Speakpigeon
Contributor
- Joined
- Feb 4, 2009
- Messages
- 6,317
- Location
- Paris, France, EU
- Basic Beliefs
- Rationality (i.e. facts + logic), Scepticism (not just about God but also everything beyond my subjective experience)
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