Adventures in Thought Space

A sentient being is a specimen that can contemplate its existence and plan for manifold futures. Humans easily qualify as sentient and, therefore, are called self-aware. The common, and rather questionable, implication of awareness here is UNDERSTANDING. In part 2, I showed that knowing and understanding are by no means necessarily the same. To go from awareness to understanding is a rather big jump. But given the nature of evolution, it’s easy to infer that self-awareness, or ANY form of awareness, couldn’t arise in such a process without a species being preprogrammed to vastly overestimate it; and if that species were designed for any degree of self or general UNDERSTANDING at all, it would only be in the very narrow sense as pertains to SURVIVAL in their evolutionary environment--and ONLY in their evolutionary environment.    The feeling or belief in understanding and rationality is often as important as the real thing, both on the group and individual levels. Confusion and uncertai

This entry will serve as an intro to at least two subsequent articles: “The Physics of Guns: Present and Future” and “Newton’s Folly and the Power of V Squared,” a discussion of the importance of kinetic energy and Newton’s failure to understand it, along with historiographical commentary.      (The following only requires high school physics: i.e., elastic collisions and kinetic energy ) Blunt force trauma is measured by kinetic energy, not momentum. An object's ability to transfer force to a target is more influenced by velocity--and, thus, kinetic energy--than mass and momentum.  A simple verbal argument: If an object has more energy, it should tend to TRANSFER more energy; if you put more (work) into it a ball, you should get more out of it--energy transfer. A higher energy transfer means a greater increase in the velocity of the Target and, thus, delivered force. But more rigor is required.    Imagine a human body as a target (T) at rest with respect to the ground being stru

Contrary to common “wisdom,” knowledge isn’t power—only knowledge supported by wisdom and understanding. Extralogical reasoning’s primary axiom: No set of concepts and models of reality, yourself, or other people can possibly be so powerful they nullify the need for good observation, fact-gathering, logical analysis, and good management of your own thinking and psychology . In other words, active critical thinking and thinking and decision-making wisdom are more important than knowledge. Even if this isn’t always the case--given the World’s evolved to accommodate smart’s people’s comparative lack of wisdom--it remains the more useful belief, or belief POLICY.   In the Information Age, few distinguish between KNOWING about something and actually UNDERSTANDING it. Knowing means knowing the parts/facts; understanding means knowing how they FIT IN WITH EACH OTHER; PROFICIENCY means knowing what to do with them (which often requires knowing how they fit in with OTHER facts); and WISDOM is K

When you see the “extra” in extralogical, you might think it takes logic and simply makes it “superior.” Such a system would better be described as "SUPER-logical." A super-logical system would incorrectly assume that human beings are imperfect logic machines that can be made “better.” Humans have many EXTRA imperfections, and extralogical reasoning provides EXTRA techniques to deal with them. In addition to serving as a guide for avoiding common mistakes, it takes the unyielding principles of logic and science and makes self-aware deviations to actively compensate for flaws in reasoning. The deviations from logic and science, however, are only deviations at face value. Taking all the EXTRA things into account, it’s as logical and scientific as you can get.    The three-part introduction reflects the primary factors that led me to create extralogical reasoning in chronological order: my grievances with common wisdom/thinking and the need for something else; my distaste for st

(The following requires high school physics and a general idea of what thermal work is) In an age when Maxwell’s equations were just a mathematical reckoning of laboratory experiments, thermodynamics powered trains that sped across continents. But thermal power always comes at a cost--energy. Processes that are mechanically desirable are thermally inefficient, especially spontaneous ones. This is well-known and easy to understand—yet sufficient explanations are rarely offered. In thermodynamics, achieving maxim work from thermodynamic state A to B is always path dependent: It doesn’t just depend on its initial and final states, but the path that it took from point A to B. A reversible transformation is an energy-exchanging process where the optimal amount of work is transferred to or from the system between two thermodynamic states--or values of temperature, pressure, and volume (all reversible processes are quasistatic, but a quasistatic process could still be irreversible due