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This is Audible. | ||
The Lie of the Discipline of Symbolic Logic, written by John Michael Kuchinski, narrated | ||
by Trevor Klinger. | ||
The Lie of the Discipline of Symbolic Logic. | ||
I used to be a professor, and one of the disciplines I taught was symbolic logic. | ||
I have long since stopped being a professor, since it was obviously a total crock. | ||
But now, I run a tutoring business that involves me helping other people with their homework, | ||
including symbolic logic homework. | ||
Back when I was a philosophy professor and grad student, I really tried to see legitimacy | ||
in the discipline of symbolic logic and actually generated some meaningful results in it. | ||
But there was always something off about it, but I couldn't quite put my finger on the | ||
problem. | ||
And then, just a moment ago, when I was finishing up a round of logic homework, for some poor | ||
sap, it hit me. | ||
What they call logic in universities is the ultimate bureaucrat discipline. | ||
There I was, doing utterly time-consuming and generally wasteful exercises for some client, | ||
who, like all my clients, knew that it simply wasn't in his interest to jump through more | ||
bureaucratic hoops than he had to. | ||
There I was, as I was saying, and I had just spent thirty minutes putting in a lot of little | ||
idiot notations, along the lines of Modus Tollens, lines two, five, and double negation, line one. | ||
Monkey idiot, fake math bullshit. | ||
Another thing I had done was complete some truth-table-based proof, another favorite of logic professors. | ||
Eighty-five percent of what I was doing had no substance. | ||
It was purely procedural. | ||
Purely bureaucratic. | ||
And, this time, I saw it with the requisite simplicity and clarity. | ||
I looked back at the people I knew, during undergraduate and graduate school, who were into logic, and | ||
they were all broken, empty husk bureaucrats. | ||
Quasi-smart, but not actually smart. | ||
Maybe a little bit actually smart. | ||
But what they had in the way of intelligence was more about what they didn't have. | ||
In other words, they lacked so much in terms of intellect, or if not intellect, then personality, | ||
that the only part of them that was still functional was the logic part, which, for that reason, predominated. | ||
They all ended up becoming cipher lawyers. | ||
The other thing is that the term logic is a serious misnomer in this context. | ||
What they call logic in college isn't logic. | ||
Real logic is about organizing statement sets in a way that exposes dependence relations. | ||
What they call logic at universities is about rooting through the leavings of some long-gone | ||
and only semi-successful attempts on some person's part to organize some statement set. | ||
What they call logic, in other words, is the study of someone else's attempt to construct | ||
a particular system of logic, which is not logic. | ||
Once the statement set in question has been duly logicized, there is quite trivially nothing | ||
left for the logician to do, since all the intelligence involving work has at that point | ||
been automated away. | ||
Whatever work there is left, it's for the robots, and that's just who does it, except | ||
that in this context, the robots are human robots, bureaucrats, in other words. | ||
There was a computer program designed around twenty years ago called Tarski's World, which | ||
was an attempt to automate logic. | ||
It was the worst conceivable failure in the history of automation. | ||
It was far more difficult to learn how to use their cantankerous software than it was to | ||
do the problems the old-fashioned way. | ||
And what they were automating had already been automated, since to construct a logic is to | ||
automate the making of inferences. | ||
So the very idea of automating logic is absurd. | ||
What the authors of this program were doing was automating the automating of making inferences, | ||
which meant that the student spent hours learning some junk program that insulated him from logic, | ||
instead of instructing him in it. | ||
Second, it wasn't even logic that was being automated. | ||
It was some fragment of some specific logic, which as it turns out was a total bust. | ||
But these philosophy professors kept on lingering over that unburied carcass because they couldn't | ||
come up with anything else. | ||
Also the algorithms of which that particular system of logic availed humanity were useless. | ||
Not in the sense that they gave the wrong answer, but in the sense that applying them took far | ||
heftier resources of intellect and energy than simply solving the target problems directly. | ||
Plus, they only apply to artifacts, and the process of converting a statement set into the | ||
requisitely artificial form is far more involved intellectually than whatever it is one supposedly | ||
figures out by using the algorithms in question. | ||
Try using truth tables to evaluate some actual argument. | ||
It's not worth it. | ||
It's easier to do it by longhand, so to speak. | ||
Plus on the rare occasions that truth tables can be applied, what they tell you is Mickey Mouse. | ||
And by using them, you will simply divert your attention from matters of substance. | ||
Such is the very definition of mathematical failure. | ||
If an algorithm makes it harder to solve the problem that it solves, then there is no use | ||
for it. | ||
It is mathematical garbage. | ||
The discipline stuck around partly because a bunch of pencil pushing geeks posing as thinkers | ||
were in the comfort zone with it. | ||
Because it's not a real discipline. | ||
It's just a collection of bureaucrat geek protocols masquerading as one. | ||
This has been The Lie of the Discipline of Symbolic Logic, written by John Michael Kuchinski, narrated | ||
by Trevor Klinger. | ||
Copyright 2020 by John Michael Kuchinski. | ||
Audible hopes you have enjoyed this program. |
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