Preface: Why these principles? Why Logic?
Albert Einstein observed in 1951 that “physicists have no understanding of logical and philosophical arguments.” (Becker 273) Adam Becker wondered himself why Hawking, Tyson, and Krauss “know so little about philosophy.” The answer he came up with is unsettling, not just because it brings a defect to awareness but because there’s defect in its awareness. It’s insufficient. He doesn’t seem to grasp the enormity of the problem he describes:
[A]t the birth of quantum physics, all physicists received some schooling in philosophy. . . . But in postwar America, . . an intelligent student [could] go all the way. . . to a PhD in physics. . . without ever darkening the door of a philosophy classroom. . . . With the massive increase in knowledge and information in the last century, education became unavoidably specialized. (Becker 273)
Physicists having no understanding of logical and philosophical arguments can’t be waved off as a failure of the classroom. It’s massively problematic. It means their serious “quest for knowledge” is being driven by minds that don’t take thinking seriously. It means their premises and their conclusions might as well be choreographed by musicians. If they don’t understand Logic, the discipline of philosophy, the heart and soul of rhetoric, they’ll never get to its goal: an understanding of Reality.
The purpose of these principles is not to push an agenda for any particular source or creed. It’s to push Logic.
Certainly not to guide Hawking’s vaunted “quest for knowledge.” In a universe that trumpets its weirdness – quivering, singularities, dark matter, spacetime curvature, particle behavior that defies explanation – talk of “knowledge” seems more than a bit presumptuous. In a funhouse of mirror images what could possibly be “known?” “Search for reality and truth” makes a better fit if we’re not to be fooled by appearances.
To set an example
Another purpose is to set an example. To demonstrate what systems thinking might produce in the way of insights and answers. To suggest how the process and structure of analysis might better serve us when established lines of inquiry aren’t measuring up to their promise. When the dominant paradigms of science, philosophy, psychology, and theology, once thought to hold answers to the origin and meaning of Life, the universe, and Consciousness, have become a chorus of “Shut up and calculate!” A collective admission of defeat not only from physicists at a loss to comprehend quantum mechanics but its equivalent from philosophers, psychologists, and theologists, enervated by centuries of hidebound “realism.” By rote convention that demands obeisance rather than thought.
From the time of Aristotle, when science took off on its “quest for knowledge” from the study of finite matter, the infinite possibilities of mind have fallen out of favor. Lost their relevance until an arch-apologist for matter, the physicist Stephen Hawking, could declare all of philosophy dead. What’s actually dead is the energy great minds like Democritus, Newton, Faraday, Einstein, and Bohr injected into physics, not with calculations alone but with their Intuition. Intuition that could only lead them on a true course to Reality and Truth if it was grounded in Logic. In thinking that coheres with implications that connect. That carry thought forward rather than back to where it started, in circular disappointment and defeat.
Why these principles? To move thinking away from its dominant paradigms that got us this far but can’t take us the rest of the way. To help persuade the theorists who dominate to reclassify a sacred premise from settled to not settled. From a given to the live, legitimate philosophical issue that it is: the premise that bodies and their sensed physical environment of spacetime and matter are real. If its basis is sensory perception then it has no logical basis, because matter can be no judge of whether matter is real. Common law doesn’t assign credibility to conflict of interest, so why is matter allowed on the witness stand to testify to itself? Who but a mind blind to logic would allow it?
Wake up and think!
Circular self-referential “reasoning” is everything that Logic isn’t: a sinkhole of disorder and conflict instead of a portal to order and harmony. It’s the reasoning equivalent of a curved universe where launch from any point is destined to end where it started. But so what: the reality of matter won’t need Logic to stir up doubt when it’s got quantum mechanics. Does anyone hopelessly muddled by the sacred premise of “realism” understand its meaning?
The theorists who dominate on the strength of illogic can do better. There’s no honor, no glory, in “Shut up and calculate!” They can try Logic for a change. How about “Wake up and think!”
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Principles and assumptions
Each of the following numbered principles will be the subject of a separate entry:
1. All fields of inquiry require Logic. Logic must be followed wherever its implications and interconnections lead, to all legitimate, logical possibilities.
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2. Search for Reality-Truth requires spontaneous insights from Mind-Intuition. Requires “realism:” Intuition-Memory of experience from another Reality. Mind-Consciousness and brain are not the same.
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3. Mind-thought and Love-feeling are inseparable in Reality, but not here. It is timeless and always Now in Reality, but not here.
4. Judgment and Free Choice are essential to the Creation and affirmation of Worth.
5. The first line of judgment about what is real is Mind-Love in a conscious state. The final authority on what is real is Logic.
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6. “Reality” is at issue because Logic requires that opposites be unreal to protect the integrity of Reality-Creation from contradiction. Reality-Creation and its governance by Logic cannot tolerate the presence of conflicting realities. therefore one must be unreal.
7. Reality is relational to Consciousness.
8. Matter is relational to Mind. The nature of the relationship is accessible through Intuition aided by all fields of inquiry into Mind in alignment with Logic.
9. Creation comes in two states: Real and unreal. Reality and unreality are the products of states of Mind: Conscious and unconscious.
10. The thoughts and Creations of Mind-Love brought to Reality by Consciousness all have opposites. Opposites can only be made real within a dream of Mind-Love’s Child who is unconscious. Every observable attribute of dreamed un-reality is the mirror-image opposite of an attribute of Conscious Reality.
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11. Reality of bodies-matter is a live philosophical issue, not a given. Body-centered Science that dismisses reality of Mind, that treats it as irrelevant, is philosophy, religion.
12. Body-centered physics and biology have reached their limits in the search for Reality and Truth.
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13. Perceptions of what is real and true are influenced by personality types.
14. Logic required to guide the search for Reality-Truth can be facilitated by Mind-Intuiting personality types guided by Logic, who accept that the reality of matter is an open philosophical issue.
15. History’s ongoing philosophical divide between rationalists-idealists and positivists-realists, between empiricism and reason, subjectivists and objectivists, is heavily influenced by opposing personality types: Mind-Intuiting vs. body-sensing.
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Works cited
Adam Becker, What Is Real? The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics (Basic Books 2018)