Extrasensory perception?

[Speakpigeon]

Sense
Any of the faculties by which stimuli from outside or inside the body are received and felt, as the faculties of hearing, sight, smell, touch, taste, and equilibrium.

Sense
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sense
Humans have a multitude of sensors. Sight (vision), hearing (audition), taste (gustation), smell (olfaction), and touch (somatosensation) are the five traditionally recognised senses. The ability to detect other stimuli beyond those governed by these most broadly recognised senses also exists, and these sensory modalities include temperature (thermoception), kinesthetic sense (proprioception), pain (nociception), balance (equilibrioception), vibration (mechanoreception), and various internal stimuli (e.g. the different chemoreceptors for detecting salt and carbon dioxide concentrations in the blood, or sense of hunger and sense of thirst). However, what constitutes a sense is a matter of some debate, leading to difficulties in defining what exactly a distinct sense is, and where the borders lie between responses to related stimuli.

And logic then?! I would submit that we obviously have to have a sense of logic. This allows us to feel intuitively certain that specific logical formula are logical truths and non-sequiturs.

Example: If I believe it’s true that when it rains the ground gets wet and if I can see it is now raining outside then I will believe that the ground outside will be wet. I will make this inference without even being aware I’m making an inference. It’s an intuition.

I couldn’t possibly verify that we all have broadly the same sense of logic but since we all have broadly the same visual sense, sense of hearing, etc., I see not good reason that we should differ much in respect of our logical sense.

So, this leads to the question of why science has not yet recognised, as far as I know, our sense of logic as a sense of perception. Don’t scientists also have logical intuitions? Or is it because they think they are good at logic because they are more intelligent, or perhaps because they have received a formal training?

We’re in 2018, for Christ’s sake. And for not very long. Time to wake up.

Or maybe they can’t be bothered?

Recognising our sense of logic as a sense of perception also avoid the embarrassment of having to rely on extrasensory perception to support our reasoning.

Most of the logic there is in our brain is essentially a capacity which is inherent in the way neurons and neuron structures work. As such, anything that the brain does is essentially a logical process, including what the brain does with input data coming from other senses, such as our visual sense etc. As such, the logic involved in these basic processes remains unconscious and doesn’t therefore constitute a sense.

However, we all also have conscious logical “impressions”. One kind of logic which can be involved sometimes here is what I would qualify as “formal logic”. Formal logic here would be any explicit logical argument we sometimes produce in particular in debates and discussions. Formal logic in this sense is not a perception sense essentially because any thinking process involving formal logic is done consciously, at least as far as we know.

However, there is another kind of logic which is also involved in our conscious thinking. As I understand it, it’s not only involved but its contribution to what we come to think is paramount. Pretty much all our ideas require that sort of logic and it isn’t formal. I would qualify it as “intuitive logic”. Essentially, we are only minimally aware of it. We can sometimes choose to focus on it but usually we don’t. There’s no difference in this respect with what we do with other types of sensory data. For instance, we don’t pay much attention if at all to most of the data from our visual sense, even the bit our conscious mind is attending to. Our attention doesn’t usually linger on what we’re looking at. Same for our logical intuitions. However, we can choose to focus on it. Just consider the following: if it’s true that it rains and that I’m hungry, then it’s true that it rains. We know it’s true, and we know it’s true outside seeing that it is raining and that we are hungry. We actually know the logical implication as such. And we can consider it long enough to decide whether we feel it’s true or false. And we will certainly all have the impression, feeling, or as I would put it, the intuition, that it is true. There’s even nothing we can do about that, much like there isn’t anything we can do about believing that there is a tree whenever we have the impression that there is a tree we are looking at. And this is what I call our logical sense, because it essentially works like a sense. We can’t deny it, it comes all ready, it’s always available, and all the processing necessary to produce such logical intuitions is unconscious. We only get the end result, the intuition itself, as a conscious impression, which is exactly what happens with other senses.

So, basically, there’s no essential difference between our logical sense and our other senses. This also means that what we perceive in this case is logic itself, or logical relations, together with whether the relation concerned is true or false.

And I would in fact say exactly the same thing of our memory capability. These cognitive capabilities, logic, memory, visual sense etc. all provide fundamentally the same kind of functions, very different in their specifics, but useful and used in fundamentally the same way by the conscious mind.

We can understand our memory capability to provide a perception of our brain’s record of our own, personal, past experience. And our logical capability, we can understand it as providing a perception of our brain’s “DNA record” of the entire past experience of life itself, starting from the first species to be gifted with at least one neuron.

So, basically, it’s a kind of perception in a sense going back something like 525 million years.

That’s perception for you.

Or extrasensory perception, as you may prefer.
EB

 

[bigfield]

You're lacking a sense of equivocation.

 

[Bomb#20]

Plato says in Phaedo that our “necessary ideas” arise from the preexistence of the soul, are not derivable from experience — read monkeys for preexistence. - Charles Darwin

 

[Speakpigeon]

You're lacking a sense of equivocation.

It's not as if you could argue your point.

In any case, I'm not going to guess what it could be if you had a point.

Happy New Year to you too.
EB

 

[Speakpigeon]

Plato says in Phaedo that our “necessary ideas” arise from the preexistence of the soul, are not derivable from experience — read monkeys for preexistence. - Charles Darwin

Exactly.

And yet, do you know of any logic textbook that insists that logic should be understood as an empirical science?

And if indeed empirical, what are we going to turn to for making our observation of the facts of logic? Any idea?

Me, I would say the human soul, or the human mind as we would say these days, or as I would put it myself, our logical intuitions understood as produced by our sense of logic as a capacity of the human brain, our sense of logic we inherited from our ancestor species, not quite monkeys but relatives of them, and indeed ultimately all the species of which we are the descendants.

Agreed?
EB

 

[Lion IRC]

I think our sense of logic is closely related to our objective/empirical understanding of cause and effect which many would call a "Law of Nature".

Logic, the science of necessary inference, seems rooted in...if this > then that.

And I think our ancient ancestors learned this by physical experience not intuition or special revelation. One might say...

...it has been shown to them and clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world
(See Romans 1:19-20)

 

[Bronzeage]

I've always had to consider the paradox of increased knowledge.

Imagine a problem in a mechanical system. You have a symptom and a basic understanding of the system. Circumstances prevent you from doing more diagnosis.

If your understanding of the system allows for three possible causes, each with a different solution, you have a 1 in 3 chance of repairing the system, provided one of the three is the true solution.

A person with more training and expertise may know 27 possible causes and solutions, so his chance is 1 in 27 of repairing the system, by pure guess.

 

[Toni]

I've always had to consider the paradox of increased knowledge.

Imagine a problem in a mechanical system. You have a symptom and a basic understanding of the system. Circumstances prevent you from doing more diagnosis.

If your understanding of the system allows for three possible causes, each with a different solution, you have a 1 in 3 chance of repairing the system, provided one of the three is the true solution.

A person with more training and expertise may know 27 possible causes and solutions, so his chance is 1 in 27 of repairing the system, by pure guess.

IRL there are no pure guesses. All possible causes and all possible cause/solutions are not equally likely. More knowledge in the form of training and experience improve the chances of determining which is the actual cause of the problem and which solution is most likely to solve the problem.

IRL all possible causes are not equally likely. A rational person first examines the likelihood of the most common causes and most likely solutions, moving on and gathering additional information until the solution is determined.

 

[Bronzeage]

I've always had to consider the paradox of increased knowledge.

Imagine a problem in a mechanical system. You have a symptom and a basic understanding of the system. Circumstances prevent you from doing more diagnosis.

If your understanding of the system allows for three possible causes, each with a different solution, you have a 1 in 3 chance of repairing the system, provided one of the three is the true solution.

A person with more training and expertise may know 27 possible causes and solutions, so his chance is 1 in 27 of repairing the system, by pure guess.

IRL there are no pure guesses. All possible causes and all possible cause/solutions are not equally likely. More knowledge in the form of training and experience improve the chances of determining which is the actual cause of the problem and which solution is most likely to solve the problem.

IRL all possible causes are not equally likely. A rational person first examines the likelihood of the most common causes and most likely solutions, moving on and gathering additional information until the solution is determined.

There is a saying in the professions where this sort of thing happens, "A good guess is as good as three hours of careful diagnosis, if you guess correctly." The corollary of this is, you can charge for 3 hours of diagnosis if your good guess is correct.

There is a great difference between a pure guess and a good guess.

 

[fromderinside]

All effects are caused is demonstration of association between cause and effect, a basis for the existence of logic.

No logical statement exists if there is no association between hypotheses.

Logic: If a then b and if b then c implies if a then c.

If light then visual sensation does not imply if sense then extrasensory nor if sense then logic.

The logic is in the association between stimulation and sensation, and cannot be also the reason for sensation.

That would be like presuming mind is necessary for experience just because there is light and sensation. Association cannot be the cause since that would lead to: association is association and effect, a basis for the existence of logic

 

[Speakpigeon]

I think our sense of logic is closely related to our objective/empirical understanding of cause and effect which many would call a "Law of Nature".

"Closely related" seems a bit vague to me. I would rather say that any specific cause-and-effect connection a person may come to believe in requires his brain to have logical capabilities.

Logic, the science of necessary inference, seems rooted in...if this > then that.

The conditional is just the linguistic form of the logical implication, which is indeed often thought of as the "necessary inference", although necessity here should be construed as a de facto necessity rather than anything metaphysical.

And I think our ancient ancestors learned this by physical experience not intuition or special revelation. One might say...

"Experience" seems a bit vague to me. There's no empirical experience outside logical processes in the brain turning perceptions into empirical experience.

Logical intuition is always there to help you make up your mind what you're going to do next. No formal logic without logical intuition and no logical intuitions with evolution. To learn anything, you need your brain to have the logical capabilities to make sense of the flow of perception big data.

...it has been shown to them and clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world
(See Romans 1:19-20)

That's very intuitive.
EB

 

[Speakpigeon]

I've always had to consider the paradox of increased knowledge.

Imagine a problem in a mechanical system. You have a symptom and a basic understanding of the system. Circumstances prevent you from doing more diagnosis.

If your understanding of the system allows for three possible causes, each with a different solution, you have a 1 in 3 chance of repairing the system, provided one of the three is the true solution.

A person with more training and expertise may know 27 possible causes and solutions, so his chance is 1 in 27 of repairing the system, by pure guess.

On the face of it, this is saying that the more you know, the less likely you are to solve the problem (1/27 < 1/3), which I have to assume is the paradox.

However, expertise really means that each of the 27 possible causes the expert is able to conceive of is more likely on it own to be a solution than each of the 3 possible causes imagined by someone less expert. So, the 27 possible causes of the expert are overall at least 9 times more likely to help you solve the problem than the 3 possible causes of the less expert.

Not much of a paradox.
EB

 

[Bronzeage]

I've always had to consider the paradox of increased knowledge.

Imagine a problem in a mechanical system. You have a symptom and a basic understanding of the system. Circumstances prevent you from doing more diagnosis.

If your understanding of the system allows for three possible causes, each with a different solution, you have a 1 in 3 chance of repairing the system, provided one of the three is the true solution.

A person with more training and expertise may know 27 possible causes and solutions, so his chance is 1 in 27 of repairing the system, by pure guess.

On the face of it, this is saying that the more you know, the less likely you are to solve the problem (1/27 < 1/3), which I have to assume is the paradox.

However, expertise really means that each of the 27 possible causes the expert is able to conceive of is more likely on it own to be a solution than each of the 3 possible causes imagined by someone less expert. So, the 27 possible causes of the expert are overall at least 9 times more likely to help you solve the problem than the 3 possible causes of the less expert.

Not much of a paradox.
EB

At some point in time, a blind pig and an apple will coincide.

"The more you know, the less likely you are to solve the problem" is not the paradox. This problem is based on limited knowledge and the need to make a quick decision. If the correct solution is among the tyro's three choices, it's still 1 in 3, as opposed to 1 in 27, for the expert. In the long run the expert has an advantage, but this is not a long term scenario.

 

[Speakpigeon]

At some point in time, a blind pig and an apple will coincide.

Sure but I thought you had discounted luck as different from a "good guess".

"The more you know, the less likely you are to solve the problem" is not the paradox.

So, what else would be the paradox here? You don't say.

This problem is based on limited knowledge and the need to make a quick decision. If the correct solution is among the tyro's three choices, it's still 1 in 3, as opposed to 1 in 27, for the expert.

Again, the solution is less likely to be in the 3 than in the 27, unless the expert is not an expert or the non-expert is just lucky.

You may have a point, but you haven't said what it is.

In the long run the expert has an advantage, but this is not a long term scenario.

I don't see why the expert wouldn't have the advantage even in the short run. Come on, spill the beans! What is it?
EB

 

[4321lynx]

Speakpigeon (not to say Speakmuchomucho said:

Example: If I believe it’s true that when it rains the ground gets wet and if I can see it is now raining outside then I will believe that the ground outside will be wet. I will make this inference without even being aware I’m making an inference. It’s an intuition.

No. Not intuition but experience and memory of that experience. Next time you look and it's raining and there is a roof outside that you somehow cannot see, you will find the ground under it is dry, and that means you have more experience and not that you have greater powers of "intuition" or perception. Not that it makes a damn of difference to anything or anyone but you, as with most Philosophy.

The rest of the article was just too long. Sorry. Did not read it.

 

[Speakpigeon]

Speakpigeon (not to say Speakmuchomucho said:

Example: If I believe it’s true that when it rains the ground gets wet and if I can see it is now raining outside then I will believe that the ground outside will be wet. I will make this inference without even being aware I’m making an inference. It’s an intuition.

No. Not intuition but experience and memory of that experience. Next time you look and it's raining and there is a roof outside that you somehow cannot see, you will find the ground under it is dry, and that means you have more experience and not that you have greater powers of "intuition" or perception. Not that it makes a damn of difference to anything or anyone but you, as with most Philosophy.

The rest of the article was just too long. Sorry. Did not read it.

Ah, sucks, it was where I provide a convincing argument that acquisition of experience is a logical operation, that experience recorded is recorded as logical implications, that making use of one's experience only happens as a logical inference. Experience is just a broad brush. You have to analyse it to understand how it works. Short of that, experience is just magic. Oh, look! It works! Sure. And there's a reason it works.
EB

 

[fromderinside]

Rather than try to fit intuition and sense of logic into physical sense description one might have included this:  Sense and reference

In the philosophy of language, the distinction between sense and referencewas an innovation of the German philosopher and mathematician Gottlob Fregein 1892 (in his paper "On Sense and Reference"; German: "Über Sinn und Bedeutung"),^[1] reflecting the two ways he believed a singular term may have meaning.The reference (or "referent"; Bedeutung) of a proper name is the object it means or indicates (bedeuten), its sense (Sinn) is what the name expresses. The reference of a sentence is its truth value, its sense is the thought that it expresses.^[1] Frege justified the distinction in a number of ways.

1. Sense is something possessed by a name, whether or not it has a reference. For example, the name "Odysseus" is intelligible, and therefore has a sense, even though there is no individual object (its reference) to which the name corresponds.
2. The sense of different names is different, even when their reference is the same. Frege argued that if an identity statement such as "Hesperusis the same planet as Phosphorus" is to be informative, the proper names flanking the identity sign must have a different meaning or sense. But clearly, if the statement is true, they must have the same reference.^[2] The sense is a 'mode of presentation', which serves to illuminate only a single aspect of the referent.^[3]

Much of analytic philosophy is traceable to Frege's philosophy of language.^[4] Frege's views on logic (i.e., his idea that some parts of speech are complete by themselves, and are analogous to the arguments of a mathematical function) led to his views on a theory of reference.^[4

and  Direct and indirect realism

The question of direct or naïve realism, as opposed to indirect or representational realism, arises in the philosophy of perception and of mind out of the debate over the nature of conscious experience;^[1][2] the epistemological question of whether the world we see around us is the real world itself or merely an internal perceptual copy of that world generated by neural processes in our brain. Naïve realism is known as direct realism when developed to counter indirect or representative realism, also known as epistemological dualism,^[3] the philosophicalposition that our conscious experience is not of the real world itself but of an internal representation, a miniature virtual-reality replica of the world.
Indirect realism is broadly equivalent to the accepted view of perceptionin natural science that states that we do not and cannot perceive the external world as it really is but know only our ideas and interpretations of the way the world is.^[4] Representationalism is one of the key assumptions of cognitivism in psychology. The representational realist would deny that "first-hand knowledge" is a coherent concept, since knowledge is always via some means. Our ideas of the world are interpretations of sensory input derived from an external world that is real (unlike the standpoint of idealism, which holds that only ideas are real, but mind-independent things are not).

In this way one can get away from confining physical representation and get at such as language and indirect reference mindfulness.

So rather than the confining discussions above one can then keep this discussion around apparently workable notions that are at present materially unprovable.

 

[Bronzeage]

Sure but I thought you had discounted luck as different from a "good guess".



So, what else would be the paradox here? You don't say.

This problem is based on limited knowledge and the need to make a quick decision. If the correct solution is among the tyro's three choices, it's still 1 in 3, as opposed to 1 in 27, for the expert.

Again, the solution is less likely to be in the 3 than in the 27, unless the expert is not an expert or the non-expert is just lucky.

You may have a point, but you haven't said what it is.

In the long run the expert has an advantage, but this is not a long term scenario.

I don't see why the expert wouldn't have the advantage even in the short run. Come on, spill the beans! What is it?
EB

Explaining a joke to someone who didn't get it, is seldom worth the effort.

 

[Toni]

I've always had to consider the paradox of increased knowledge.

Imagine a problem in a mechanical system. You have a symptom and a basic understanding of the system. Circumstances prevent you from doing more diagnosis.

If your understanding of the system allows for three possible causes, each with a different solution, you have a 1 in 3 chance of repairing the system, provided one of the three is the true solution.

A person with more training and expertise may know 27 possible causes and solutions, so his chance is 1 in 27 of repairing the system, by pure guess.

IRL there are no pure guesses. All possible causes and all possible cause/solutions are not equally likely. More knowledge in the form of training and experience improve the chances of determining which is the actual cause of the problem and which solution is most likely to solve the problem.

IRL all possible causes are not equally likely. A rational person first examines the likelihood of the most common causes and most likely solutions, moving on and gathering additional information until the solution is determined.

There is a saying in the professions where this sort of thing happens, "A good guess is as good as three hours of careful diagnosis, if you guess correctly." The corollary of this is, you can charge for 3 hours of diagnosis if your good guess is correct.

There is a great difference between a pure guess and a good guess.

In other words, most issues are among the most common and are easily diagnosed. Additional training/education/experience remove the element of guesswork and allows more reasoned deduction.

 

[fromderinside]

In other words, most issues are among the most common and are easily diagnosed. Additional training/education/experience remove the element of guesswork and allows more reasoned informed deduction.

Sometimes things are so reasonable it gets stuck on your keyboard.