Replying to LO23500 --
Dear Organlearners,
Winfried Dressler <winfried.dressler@VOITH.DE> writes in reply to my:
>>I cannot identify something which is not real.
>and
>>WE CANNOT ESCAPE REALITY.
>Dear At,
>
>here you expressed, what makes the law of the excluded middle
>(LEM) so important to me.
>
>Let A be identified as something that is real.
>
>Then NOT A consists of ALL BUT A.
>
>The LEM states that NOT NOT A 'cannot escape reality'. It has to
>be A again.
>
>Without LEM, A could be real (as A) and not real (as it's double
>negation). But: A and NOT A is ALL. Tertium non datur.
Greetings Winfried,
Yes, I agree provided A is something which does not change as time pass.
When A changes, the double negation NOT NOT A will only be equal to A
itself if there is no lapse of time during the negation acts. But as
humans our physical brain takes a finite time to process any thought, even
a negation. Thus when we arrive at the NOT NOT A, it is not the A which we
have initially begun with.
>This is the contribution of sureness to reality. Otherwise, how could
>one identify anything at all?
>
>(To avoid misunderstanding, I should repeat, that the place of LEM
>is in sureness. LEM doesn't make sense for liveness, wholeness,
>fruitfulness and openness. I am not sure about the relation between
>LEM and otherness and spareness.)
Simply determine whether you have a two-value categorisation (like
true/false or good/bad) or not. LEM requires two and only two values to
operate: either the one, or the other, but not both or none.
When more than two values (as a result of the one-to-many-mapping of
entropy production) apply in a property, it now becomes finding a unique
value among all the values. This is nothing else than the defining
property of all mathematical functions.
All the essentialities, even sureness, EXCEPT liveness ("becoming-being")
have a one-to-many-mapping. I was very puzzled by this because as you I
assumed that LEM orginates from sureness. But eventually I managed to
uncover a logic of commands by using "becoming-being" of liveness as the
basic categorisation. To my surprise this logic of commands was not
disjuct from the logic of statements, but actually encompasses it. It is
because of this encompassing that LEM gets a foothold in sureness once we
reduce (simplify) the logic of commands to the logic of statements.
As I have written in my previous contribution, it is important that we do
not use LEM without qualifying it in creativity and its higher order
emergents like learning. In other words, we must question ourselves often
when we use "negative reasoning" in creating, learning, believing and
loving. The reason is that these activities all have to do with change
("becoming") as is witnessed by the essentiality liveness. Negative
reasoning in these activities is fallible and often leads to disastrous
results. Simply ask a couple in love how often negative reasoning has led
to heated arguments between them.
When will we learn that a YES at the right place and time will achieve far
more than issueing NO's left, right and centre. Before saying NO, place a
guard in your mind to skip it and to say YES at the first available
opportunity. Let us use LEM sparingly. This will help us to emerge from
learning individuals to learning organisations.
The primordial source of all these activities or changes is entropy
production -- the change (increase) in entropy of the universe as time
proceeds. Thus trying to understand entropy production with negative
reasoning is not only fallible, but almost fatal. It is especially true
with respect to the dynamics (force flux pairs, free energy, etc.) of
creativity -- the "other side" of the essentialities. For example, how
will we understand the entropic force arising between good and bad in
ethics if we try to exclude the bad from the good and hide it in a closet?
As you gain experience in thinking about entropy production and observe
the thinking (positively or negatively of others, you will find
confirmation to what I have to say.
With caring and best wishes,
--At de Lange <amdelange@gold.up.ac.za> Snailmail: A M de Lange Gold Fields Computer Centre Faculty of Science - University of Pretoria Pretoria 0001 - Rep of South Africa
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