Wikileaks says Wednesday is the End for Hillary.

[xorcist at sigaint.org]

>
> 	You subscribe to that one too? Well no, since scammers,
> 	charlatans and intellectual frauds love to hide their scams
> 	behind empty, ambiguous words.
>
> 	Anyway, hopefully you got the point. Your 'understanding'
> 	of 'logic' is quite similar to that of the worst totalitarian.

I disagree, but I can understand where you're coming from. I always have
understood your point. I've discussed this sort of thing, at length, with
many people who put logic on a pedestal. I don't believe you've made an
effort to understand my point, however.

There is a danger in being too focused on logic and reason. It
unnecessarily constrains one's thoughts. Consider the very word -
RATIONAL. As in, rational numbers - numbers expressible as ratios. That is
how the Pythagoreans thought of numbers. They had no concept at all of an
"irrational" number - a number not expressible as ratios.

So, to say to them that sqrt(2) is not expressible as a ratio of two
integers was UNTHINKABLE. They had no framework for the concept within
their "logic." They lacked the IMAGINATION to set aside their quite
literally rational view of arithmetic and to simply THINK, with as few
rules guiding that process as they could manage.

And that is an example regarding something a simple as the concept of
quantity. How much more should we be suspicious of such failures of
imagination when dealing with complex concepts?

As far as totalitarianism goes, I'm not sure what an example from fiction
is necessarily supposed to prove, but I can counter with another: legend
has it that Hippasus was murdered for proving that root 2 is irrational. A
warning for taking systems of thought, ideologies, logics and so on, too
seriously.

But there is a deeper matter, here. When you ask for something to be
"logical" what, exactly, do you mean? Logical according to what?

A triangle has interior angles which sum to 180 degrees, says Euclid.
Lobachevsky can prove all triangles have more than 180 degrees. Both are
correct, given their assumptions. Both work in the real world. Which,
then, meets your criteria of "logical" or "rational"? Which do we use?

There is classical, "Aristotelian" logic. But there are parametric logics
where induction and deduction are special cases of consequence. There are
fuzzy logics where truth and falsehood are not 1 and 0's but take on a
range of values .. formalized "grey area" thinking, essentially.  More
importantly, there are paraconsistent logics - logics which specifically
deal with contradiction in definable, inconsistency-tolerant ways.

So what type of logic should we use? And why? You want to use one type of
reasoning, as most people do, usually Aristotelian; but there is
absolutely no basis for this other than ignorance of the others - despite
the fact that the others are often times the better tools for the job.
That is why they were invented.

I mentioned Godel's Incompleteness Theorem at one point. It says,
informally, that in any logical system with a finite number of
assumptions, one cannot have consistency, and the ability to prove all
true statements.
If you value consistency as the ideal, you put truth at second place. This
is the choice of the mathematician. To have access to all truths within
such a system, you need either an infinite mind to hold infinite axioms,
or tolerance for inconsistency. This is the path of the philosopher.

Some would suggest that complete tolerance for all inconsistencies and
having an infinite mind are quite the same thing. Hence, the F.S.
Fitzgerald quote.

My point is that "rational" and "logical" only make sense according to
some assumptions, according to a frame of reference. And that frame of
reference needs to be agreed upon for use in order to have any utility in
a discussion.

You mentioned that 2+2 doesn't equal 5 before. True enough, at least not
that I know of, but I countered that 7+10 does equal five.

And it does, according to a different frame of reference. That frame of
reference being the face of a clock. Circular.

You choose to only think linearly. I choose to think according to any
rules I choose, when I choose them, for the purposes of getting to the
goal that I decide is worth pursuing.

I'm free of thought that way.