A just had a debate with a couple of Twitter users, one of whom was aggressively wrong while insulting me before deciding the conversation was over, and the other of which was very strange, but before the first one left, they did make one point that gave me pause. Here’s the starting point of the conversation: taoki on X: “125-140IQ is probably the worst IQ you could have. literally anything else is better” / X. (I didn’t realize until it was all over that I had been talking to two different people.)
The former user’s point was, “& yet you propose the world is not in adherence to reason, which is the entire point why reasoning is an invaluable tool? This conversation is over”, after I’d mentioned that I believe the universe is non-mechanistic and non-deterministic, that consciousness is the primary substrate, that consciousness is magic in its fullest sense, and that logic is a filter that helps us weed out considerations that can’t be the case because they’re self-contradictory, but that logic can’t in itself create anything new. So, let me attempt to tackle that here.
First, magic and the non-mechanistic are not necessarily illogical. I, for one, am fiercely logical, and I can hold the possibilities of both those things in my mind easily. They’re rather counterintuitive and in violation of a typical set of first principles that aren’t strictly, fundamentally required by logic but that not adhering to may be confusing and scary for some people. Magic and the non-mechanistic simply aren’t as neatly structural or conceptually orderly, nor are they as precisely modelable (e.g. with mathematics/physics), as many would prefer. They’re not grounded in the concrete, the absolute, the discretely apprehensible.
Insofar as magic can be understood and done so on semantic/semiotic terms, which is to a limited but not total degree, logic can be applied to it, because logic applies to semantic/semiotic thought. It’s indeed the most fundamantal organizing principle behind such thought.
But even if logic couldn’t be applied to magic or the non-mechanistic, that *still* wouldn’t mean that believing in magic or the non-mechanistic is illogical or that you couldn’t still use logic to filter reality while still believing in magic or the non-mechanistic. You could simply compartmentalize magical or non-mechanistic things as unkowns or as impenetrable with regard to logic’s purview, while still applying logic faithfully to that which you deem amenable to it. The magical or non-mechanistic things could only be considered, shuffled and vetted or thrown out by logic atomically, just not with respect to their internal structures to the degree that they even have internal structures per se.
This may imply that if logic couldn’t be applied to magic and the non-mechanistic, the internals of magical or non-mechanistic things would be merely *alogical* rather than *illogical*, because if such things/the concepts of such things contained *illogical* parts or relationships between parts, then it would arguably stand to reason that an overarching logical organization principle would *have* to throw them out in order to maintain integrity. I think this remains arguable, though, because one could consider such exceptional items as “black boxes” whose illogical internals don’t and can’t affect anything else with regard to overall logical consistency because the insides and outsides aren’t related by any given logical principles, as the complete insides are atomically contained, again, within logical black boxes.
The latter two paragraphs may be completely academic, as I already stated that logic can be applied to one’s semantical understanding of the magical and non-mechanistic–i.e., to the things’/concepts of the things’ internals–but then, I also implied that perhaps magic or the non-mechanistic can’t be completely understood, or can’t be completely understood semantically. For example, I believe that the most fundamental layers of life or existence are wholly ineffable. This makes their internals alogical, except that they don’t have internals because there are no internals to know. However, their basic alogicality may impinge upon things outside of them, because presumably they have some sort of observable influence on or relationship to the rest of reality or there wouldn’t be any reason to even consider them as extant. So, where do the logically cascading effects of such alogical elements end, or, coming from the other direction, where do the cascading effects of the *logical* elements of reality/one’s ontology end? I.e., if the ineffable can’t be separated from the effable, and logic can be applied to the effable, where and how do the logical implications stop short of the ineffable?
There are two possible answers. One, consider the alogical ineffable to be, again, inside a logical black box that’s not connected to outside by any logical principles. But if it’s in such a black boxe, can it still affect or have correspondence to the rest of reality, and if not, then are our earlier established black boxes even valid either? I think this conundrum can be resolved by answer number two.
Two, simply apply logic exactly as far as what you apply semantic/semiotic explanation or modeling to, and don’t apply it to what you know exists but that you can’t semantically/semiotically explain or model. This, of course, retains the rights to logically consider magical or non-mechastic things, or the entire ineffable substrate of reality, on an atomic level in order to decide whether to throw them out or not. I decide not to throw them out.
To make an argument that the most fundamental levels of reality are ineffable, to understand a layer of reality, you must understand it in terms of an outcrop of a more fundamental layer, otherwise you haven’t understood why the former layer is the way it is as opposed to any other conceivable way. And the most fundamental layer can’t possibly be understood as an outcrop of an even more fundamental layer, because there obviously is no more-fundamental layer than the most fundamental layer.
Though similarly, regarding not our understanding but metaphysical reality, if there’s no more-fundamental layer, then there’s literally nothing to determine that the most fundamental layer is what it is as opposed to any or every other possible way, and therefore it can’t be such. Therefore, reality must be an endlessly/infinitely layered onion, and obviously we can never understand an unlimited number of layers of reality.
There is one alternative to the infinite-layers model, though, and that’s that everything that could ever possibly or conceivably exist, exists “somewhere” “sometime” or “always-already,” which includes all the possibilities in which nothing locally or globally exists, which we simply never notice those possibilities because we’re too busy experiencing the things that *do* exist. But then, that brings us right back to infinite layers, because obviously there’s no end to how many more-fundamental substrates of reality are metaphysically conceivable or possible and that therefore must exist.
Well, this has gotten a little more masturbatory than I’d anticipated, which maybe proves the Twitter user right that I need to “touch grass,” but nonetheless, the most important and simple points about magic and the non-mechanistic not necessarily contradicting the will to be logical, rational or reasonable are all up there somewhere.
Like this:
Like Loading...
