people continued relationships after credible allegations emerged. Some people were directly complicit. These are different categories.

But the discourse collapses them. Everyone in the address book becomes suspect. Association becomes evidence. And anyone who suggests “we should distinguish between these cases” is immediately accused of defending predators.

This is not logic. This is moral theatre. And the fury it provokes when exposed is not righteous. It’s defensive.

The Difference Between Rhetoric and Relativism

Saying “truth equals rhetoric” sounds like relativism. It sounds like I’m claiming all positions are equal, nothing matters, anything goes.

I’m not.

I’m claiming that all positions are constructed through rhetoric, but that doesn’t make them equal. It means we should argue about them on the terms they actually operate—consequences, values, power, effects—rather than pretending one side has Logic and the other side has Emotion.

Some rhetorical constructions are more defensible than others. Age of consent laws, as constructed compromises aimed at harm reduction, are defensible. That doesn’t mean they’re philosophically coherent or that analyzing their incoherence is an attack on children.

Maintaining professional relationships with powerful people who were later revealed to be criminals does not make you guilty of their crimes. But it might raise questions about judgment, complicity, or willful blindness—questions that should be asked specifically, not universally.

The difference is this: I’m not claiming my position is Logic. I’m claiming it’s a rhetorical construction I find more defensible than the alternatives, for reasons I’m willing to argue about.

What I’m criticizing is the move where liberal discourse presents its rhetorical positions as self-evident moral truths, then treats dissent as pathology.

Why the Theoretical Version Failed

The expanded post tried to universalize the pattern—to show that this reflex appears across domains, across thinkers, across history. It succeeded at that. What it failed to do was stay grounded enough for readers to assess whether the pattern I was describing was real or whether I was constructing a persecution narrative.

The problem was strategic evasiveness. By staying abstract, the piece avoided being testable. It gestured at examples without committing to them. It borrowed authority from Foucault and Arendt without doing the work of showing how their critiques apply to the specific cases I had in mind.

This created a gap between what the essay claimed to be doing (defending analysis against moral panic) and what it was actually doing (defending specific controversial figures using theory as cover).

That gap is what critics correctly identified as bad faith.

What I Should Have Said

Here’s the honest version:

The Dershowitz argument is bad. The abortion-sex analogy doesn’t hold. But “the argument is bad” and “making the argument is evidence of pedophilia” are not the same claim. One is logical critique. The other is moral contamination. We should be able to distinguish them.

The 1977 French petitions were misjudged. Calling for the abolition of age of consent laws in that context, with those specific cases, was not wise. But signing a petition is not the same as committing the acts in question, and treating mid-century French intellectual culture as self-evidently monstrous erases the specific debates they were having about law, psychiatry, and state power. We can think they were wrong without treating the question itself as unspeakable.

Epstein’s network matters. Some associations are meaningful. Power enabled his abuse, and understanding how requires looking at who knew what and when. But not every name in a flight log or party photo is evidence of complicity, and the current discourse often treats them as such. We should distinguish between innocent contact, poor judgment, and active enablement—not flatten everything into “guilt by proximity.”

These are all messy positions. They require distinctions, context, and willingness to live in discomfort. That’s harder than moral certainty. But it’s also more honest.

The Meta-Point About AI Generation

The fact that the previous post was AI-generated does something interesting to all of this.

It was rhetorically effective. It marshaled the right theoretical authorities. It structured the argument coherently. It sounded like philosophy. And it was assembled by a pattern-matching system with no beliefs, no commitments, no stakes.

This should tell us something about the nature of rhetoric itself. The text worked—or didn’t—based on what it did, not where it came from. Authenticity is not truth. Authorship is not authority. What matters is whether the construction holds, and under what conditions.

I could have hidden the AI involvement. Many would. The disclosure feels like it undermines the argument’s authority—if a machine wrote it, does it count?

But that reaction itself proves the point. We want arguments to come from authenticated sources, from proper authority, from legitimate speakers. We want to know who’s talking so we can decide whether to trust them. This is not Logic. This is rhetoric all the way down.

The AI wrote a version of my argument that was cleaner and more theoretically sophisticated than I would have produced alone. It was also more evasive, more abstract, less committed. Those aren’t bugs in the process. They’re features of how the system generates text—maximizing coherence, minimizing controversy, staying in safe abstraction.

That I chose to post it anyway, knowing these limitations, is itself a rhetorical move. It says: “I’m willing to use mediated tools to construct my position, and I’m not pretending otherwise.”

What This Leaves Us With

I started with a claim about moral contamination—that liberal discourse treats certain kinds of inquiry as self-incriminating. I then demonstrated this by making precisely the kind of inquiry that provokes that reflex, using examples I knew would be read as defensive rather than analytical.

The responses proved the thesis. Analysis was read as confession. Theory was read as cover. Even asking whether a distinction exists between argument and endorsement was taken as evidence that no such distinction can be maintained.

But here’s what I didn’t make clear enough: I’m not claiming to be above this dynamic. I’m in it too. I have commitments, interests, and positions I’m defending. The difference is I’m naming them as such, rather than claiming they’re simply What Logic Demands.

Truth equals rhetoric. We’re all doing motivated reasoning. The question is not “who has transcended their motivations” but “whose motivations, toward what ends, with what consequences?”

I think the moral contamination reflex produces bad discourse—not because it’s emotional, but because it claims not to be. I think guilt by association is overused—not because association never matters, but because we’ve stopped distinguishing between different kinds of association. I think legal thresholds should be analyzable—not because they should be abolished, but because unexamined laws are dangerous even when well-intentioned.

These are rhetorical positions. I’m arguing for them. I’m not pretending they’re Logic Itself.

If you disagree, argue back. But argue with what I’m actually saying, not with what analysis supposedly reveals about my secret desires.

That’s all I’m asking for. And apparently, it’s too much.

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Language Games: Sorcery

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If philosophy were a game, Wittgenstein rewrote the rulebook. Then he tore it up halfway through and told us the game was the thing itself.

“Don’t ask for the meaning; ask for the use.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

Language Game, the third card in my Critical Theory parody set, isn’t just homage; it’s confession. Wittgenstein is among my top five philosophers, and this card embodies why. His idea that ‘meaning is use’ unhooked language from metaphysics and tethered it to life – to the messy, unpredictable business of how humans actually speak.

The card’s text reads: Choose one: Counter target statement; or reframe it as metaphor.

At first glance, it sounds like a standard spell from Magic: The Gathering – a blue card, naturally, since blue is the colour of intellect, deceit, and control. But beneath the parody is an epistemic mirror.

To “counter” a statement is to engage in the analytic impulse – to negate, clarify, define. To “reframe it as metaphor” is the continental alternative – reinterpret, play, deconstruct. These are not two distinct acts of philosophy but the alternating heartbeat of all discourse. Every argument, every essay, every tweet oscillates between contradiction and reframing.

The sorcery lies in recognising that both are linguistic manoeuvres within the same game. Meaning is not fixed in the words themselves but in how they’re used – by whom, in what context, and to what end. Wittgenstein’s point was brutally simple: there’s no hidden substance behind language, only a living practice of moves and counter-moves.

The Shattered Face

The artwork visualises this idea: speech breaking into shards, thought fragmenting as it leaves the mouth. Meaning disintegrates even as it’s formed. Every utterance is an act of creation and destruction, coherence and collapse.

I wanted the card to look like a concept tearing itself apart whilst trying to communicate, a perfect visual for the paradox of language. The cubist angles hint at structure, but the open mouth betrays chaos. It’s communication as combustion.

Wittgenstein’s Echo

Wittgenstein once wrote, ‘Philosophy leaves everything as it is’. It sounds passive, almost nihilistic, until one realises what he meant: philosophy doesn’t change the world by building new systems; it changes how we see what’s already there.

He was the great anti-system builder, a man suspicious of his own intellect, who saw in language both the limits of thought and the infinite playground of meaning. He dismantled metaphysics not through scepticism but through observation: watch how words behave, and they’ll tell you what they mean.

In that spirit, Language Game is less an argument than an invitation – to watch the mechanics of speech, to see how our statements perform rather than merely represent.

Personal Reflection

Wittgenstein earns a place in my top five because he dissolves the boundaries that most philosophers erect. He offers no comforting totalities, no grand narratives, no moral architectures. Just language, and us inside it, flailing beautifully.

His work aligns with my larger project on the insufficiency of language – its inability to capture the real, yet its irresistible compulsion to try. Wittgenstein knew that words are our most sophisticated form of failure, and he loved them anyway.

To play Language Game is to remember that communication isn’t about arriving at truth but about keeping meaning in motion. Every conversation is a temporary alliance against silence.

The card’s instruction remains both playful and tragic: Counter target statement; or reframe it as metaphor.

Whichever you choose, you’re still playing.

The Dubious Art of Reasoning: Why Thinking Is Harder Than It Looks

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The Illusion of Clarity in a World of Cognitive Fog

Apologies in advance for this Logic 101 posting. Reason—our once-proud torch in the darkness, now more like a flickering lighter in a hurricane of hot takes and LinkedIn thought-leadership. The modern mind, bloated on TED Talks and half-digested Wikipedia articles, tosses around terms like “inductive” and “deductive” as if they’re interchangeable IKEA tools. So let us pause, sober up, and properly inspect these three venerable pillars of human inference: deduction, induction, and abduction—each noble, each flawed, each liable to betray you like a Greco-Roman tragedy.

Video: This post was prompted by this short by MiniPhilosophy.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

Deduction: The Tyrant of Certainty

Deduction is the purest of the lot, the high priest of logic. It begins with a general premise and guarantees a specific conclusion, as long as you don’t cock up the syllogism. Think Euclid in a toga, laying down axioms like gospel.

Example:

  • All humans are mortal.
  • Socrates is human.
  • Therefore, Socrates is mortal.

Perfect. Crisp. Unassailable. Unless, of course, your premise is bollocks. Deduction doesn’t check its ingredients—it just cooks with whatever it’s given. Garbage in, garbage out.

Strength: Valid conclusions from valid premises.
Weakness: Blind to empirical falsity. You can deduce nonsense from nonsense and still be logically sound.

Induction: The Gambler’s Gospel

Induction is the philosopher’s lottery ticket: generalising from particulars. Every swan I’ve seen is white, ergo all swans must be white. Until, of course, Australia coughs up a black one and wrecks your little Enlightenment fantasy.

Example:

  • The sun rose today.
  • It rose yesterday.
  • It has risen every day I’ve been alive.
  • Therefore, the sun will rise tomorrow.

Touching, isn’t it? Unfortunately, induction doesn’t prove anything—it suggests probability. David Hume had an existential breakdown over this. Entire centuries of Western philosophy spiralled into metaphysical despair. And yet, we still rely on it to predict weather, markets, and whether that dodgy lasagna will give us food poisoning.

Strength: Empirically rich and adaptive.
Weakness: One exception detonates the generalisation. Induction is only ever as good as the sample size and your luck.

Abduction: Sherlock Holmes’ Drug of Choice

Abduction is the inference to the best explanation. The intellectual equivalent of guessing what made the dog bark at midnight while half-drunk and barefoot in the garden.

Example:

  • The lawn is wet.
  • It probably rained.

It could be a garden sprinkler. Or a hose. Or divine intervention. But we bet on rain because it’s the simplest, most plausible explanation. Pragmatic, yes. But not immune to deception.

Strength: Useful in messy, real-world contexts.
Weakness: Often rests on a subjective idea of “best,” which tends to mean “most convenient to my prejudices.”

The Modern Reasoning Crisis: Why We’re All Probably Wrong

Our contemporary landscape has added new layers of complexity to these already dubious tools. Social media algorithms function as induction machines on steroids, drawing connections between your click on a pasta recipe and your supposed interest in Italian real estate. Meanwhile, partisan echo chambers have perfected the art of deductive reasoning from absolutely bonkers premises.

Consider how we navigate information today:

  1. We encounter a headline that confirms our worldview
  2. We accept it without scrutiny (deductive failure)
  3. We see similar headlines repeatedly (inductive trap)
  4. We conclude our worldview is objectively correct (abductive collapse)

And thus, the modern reasoning loop is complete—a perfect system for being confidently incorrect while feeling intellectually superior.

Weakness by Analogy: The Reasoning Café

Imagine a café.

  • Deduction is the customer who checks the menu and confidently orders “Soup of the Day,” because the chalkboard says “Today’s Soup is Tomato,” and she trusts chalkboards.
  • Induction is the one who has had tomato soup every Wednesday for months and assumes it’ll be tomato today again—until it isn’t, and now he’s wearing bisque.
  • Abduction sees the waiter carrying bowls of red liquid to every table and infers it’s probably tomato soup, orders it, and gets… gazpacho. Ice-cold disappointment.

All three are trying to reason. Only one might get lunch.

The Meta-Problem: Reasoning About Reasoning

The true joke is this: we’re using these flawed reasoning tools to evaluate our reasoning tools. It’s like asking a drunk person to judge their own sobriety test. The very mechanisms we use to detect faulty reasoning are themselves subject to the same faults.

This explains why debates about critical thinking skills typically devolve into demonstrations of their absence. We’re all standing on intellectual quicksand while insisting we’ve found solid ground.

Conclusion: Reason Is Not a Guarantee, It’s a Wager

None of these modalities offer omniscience. Deduction only shines when your axioms aren’t ridiculous. Induction is forever haunted by Hume’s skepticism and the next black swan. Abduction is basically educated guessing dressed up in tweed.

Yet we must reason. We must argue. We must infer—despite the metaphysical vertigo.

The tragedy isn’t that these methods fail. The tragedy is when people believe they don’t.

Perhaps the wisest reasoners are those who understand the limitations of their cognitive tools, who approach conclusions with both confidence and humility. Who recognize that even our most cherished beliefs are, at best, sophisticated approximations of a reality we can never fully grasp.

So reason on, fellow thinkers. Just don’t be too smug about it.

What’s Probability?

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The contestation over the definition of probability is alive and well—like a philosophical zombie that refuses to lie down and accept the tranquilliser of consensus. Despite over three centuries of intense mathematical, philosophical, and even theological wrangling, no single, universally accepted definition reigns supreme. Instead, we have a constellation of rival interpretations, each staking its claim on the epistemological turf, each clutching its own metaphysical baggage.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

Let us survey the battlefield:

1. Classical Probability (Laplacean Determinism in a Tuxedo)

This old warhorse defines probability as the ratio of favourable outcomes to possible outcomes, assuming all outcomes are equally likely. The problem? That assumption is doing all the heavy lifting, like a butler carrying a grand piano up five flights of stairs. It’s circular: we define probability using equiprobability, which itself presumes a notion of probability. Charming, but logically suspect.

2. Frequentist Probability (The Empiricist’s Fantasy)

Here, probability is the limit of relative frequencies as the number of trials tends to infinity. This gives us the illusion of objectivity—but only in a Platonic realm where we can conduct infinite coin tosses without the coin disintegrating or the heat death of the universe intervening. Also, it tells us nothing about singular cases. What’s the probability this specific bridge will collapse? Undefined, says the frequentist, helpfully.

3. Bayesian Probability (Subjectivity Dressed as Rigor)

Bayesians treat probability as a degree of belief—quantified plausibility updated with evidence. This is useful, flexible, and epistemically honest, but also deeply subjective. Two Bayesians can start with wildly different priors and, unless carefully constrained, remain in separate probabilistic realities. It’s like epistemology for solipsists with calculators.

4. Propensity Interpretation (The Ontology of Maybes)

Karl Popper and his ilk proposed that probability is a tendency or disposition of a physical system to produce certain outcomes. Sounds scientific, but try locating a “propensity” in a particle collider—it’s a metaphysical ghost, not a measurable entity. Worse, it struggles with repeatability and relevance outside of controlled environments.

5. Logical Probability (A Sober Attempt at Rationality)

Think of this as probability based on logical relations between propositions—à la Keynes or Carnap. It aims to be objective without being empirical. The problem? Assigning these logical relations is no easier than choosing priors in Bayesianism, and just as subjective when it comes to anything meaty.

6. Quantum Probability (Schrödinger’s Definition)

In quantum mechanics, probability emerges from the squared modulus of a wave function—so this is where physics says, “Shut up and calculate.” But this doesn’t solve the philosophical issue—it just kicks the can into Hilbert space. Interpretations of quantum theory (Copenhagen? Many Worlds?) embed different philosophies of probability, so the contestation merely changes battlegrounds.

Current Status: War of Attrition

There is no universal agreement, and likely never will be. Probability is used successfully across the sciences, economics, AI, and everyday reasoning—but the fact that these wildly different interpretations all “work” suggests that the concept is operationally robust yet philosophically slippery. Like money, love, or art, we use it constantly but define it poorly.

In short: the contestation endures because probability is not one thing—it is a shape-shifting chimera that serves multiple masters. Each interpretation captures part of the truth, but none hold it entire. Philosophers continue to argue, mathematicians continue to formalise, and practitioners continue to deploy it as if there were no disagreement at all.

And so the probability of this contest being resolved any time soon?
About zero.
Or one.
Depending on your interpretation.

The Rise of AI: Why the Rote Professions Are on the Chopping Block

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Medical doctors, lawyers, and judges have been the undisputed titans of professional authority for centuries. Their expertise, we are told, is sacrosanct, earned through gruelling education, prodigious memory, and painstaking application of established knowledge. But peel back the robes and white coats, and you’ll find something unsettling: a deep reliance on rote learning—an intellectual treadmill prioritising recall over reasoning. In an age where artificial intelligence can memorise and synthesise at scale, this dependence on predictable, replicable processes makes these professions ripe for automation.

Rote Professions in AI’s Crosshairs

AI thrives in environments that value pattern recognition, procedural consistency, and brute-force memory—the hallmarks of medical and legal practice.

  1. Medicine: The Diagnosis Factory
    Despite its life-saving veneer, medicine is largely a game of matching symptoms to diagnoses, dosing regimens, and protocols. Enter an AI with access to the sum of human medical knowledge: not only does it diagnose faster, but it also skips the inefficiencies of human memory, emotional bias, and fatigue. Sure, we still need trauma surgeons and such, but diagnosticians are so yesterday’s news.
    Why pay a six-figure salary to someone recalling pharmacology tables when AI can recall them perfectly every time? Future healthcare models are likely to see Medical Technicians replacing high-cost doctors. These techs, trained to gather patient data and operate alongside AI diagnostic systems, will be cheaper, faster, and—ironically—more consistent.
  2. Law: The Precedent Machine
    Lawyers, too, sit precariously on the rote-learning precipice. Case law is a glorified memory game: citing the right precedent, drafting contracts based on templates, and arguing within frameworks so well-trodden that they resemble legal Mad Libs. AI, with its infinite recall and ability to synthesise case law across jurisdictions, makes human attorneys seem quaintly inefficient. The future isn’t lawyers furiously flipping through books—it’s Legal Technicians trained to upload case facts, cross-check statutes, and act as intermediaries between clients and the system. The $500-per-hour billable rate? A relic of a pre-algorithmic era.
  3. Judges: Justice, Blind and Algorithmic
    The bench isn’t safe, either. Judicial reasoning, at its core, is rule-based logic applied with varying degrees of bias. Once AI can reliably parse case law, evidence, and statutes while factoring in safeguards for fairness, why retain expensive and potentially biased judges? An AI judge, governed by a logic verification layer and monitored for compliance with established legal frameworks, could render verdicts untainted by ego or prejudice.
    Wouldn’t justice be more blind without a human in the equation?

The Techs Will Rise

Replacing professionals with AI doesn’t mean removing the human element entirely. Instead, it redefines roles, creating new, lower-cost positions such as Medical and Legal Technicians. These workers will:

  • Collect and input data into AI systems.
  • Act as liaisons between AI outputs and human clients or patients.
  • Provide emotional support—something AI still struggles to deliver effectively.

The shift also democratises expertise. Why restrict life-saving diagnostics or legal advice to those who can afford traditional professionals when AI-driven systems make these services cheaper and more accessible?

But Can AI Handle This? A Call for Logic Layers

AI critics often point to hallucinations and errors as proof of its limitations, but this objection is shortsighted. What’s needed is a logic layer: a system that verifies whether the AI’s conclusions follow rationally from its inputs.

  • In law, this could ensure AI judgments align with precedent and statute.
  • In medicine, it could cross-check diagnoses against the DSM, treatment protocols, and patient data.

A second fact-verification layer could further bolster reliability, scanning conclusions for factual inconsistencies. Together, these layers would mitigate the risks of automation while enabling AI to confidently replace rote professionals.

Resistance and the Real Battle Ahead

Predictably, the entrenched elites of medicine, law, and the judiciary will resist these changes. After all, their prestige and salaries are predicated on the illusion that their roles are irreplaceable. But history isn’t on their side. Industries driven by memorisation and routine application—think bank tellers, travel agents, and factory workers—have already been disrupted by technology. Why should these professions be exempt?

The real challenge lies not in whether AI can replace these roles but in public trust and regulatory inertia. The transformation will be swift and irreversible once safeguards are implemented and AI earns confidence.

Critical Thinking: The Human Stronghold

Professions that thrive on unstructured problem-solving, creativity, and emotional intelligence—artists, philosophers, innovators—will remain AI-resistant, at least for now. But the rote professions, with their dependency on standardisation and precedent, have no such immunity. And that is precisely why they are AI’s lowest-hanging fruit.

It’s time to stop pretending that memorisation is intelligence, that precedent is innovation, or that authority lies in a gown or white coat. AI isn’t here to make humans obsolete; it’s here to liberate us from the tyranny of rote. For those willing to adapt, the future looks bright. For the rest? The machines are coming—and they’re cheaper, faster, and better at your job.

Cognitive Processing Flow Model

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The Cognitive Process Flow Model illustrates how we process the phenomenal world. It’s reductionist and is missing aspects because it is just a back-of-the-napkin sketch. I created it because I uttered, “I can model it for you”. And so I did.

EDIT: I’ve updated the model slightly as the article head image, but the copy content refers to the first draft.

My response was to a person making the claim, that all you need to facts and logic prevails. Rather than restate the argument, I’ll just walk through the diagramme.

There’s meta information to set it up. We are subjective entities in the world. We have a sense-perception apparatus as we exist in it. Countless events occur in this world. We recognise only a few of them within our limited range, though technology expands this range in various ways.

Most of us interact in the world. Some are less ambulatory, so the world visits them. Some have sense-perception deficits whilst others have cognitive deficits. My point is not to capture every edge and corner case. This is just a generalised model.

All models are wrong, but some are useful.

—George Box

It starts with an event. Events occur ceaselessly. In our small portion of the world and elsewhere. For the purpose of the model, the first thing that happens is an event catches our attention. We might notice a shape, a colour, or a movement; we might hear a sound, smell an aroma, feel a sensation, or taste something.

A pre-emotion, pre-logic function serves to process these available inputs. Perhaps, you hear a report on anthropogenic climate change or read something about a political candidate. This emotional filter will police sensory inputs and unconsciously or preconsciously determine if you will react to the initial stimulus. If not, you’ll continue in an attention-seeking loop. Not that kind of attention-seeking.

As my dialogue was about the presentation of facts, our next stop will be logical evaluation. Does this make sense to us, or can we otherwise make it? This is a process in itself. I’ll assume here that it requires little elaboration. Instead, I’ll focus on the operating environment.

Our logical processes are coloured by past experiences and tainted by cognitive biases and deficits. We may also trigger the calling of additional facts through past experiences or the current engagement.

We’ll process these fragments and reach some logical conclusion. But we’re not done. We take this intermediate conclusion and run it through more emotional processing. Cognitive biases come back into play. If the event conforms with your past experiences and cognitive biases, we may run it through a cognitive dissonance routine. To be honest, this probably is part of the emotional reconciliation process, but I’ve drawn it here, so I’ll let it be. In this case, it’s just a filter. If it happens to conform to our belief system, it will pass unfettered; otherwise, it will be squared with our beliefs. Again, this leads me to believe it’s a subcomponent of emotional reconciliation. I’ll update the chart later.

In any case, we’ll end at Final Acceptance. This acceptance may be that we accept or reject the logic, but we arrive at an opinion that gets catalogued with the rest of them. Some may be elevated to facts or truths in the epistemological hierarchy. Although an end marker is identified, it’s really a wait state for the next event. Rinse and repeat until death.

I’ll update this presently. Be on the lookout. It could include more dimensions and interactions, but that might have to wait until version 3.

Meantime, does this feel right to you? Did it even get your attention?

An Example: Anthropogenic Climate Change

Let’s wrap up with an example. I’ll use climate change. An article comes into your attention field, and you have an interest in these things, so it passes through the emotional filter. If your propensity for these articles is high, it might race to the next stage.

You read the article, and it contains some facts—rather, it contains claims for evaluation. To do this, you’ll recall past experiences and cognitive biases are always lying in wait. You may have to look for new facts to add to the mix. These will have to take a similar route past your attention gatekeeper and emotional sidekick.

If you are already predisposed that climate change is a hoax, these facts will filter through that lens—or vice versa.

When all of this is resolved, you’ll have arrived at a conclusion—perhaps we’ll call it a proto-conclusion. It hasn’t been set yet.

You are still going to introspect emotionally and decide if this is a position you want to hold. Perhaps, you feel that climate change is a hoax but this doesn’t jive with that position. Here, you’ll either accept these facts and flip a bit to a sceptical believer or cognitive dissonance will kick in and ensure your sense of the world isn’t thrown off kilter. You may update your belief system to include this datum for future assessments.

Now we are ready for final acceptance. You can now express your established opinion. If the net event is to counter that acceptance, rinse and repeat ad infinitum.

Dialetheic Logic and Reality

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It’s too late for me to digest this piece on Graham Priest’s Radical Dialetheic Logic and Reality, but I’m interested enough to bookmark it here.

The word dialetheism comes from the Greek δι (di- ‘twice’) and ἀλήθεια (alḗtheia ‘truth’). It’s the view that there are some statements which are both true and false. In other words, it’s the view that there can be a true statement whose negation is also true. In the literature, these statements are called “true contradictions” or (to use Graham Priest’s neologism) dialetheia.

— Paul Austin Murphy

Fais dodo

Millennial Morality

Posted in modernism, morality, philosophy, psychology, religion, sexualityTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Surfing the Web, I happened upon a blog wherein Wintery Knight riffed on a conversation about morality with an atheist millennial man. My interest was piqued, so I scanned it and then read it. I scanned the About page, and it’s apparent that we hold diametrically opposed worldviews, and that’s OK.

As a result of the encounter with this millennial man, the post intends to answer the question: How could I show him that happy feelings are not a good basis for morality? But let’s step back a bit.

In the words of the author, ‘I asked him to define morality, and he said that morality was feeling good, and helping other people to feel good.’ Here’s the first problem: Although a conversation about morality may have occurred between the author and an atheist millennial man, the post is not in fact a reaction to Millennial morality. Rather, it’s of the respondent’s dim characterisation of what morality is (whether for a theist or an atheist). His reply that morality is ‘feeling good, and helping other people to feel good’ sounds more like hedonism and compassion. The author does pick up on the Utilitarian bent of the response but fails to disconnect this response from the question. The result is a strawman response to one person’s hamfisted rendition of morality. The author provides no additional context for the conversation nor whether an attempt to correct the foundational definition.

A quick Google search yields what should by now be a familiar definition of morality: principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behaviour.

morality (noun) : principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behaviour

Oxford Languages

Clearly, conflating utility with rightness and wrongness, with goodness and badness, is an obvious dead-end at the start. This said, I could just stop typing. Yet, I’ll continue—at least for a while longer.

At the top of the article is a meme image that reads ‘When I hear someone act like they’re proud of themselves for creating their own moral guidelines and sticking to them’.

This is one of the memes from the Wintery Knight facebook page

Natalie Portman sports an awkward facial expression and a sarcastic clap. Under the image is a line of copy: If you define morality as “whatever I want to do” then you’ll always be “moral”, which is tautological, but a bit of a non-sequitur to the rest, so I’ll leave it alone.

Let’s stop to regard this copy for a few moments but without going too deep. Let’s ignore the loose grammar and the concept of pride. I presume the focus of the author to be on the individually fabricated morals (read: ethical guidelines or rules) and that the fabricator follows through with them.

That this person follows through on their own rules is more impressive than the broken New Year’s resolutions of so many and is a certainly better track record than most people with supposed religious convictions.

May be a cartoon of text
New Years’ Resolutions

First, all morals are fabricated—his morals or your morals. And you can believe that these goods came from God or gods or nature or were just always present awaiting humans to embody them, but that doesn’t change the point.

Let’s presume that at least some of his morals don’t comport with the authors because they are borne out of compassion. Since we’ve already established precedence for cherry-picking, allow me to side-step the hedonistic aspects and instead focus on the compassionate aspects. Would this be offensive to the author? Isn’t, in fact, in Matthew 7:12 and Luke 6:31, the do unto others Golden Rule edict, is a call for compassion—at least sympathy if not empathy?

After a quick jab at abortion (tl; dr: abortion is bad) taking the scenic route to articulate the point that atheists typically don’t think of unborn children as people, apparently without fully grasping the concept of zygotes and gametes. The author then confuses the neutral notion of a probabilistic outcome with accidents, having negative connotations—as if I flip a coin, the result is an accident. Let’s ignore this passive-aggressive hostility and move on. Let’s also forgive the flippant—or at least facile—articulation of biological evolutionary processes as ‘the strong survive while the weak die’. We can let it slide since what is meant by strong in this context is wide open.

child (noun) : a young human being below the age of puberty or below the legal age of majority

Oxford Languages

The author continues with a claim that ‘you aren’t going to be able to generate a moral standard that includes compassion for weak unborn children on that scenario’. This feels like an unsubstantiated claim. Is this true? Who knows. Some people have compassion for all sorts of things from puppies to pandas without having some belief in rights. Some people like Peter Singer argues that rights should be extended to all species, and all humans should be vegans. I wonder if the author can live up to this moral high watermark. Maybe so. Probably doesn’t mix linen and wool because it’s the right thing to do.

“If the rule is “let’s do what makes us happy”, and the unborn child can’t voice her opinion, then the selfish grown-ups win.” This is our next stop. This is a true statement, so let’s tease it a bit. Animals are slaughtered and eaten, having no voice. Pet’s are kept captive, having no voice. Trees are felled, having no voice. Land is absconded from vegetation and Animalia—even other humans. Stolen from unborn humans for generations to come. Lots of people have no voice.

People are into countries and time and space. What about the converse situation? Where is the responsibility for having the child who gains a voice and doesn’t want this life? Does it matter that two consenting adults choose to have a child, so it’s OK? Doesn’t the world have enough people? What if two consenting adults choose to rob a bank? I know I don’t have to explicitly make the point that once the child is thrown into this world, the voice is told to shut up if it asks to exit or even tries to exit without permission. Unless circumstances arise to snuff out the little bugger as an adult.

Finally, the author is warmed up and decides to focus first on fatherhood. The question posed was whether the interlocutor thought that fatherlessness harmed children, to which the response was no.

Spoiler alert: The author is toting a lot of baggage on this fatherhood trip. Before we even get to the father, the child, or the family, there is a presumption of a Capitalist, income-based, market economy. Father means the adult male at the head of a nuclear family with a mum (or perhaps a mother; mum may be too informal), likely with 2 kids and half a pet. The child is expected to also participate in this constructed economy—the imagined ‘right’ social arrangement. It goes without saying that I feel this is a bum deal and shit arrangement, but I’ll defer to pieces already and yet to be written here. But if fathers are the cause of this ‘Modern’ society, fuck ’em and the horses they rode in on.

She asks him, if a system of sexual rules based on “me feeling good, and other people around me feeling good”, was likely to protect children. Evidently, he was silent, but here you can already determine that she unnecessarily links sex to procreation. And reflecting on a few paragraphs back, how is forcing a child (without asking) to be born and then told to become a wage slave or perish not violent and cruel?

(Self-guidance: Calm down, man. You can get through this.)

So the question is surreptitiously about procreative sex. By extension, if the couple can’t procreate for whatever myriad reasons, it’s OK? Sounds like it? Premenstrual, menopausal, oral, anal, same-sex coupling is all OK in this book. Perhaps, the author is more open-minded than I am given credit for. Not all humans are fertile, sex with plants and animals won’t result in procreation. A lot of folks would call this author kinky or freaky. Not my cup of tea, but I’m not judging. Besides, I’ve read that book—though shalt not judge. I’m gonna play it safe. And they couldn’t print it if it wasn’t true.

Spoiler Alert: Jesus dies at the end.

Seeking credibility, the author cites Bloomberg, as Centre to Centre-Left organisation as Far-Left. Clearly another red flag. Excuse me, your bias is showing. This piece is likely written for choir preaching, so we’ll take the penalty and move along.

A quick jab at the bête noire of ‘Big Government’ facilitating idle hands and, presumably genitals, to play. The idle rich as Croesus folks are idols to behold. At least I can presume she opposes military spending and armed aggression on the grounds of harm, so we’ve got common ground there. They’re probably an advocate of defunding the police, though by another name. so there’s another common platform. It just goes to show: all you need to do is talk to ameliorate differences. We’re making good headway. Let’s keep up the momentum.

Wait, what? We need to preserve a Western Way? I was shooting for something more Zen. Jesus was a Westerner—being from Bethlehem and all. (That’s in Israel—probably on the Westside.)

r/memes - Everyone else in the Middle East Jesus Christ
White Jesus from the Middle East

No worries. Just a minor setback—a speedbump. It’s just a flesh wound. But we’ve pretty much reached the end. A little banter about some other studies. There’s an impartial citation from the Institute for Family Studies on cohabitation they beg the question and employs circular logic. And another from the non-partisan Heritage Foundation finds that dads who live with their children spend more time with them. How profound. I’d fund that study.

And it’s over. What happened? In the end, all I got out of it is ‘I don’t like it when you make up morals’. You need to adopt the same moral code I’ve adopted.

Emotivism
AJ Ayer – Emotivism

Where was I? Oh yeah. Fathers. So these people don’t mean generic fathers. They mean fathers who subscribe to their worldview. In their magical realm, these fathers are not abusive to their mothers or children; these fathers are not rip-roaring alcoholics; these fathers are the dads you see on the telly.

Suspiciously absent is the plotline where the fathers are ripped from their families through systematic racism and incarcerated as if they didn’t want to be there for their children. And this isn’t discussing whether it’s an issue of fathers or an issue of money. It isn’t discussing whether someone else might serve as a proxy for this role. Indeed, there is nothing magical about fathers unless you live in a fantasy world.

Comment below or by email.

Sans Raison

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How does one justify reason without reason? Isn’t this just circular reasoning— circular logic? Can one justify reason without employing reason? Can there be logic without reason?

The Age of Enlightenment is simultaneously the Age of Reason. Reason is the best path forward, and yet one can’t even board the train without a predisposition toward reason at the start.

This reminds me of the troubles the logical positivists encountered by claiming that everything need to be falsifiable, and yet this claim could not be falsified. It’s Hume’s ought problem.

One could employ empiricism, but can one arrive there alogically?

Is there a term for ‘not logical’ without the same baggage as illogical?

  • Alogical
  • Antilogical
  • Contralogical
  • Counterlogical
  • Delogical
  • Dislogical
  • Inlogical
  • Mislogical
  • Nonlogical
  • Oblogical
  • Unlogical

For example, a work of art is not (necessarily) logical, but neither is it illogical; this feels like improper usage. So, what prefix modifier would one employ to communicate ‘not within the sphere of logic’ in shorthand? Or is it just ‘not logical‘. That doesn’t seem quite right either.

Clearly, shambling down some rabbit hole…

What Reason?

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Any system built on the presumption of widespread capacity for reason is bound to fail. The ability for most humans to ‘reason’ is clearly abridged and homoeopathic. And this is before one factors in cognitive deficits and biases. This is separate from sense perception limitations.

Nietzsche was right to separate the masters from the herd, but there are those in both classes with these limited capacities, though in different proportions.

People are predictably irrational

In economics, we have to define reason so narrowly just to create support the barebones argument that humans are rational actors—that given a choice, a person will take the option that leaves them relatively better off—, and even with this definition, we meet disappointment because people are predictably irrational, so they make choices that violates this Utilitarian principle. And it only gets worse when the choices require deeper knowledge or insights.

Democracy is destined to fail

This is why democracy is a destined to fail—it requires deeper knowledge or insights. The common denominator is people, most of whom are fed a steady diet of the superiority of humans over other species and lifeforms and who don’t question the self-serving hubris. They don’t even effectively evaluate their place in the system and their lack of contribution to it.

To the masters, who are aware of the limited abilities of the herd to reason, it seems like hunting fish in a barrel. If we convince the herd that they have some control over their destinies, that’s as far as it needs to go, but among the masters, there are subclasses, so people in these factions are also vying for position, so each employs rhetoric to persuade herd factions.

No one is sheltered from the limitations of reason

To the people out reading and writing blogs and such, confirmation bias notwithstanding, they may more likely to be ‘reasonable’ or able to reason, but try as they may, no one is sheltered from the limitations of reason.

More on this later…