RE: Is the statement "Claims demand evidence" always true?
January 15, 2017 at 9:44 am
(This post was last modified: January 15, 2017 at 10:08 am by emjay.)
Another food for thought... what is reason from a neural point of view? Without reason the brain just passively as it were statistically analyses whatever is put in front of it and extracts patterns and relationships. Whereas it appears to me that reason has the same goal, but deliberately/willfully. So for instance the passive system might be presented (in the normal course of events) with events ABCD and JKLM, each with repeated variations on the scene... so:
ABCD
ABDE
BCDE
BFGH
Leading to a statistical extraction of B as the first principal (ie stable) component (but other patterns as well probably). Then if we apply the same relative relationships to letters re the second group of letters:
JKLM
JKMN
KLMN
KOPQ
Leading to the extraction of K and other patterns. But if never these two events meet in the normal course of events, then any uber-patterns are lost. But reason allows you to willfully bring together events ABCD and JKLM and present them to the network simultaneously, thus allowing the extra pattern to be extracted, namely that the same letter shift is used in both.
So reason supplements and improves on what's already there, by allowing not just passive coincidences to be analysed but also active, willfully arranged coincidences (ie collating thoughts and ideas).
Eta: furthermore, that above process identifies the first kind of truth... ie the stable patterns in whatever is presented. But I'd guess that the second process involved in reason... logical deduction to explain those stable features... is on similar lines, but instead of willfully collating things to be statistically analysed for patterns, you instead collate things to be detected: ie a neuron is a detector of the presence of whatever it detects in the environment. So if you willfully arrange coincidences of ideas for detection, ie whether they support the conclusion or not, that could be a valid explanation. Needs a bit of work though on the how's and whys, but it looks feasible to me.
ABCD
ABDE
BCDE
BFGH
Leading to a statistical extraction of B as the first principal (ie stable) component (but other patterns as well probably). Then if we apply the same relative relationships to letters re the second group of letters:
JKLM
JKMN
KLMN
KOPQ
Leading to the extraction of K and other patterns. But if never these two events meet in the normal course of events, then any uber-patterns are lost. But reason allows you to willfully bring together events ABCD and JKLM and present them to the network simultaneously, thus allowing the extra pattern to be extracted, namely that the same letter shift is used in both.
So reason supplements and improves on what's already there, by allowing not just passive coincidences to be analysed but also active, willfully arranged coincidences (ie collating thoughts and ideas).
Eta: furthermore, that above process identifies the first kind of truth... ie the stable patterns in whatever is presented. But I'd guess that the second process involved in reason... logical deduction to explain those stable features... is on similar lines, but instead of willfully collating things to be statistically analysed for patterns, you instead collate things to be detected: ie a neuron is a detector of the presence of whatever it detects in the environment. So if you willfully arrange coincidences of ideas for detection, ie whether they support the conclusion or not, that could be a valid explanation. Needs a bit of work though on the how's and whys, but it looks feasible to me.