A Summary Intro to Extralogical Reasoning

The puzzle of life (POL) is dynamic and can never truly be solved (the POL is from Bishko’s life engineering). A thinker contrives progressively better solutions as the puzzle continually changes. The external World is in a perpetual state of change, and improving one’s solutions results in additional changes. Extra logical reasoning (ER) is my solution to the POL. Since I posted my three-part intro (part 1, part 2, part 3) over eighteen months ago, ER has evolved along with its creator. That intro totals over thirty-six pages, and I felt a shorter and updated iteration, nine pages, was in order. 

 

 

The POL is dynamic because life is a complex system: a system of numerous known, unknown, and unidentifiable variables undergoing complex interactions (link to complexity theory article). Ecosystems, economies, and societies are other examples. It is not what I call a COMPLICATED system, like a sophisticated watch or automotive system, nor a chaotic system, a complicated system with governing nonlinear differential equations that make it highly sensitive to initial conditions. Add a psychology to a complex system like society and life becomes quite complex, indeed. 

 

Nothing in life exists by itself in an isolated universe. Beliefs, decisions, models of reality, goals, plans, attributes, pieces of knowledge--all interact with themselves and each other in complex and dynamic ways. You can’t reliably understand the effects of any one of these things by looking at it by itself; you have to see how it all fits together. This is called holistic analysis, analysis of the WHOLE.  Unfortunately, common “thinking” and “wisdom” treat life more like it’s a complicated system. Complicated systems may deserve their name, but since all the variables are known and undergo quantifiable interactions, both parts (or individual variables) and whole (the collection of variables) can be analyzed by a straightforward analysis of the parts. Analysis by parts is called reductionistic analysis.

 

For reasons that will be covered shortly, holistic reasoning is not an entirely natural way of thinking. Extralogical reasoning cultivates holistic thinking not only directly, but also indirectly by helping people manage the weaknesses in their thinking that often get in the way.

 

Wisdom is necessary for two major reasons:

 

One, quality thinking and decision-making are necessarily context-based, and everyone’s puzzle is different. I often joke that life is complicated by the fact that everyone’s different--especially since they’re also all the same. Learning that this is an all-else-NEVER-being-equal world is one of life’s most basic lessons. The all-else-being-equal viewpoint is a simplification necessary for LEARNING, not direct application to real-life. Wisdom is necessary BECAUSE of how much of simplification it is. Even if the CONTENT of common wisdom isn’t entirely wrong, that it and common thinking are bottomed almost exclusively on the all-else-being-equal viewpoint means they can’t be wisdom at all. Worse, the very fact they aren’t context-based at best implies such thinking doesn’t matter and at worst that it’s a mistake. These implications make common thinking and wisdom UNWISDOM.

 

Two, wisdom and especially ENLIGHTENMENT are largely one’s understanding of what knowledge is and how to use it. KNOWING means knowing the facts; UNDERSTANDING means knowing how they fit in with EACH OTHER; PROFICIENCY means knowing what to do with it, which often requires knowing how those facts fit in with other facts; and WISDOM means knowing what they all are and how they, in turn, fit together. Common wisdom says nothing of this, disqualifying it yet again. If you know facts but don’t have proportional knowledge of how they fit in together, you don’t have proportional knowledge of what to do with them, and you don’t really know what any of these things are—you have a self-inconsistent understanding of something that’s naturally prone to misusage, especially if knowing the facts gives you an artificial sense of confidence. There’s nothing unusual about a person who learns one fact, then falsely extrapolates another three. And hubris is more dangerous than ignorance. Therefore, the phrases, “The more you know, the better” and “knowledge is power,” though correct from the all-else-being-equal viewpoint, are sufficiently misleading to render common wisdom unwisdom.       

 

These phrases are part of the rhetorical foundations of knowledge idolatry. Make no mistake: Idolatry is not respecting, admiring, treating as important—but blind worship. Worshiping knowledge, as opposed to merely respecting it, not only leads to an excessive attachment to the worshiped knowledge, but also to preferred or preconceived ideas IN GENERAL, far more than one would already possess given that’s a defining human flaw. The last thing in the World a reasoning philosophy needs to do is encourage it. Even if most knowledge idolators would objectively agree that wisdom and critical thinking skills are more important, because fact-based knowledge is more tangible and abundant than wisdom and understanding, and plays a more conspicuous role in one’s overall learning, the inexorable result of idolizing knowledge will be to cultivate the opposite. Idolatry is an enemy of learning. Blind worship leads to blind faith; blind faith means belief despite less than complete understanding. Idolators sacrifice understanding to achieve a religious form of gratification. Which also makes idolatry an enemy of APPRECIATION.

 

There are many psychological factors behind the pursuit of knowledge, which are covered at some length in part two of the intro, and none need prevent learning from being healthy. To simplify, animals get a jolt of pleasure (often accompanied by an ego-boost) when doing something relevant to survival, such as learning, and these jolts are addictive. These jolts have been fueling knowledge idolatry and information addiction since time immemorial (when humans lack information to obsess over, the make some up). But this doesn’t necessarily make the pursuit of such pleasures “bad”; it only becomes ill-advised if learning and thinking are compromised by not sufficiently recognizing and treating them for what they are. Extralogical reasoners pride themselves in disciplining their thinking accordingly because unlike knowledge idolators, they actually do understand and appreciate knowledge—and want to be good at using it.

 

 

Humans like to bandy around the term “self-aware.” They are sentient beings. They feel pleasure and pain, contemplate their existence, have at least the appearance of Free Will, and plan for manifold possible futures. Here, however, the rather questionable implication of awareness is UNDERSTANDING. To go from being aware of something to actually understanding it is a rather big jump. But if you understand the nature of evolution, it’s easy to infer there’s virtually no change evolution would select for any appreciable degree of awareness, self or otherwise, without creating an exaggerated sense of UNDERSTANDING. In other words, in an evolutionary process, you can’t have any appreciable degree of awareness without DELUSION. You become what humans claim to be, SAPIENT, not by being without delusionary inclinations, but when you became AWARE of them (and other weaknesses in thinking) enough to create a way of thinking that both passively and actively compensates for them. This is an epistemic POL.  

 

Confusion, inhibition, and distractions can be as detrimental to an animal’s dealings with reality as understanding it is beneficial. I’ve found that it’s usually better to have a solution, outlook, model of reality etc. that’s just good or right ENOUGH but one you’re comfortable with and feel like you understand than to have one markedly better in theory that you’re not comfortable with. Evolution is not unaware of this, and the selection for cognitive traits that seek these models of reality fits well with a path of least resistance process like natural selection. In sum, the FEELING or BELIEF in understanding and rationality is almost as important as the real thing, both on the individual and GROUP levels; and a certain degree of understanding is sacrificed to accommodate clarity and resolve. 

 

This is achieved by what I call artificial Resonance. Animal thinking organs reflectively twist correlated events into causational relationships, turning reality into a “harmonious narrative.” This may include discarding information relevant to the truth. Thus, animal thinking organs view the World through an artificial lens of cause and effect. This results in numerous related phenomena: Confusing correlation and causation and observation and interpretation; the causation bias, the natural human tendency to assume that causality will always be ascertainable and satisfying, including in randomness; reductionistic thinking; overestimating both the need and ease of ascertaining correct answers; ineptitude at probability and statistics; the hindsight bias ("knew-it-all-along" bias); many other biases and common fallacies; the linear illusion, the illusion that the Universe tends to change in a linear rather than nonlinear way; and “The Sham,” the widespread con/delusion that rational human agency predominates society (in other words, that human actions and societal events are determined by factors that are far more rational, organized, and predictable than is the case).

 

More intelligence can’t get around the problem. Making the overall thinking machinery smarter makes the delusionary machinery smarter: All else being close to equal, a smarter person might be better at apprehending the truth, but they’re also better at concocting packages of beliefs that protect themselves from inconvenient truths. Moreover, the thinking organ rarely if ever has a true means of verifying correct answers. It’s limited to a SIMULATION of verification: CONVINCING itself. Since the thinking machine that made the inference is also the one “verifying” the answer, this puts the thinker in an inescapable conflict of interest, creating fertile grounds for delusion and rationalization.

 

Just as you can’t disentangle the understanding machinery with the delusionary, you can’t disentangle it with the emotional, either. Evolution doesn’t integrate. It assimilates. It only adds functions to the extent to which it complements or enhances what’s already there. What was already there, prior to the rise of sentience, was mostly primitive. Intellect and emotion are meant to work together. Too little emotion can impair one’s judgment, as is observed with psychopaths and sociopaths; too much presents an even greater and more obvious set of problems. It needs to be just right, which it never is.  

 

Disregarding the many impurities and ambiguities of what’s called natural intuition, most people falsely believe natural intuition is something akin to the common thinking machinery designed to understand the World as it is. In truth, it’s something much more akin to the common thinking machinery designed to MAKE SENSE OF a SIMPLER environment for SURVIVAL. Naturally, this is a flawed design imperative for understanding the modern World and one’s place in it. This in addition to a host of fallibilities arising from people’s social, emotional, and primitive instincts necessities reengineering plans in the form of an epistemic POL. This is what ER is. 

 

What extralogical reasoning is not is “superlogic” or “logic only better.” Although in the end, if you take all the EXTRA things into account, it’s entirely consistent with logic and science, it very much recognizes that the human thinking organ isn’t entirely designed to be logical. Much of ER is based on avoiding wrongness, and, due to artificial Resonance, this requires some reengineering. 

 

Artificial resonance gives rise to the causation bias and the tendency to jump to conclusions, which the thinking organ is DESIGNED to do by default. The first creates the illusion that ascertaining correct answers is easier than the case, the second more necessary. However illogically and impulsively it may often be done, the conscious and unconscious minds are constantly trying to reinforce their beliefs in mutually supporting packages—this includes delusions, bad instincts, bad attitudes, misconceptions, etc. It should, therefore, be assumed that the more a belief or model of reality deviates from the truth, the more the beliefs and models of reality that will come to support it will also deviate from it, including future beliefs and models, which can only be guessed. Wrongness tends to metastasize into other areas of your thinking, leading to more wrongness.    

 

ER respects people who are SMART about their beliefs. But someone who’s smart about their beliefs know that this is about more than simply having beliefs that are smart. Sometimes, being smart about your beliefs may mean passionately proclaiming them, even at the expense pissing people off; but usually, it’s about knowing what not, not YET, to have an opinion on. Ultimately, it’s about disciplined, holistic MANAGEMENT of one’s beliefs. You’re charged with the management of a system—your beliefs and thinking organ—that you have limited control over; don’t make the system unnecessarily large. Focus on the beliefs you care about—and discard the rest.     

 

Although ER always acknowledges the truth, it largely eschews beliefs in favor of belief policies called pragmatic preferences. Remember, one must avoid being wrong more than being correct; thus, pragmatic preferences tend to be “unwrong,” less than fully right but not really wrong, either. ER posits that the truth is not as informative as sometimes believed. The truth doesn’t always reflect control and necessary emphasis. You control some factors more than others, and one must avoid mistakes. For example, ER posits that it’s generally advisable to think of people as more different than similar to encourage context-based thinking and decision-making, and discourage the common over-reliance on preferred and preconceived ideas. On the one hand, everyone has the same foundational attributes, but they vary quite a bit in how they manifest themselves from person to person and place to place. The pragmatic preference is unwrong. 

 

 

Although the focus on avoiding wrongness might seem reasonable to most, it runs counter to almost every aspect of societal thinking. The species might lack curiosity and intellectual ambition, but they’re cognitively and socially programmed for the opposite mode of thinking. People, especially knowledge idolators, often want opinions more than being correct; the voting system treats opinions as more important than knowledge and understanding; and psychiatric diagnostics (at least as a societal phenomenon) encourages people to want to diagnos the mentally ill more than understand them. Social imperatives and the Sham (or delusions about societal rationality and predictability) make a reasoning system based on avoiding wrongness, mistakes, and unnecessary beliefs socially and intellectually unappealing. The futility of ER will be discussed in the upcoming post-script to the original three-part intro.