The Laws of Thought

Last week I talked about flow and wu wei, two ways of describing a state where the conscious observer ceases to exist.  Each of these two descriptions has an accompanying framework or value system that connects the ideas to a greater body of work. I’m especially fascinated by the Taoist worldview that supports wu wei because it’s a value system that operates in a way that challenges mainstream western intuition.  It espouses many truths that seem contradictory or incompatible with the way that we normally process information in modern society.  In Blob Theory, I tie this default model to the Laws of Thought, which are some very old ideas that originated in Greece and have evolved over the past few thousands of years.  These laws describe, in as precise a way as possible, the ways that logic or reason can shape and reflect our culture. 


The model that follows these laws is connected with many of the core values in western culture and in science, but it doesn't reflect intuition on a universal scale.  Other value systems such as Taoism use completely different rules, but I call the model built on the Laws of Thought an 'intuitive' system because it echoes a lot of the ways that things naturally seem to work. 


I have a unique feeling of what “normal” means to me, a Ruben-specific understanding of what makes sense in my world.  This sense of normal results from a combination of shared knowledge, of scientific facts built up over many generations, as well as an implicit indescribable reaction to the environment that can’t be captured with language.  These two parts complement each other to form a holistic picture of the way the world is. 

The shared knowledge can be explicitly represented in the laws of physics or mathematics, or in language by legal codes and government structure.  The implicit reaction is just what being alive feels like, what the senses generate through consciousness.  My personal feeling of normal is probably very close to your feeling of normal, but it’s not exactly the same.  No two people have a perfectly shared version of reality, but we can get a pretty good guess of what objective reality might be like by seeing where the sum of individual points of perspective coincide.

The people around me share my sense of normality to a high degree, but this alignment fades the further I look in both time and space.  The western world 500 years ago saw things differently than we do today, and other parts of the earth have different stories of reality that tend to differ by geographic location.  I can confidently describe our environment as a bacteria-filled world that orbits around the sun, but this only makes sense to my english-speaking peers in the modern age.  Other ages or other parts of the world can easily reject this view as incompatible or insignificant when compared to their own explicit sense of normality, even though these hypothetical humans presumably share a very similar implicit indescribable reaction to reality.  They would see similarly, hear similarly, think similarly, but have a different story or narrative for the way things work. 

In the West, our explicit acknowledgement is built on cumulative models that compound on each other.  Our models start with foundational truths, which are then polished and refined through generations of observation and experimentation.  For example, hundreds of years ago, the world was explained through the lens of alchemy and humors, theories of reality that are invalidated by current standards.  Modern models like nuclear physics or endocrinology have proved themselves to be more consistent and applicable in more contexts, and they have successfully replaced the old ideas because they properly follow the expectations of the western value system.  These expectations mean that all ideas compete with each other, and the ideas that emerge victorious in the West do so because they comply with the system of first principles that sits at the foot of scientific progress. These first principles, called the Laws of Thought, were originally documented around 2500 years ago, making it a framework roughly as old as Taoism. 

These laws, originally proposed by Aristotle, describe a framework for making sense of the world at the most basic level.  In essence, they establish a preference for statements and information that is concrete, consistent, and non-contradictory.  If information is to be treated as logical or reasonable, it must comply with the conditions stated by the laws of thought.  The laws are considered self-evident truths, and can be represented as follows:

1. Things are equal to themselves, and have consistent identities
2. Things cannot simultaneously exist and not exist, they cannot be contradictory
3. Things are either true or false, there is no third option

They provide the structure for the study of formal logic, and have evolved as a principle that supports mathematics, the scientific method, our legal system, and nearly every facet of modern western normality.  Their utility comes from the fact that they can be used to infer or extrapolate: if you have a set of statements that satisfy the above conditions, you can draw trustworthy conclusions by using deduction or reasoning.  

For example, if I am older than my brother but younger than my cousin, then my cousin is older than my brother.  This is intuitively obvious, but it’s also an example of the transitive property that arises from statements that follow the three laws.  This type of calculation can be very basic, but the most basic bits of information compile and compound upon each other and ultimately culminate in advancements like the computer that I’m currently writing on.  The western world is built using these blocks, and they shape our sense of implicit and explicit normality.  This makes it very hard to understand a value system that goes against these laws, such as Taoism or other eastern value systems.  We place such a high value on concrete concrete logic, so the Taoist emphasis on the ineffable seems like a strange tool for navigating reality. If I were to translate Taoism’s values into a structure that mirrored the laws of thought, it would look something like this: 

1. Things are not equal to themselves, and constantly move and change
2. Things simultaneously exist and do not exist, and are contradictory by nature
3. Things are neither true nor false, but rather something in between

It might seem difficult to imagine a system that can make calculations using such paradoxical axioms, but this is the starting point for Blob Theory.  It’s probably unnatural to think of contradictions as useful, but I use these paradoxes as lenses for understanding complexity - embracing contradiction rather than resolving it.  In next week’s writing, I’ll talk about contradiction in greater depth, and how each of us has internal division or contradictions to our personas or our behavior. 


Do you ever notice what your default intuition is like? Do you trust logic?  Do you trust god more? When's a moment when you’ve realized your sense of normal differed from someone else’s?

Let me know in the comments or by direct message!