further beyond reason

(note - this post extends the prior post here, "Beyond Reason" )

There are several other dimensions in which this argument can be supported.

The first is models of any kind of collaborating agents, as I mention in my comment to my last post.

For those who insist on purely academic and "scientific" examples, I'd suggest the model of connecting many legacy computer systems together in a company and trying to get that mess to work.

The "tinker toy" model of little balls (legacy systems) connected by little rods (messaging pathways) simply doesn't work, and breaks down pretty rapidly as you attempt to scale it up. Having each agent determine its own version of "truth" doesn't work.

However, having each one chip in to the discussion about accepting each fact does - in what is known as a "two-phase commit."

A true "distributed operating system" is one in which each agent gives up some level of control and self-determination in exchange for the entire thing working at all.

It's a model that works. It's a model close to the way cells relate in the human body, or neurons in the visual system.

It should be explored more as a model for civilized behavior.

A second strong support are the deviations from Turing's hypothesis. Computability is generally determined on the basis of a Turing Machine model, which is complex to explain but basically says any computation can be reduced to a very long tape of ones and zeros and a machine that reads them and decides which way to move the tape.

The problem with applying that model to human beings is that humans have finite energy, bandwidth, and attention span. In fact, often a very small volume in communication space. Any communication that has any longer-wavelengths in it that fit in such a small box will simply be lost and are not possible. No "long-term" issues will "make sense" at all.

"Reason", if by reason we mean the application of logical steps to a series of strings of symbols, is thereby limited for humans to what can be said, via shared symbols, in a short period of time. And, for the symbols to be shared, they have to at least have been learned, which means they can take no more than 100 years to learn. Again, we have huge limits here on what can ever be communicated that way, even neglecting how fast things are forgotten and partial understandings evaporate. In reality something that takes over a day to communicate is highly unlikely, especially if it has high information content, i.e., is very surprising and doesn't fit preconceived notions.

Furthermore, human brains and perception fill in gaps, leap ahead, resolve ambiguous phrases into stereotyped meanings short-circuiting the whole process. The communication is, in sort, noisy, misunderstood, mis-resolved, and decays rapidly.

The power of reason to accomplish synthesis of meaning and action and synergy in such a context is demonstrably poor. And, we have no other context.

On the other hand, if we go to higher dimensionality communication, such as image processing or higher, many of these bandwidth limitations can be pushed back at least an order of magnitude. These communications would be somewhat holographic, conveying many related idea and their relationships in parallel, not in serial order. This works. "A picture is worth a thousand words".

Actually, I think virtual reality and immersive experiences can be even more compelling and complete than pictures, but that's a different post.

I simply don't see any other conclusion than "Therefore, reason is not a good tool to use for stabilizing civilization and getting the mutual destruction to stop."

Reason may be part of a set of tools, but it is not complete, and I can see no empirical evidence that it works at large scale, at all, ever. Our toys grow more sophisticated, yes, but our conversation about them grows less sophisticated, increasing daily the risk that our toys will be misused.

Frankly, we are stymied by the simple problem of making N plus 1 people more powerful than N people at deciding something or perceiving something. We have what is referred to as "committees" and God help us if the committee size is over 5. We are without tools to help. Unassisted appeals to reason do not seem to do the trick, in realistic contexts.

Third, all reasoning assumes, essentially, that the metric space in which we are working is flat, and that the value at any given "point" in space of "truth" doesn't depend on the pathway we used to get there. Or, more precisely, that the value we show in our tabulator of taking the present facts and reasoning with them to that point should be, we think, independent of the pathway we took. We can use B implies C before or after we use A implies B and end up in the same place.

First, this assumes truth is single valued. Even that is not clear.

Second this assumes that the metric we are reasoning in, some kind of Hilbert Space, is flat -- so that, at the end of a day, we do not end with something like M.C. Escher's waterfall -- that is locally reasonable and globally unreasonable.

In reality this appears to be unjustified. Small factors that we see as "ignorable", in a world with millions of cycles of feedback, turn out to be more important that what seem locally to be "big" factors. Tiny differences result in hurricanes and tornadoes out of "thin air". This matters.

In any Hilbert space, I believe there is always a locally flat coordinate system that works locally, but this does not mean that the entire space is flat, nor that it can be covered by a flat metric.

I find this is the strongest argument at all, involving geodesics and "lines of reasoning", but I fear it is the least accessible, unless the reader has experienced metric spaces in some mathematical context.

In point of fact, reality seems to me to be more fractally complex than flat. From higher up in an organization, the myriad of details that lower levels have to deal with are completely invisible, recursively.

And truth seems to be fractal, in that the size of ruler used to measure it, and the scale of time and space used as a framework, seem to change the measured value. (See hybrid images post).

So, between a world way more complex than desired, and a reasoning power collectively that is way weaker than desired, the ability of reason alone to solve humanity's problems seems in doubt.

This is not to say that reason is not "locally valid".

But to deal with larger scale issues, we need some tool that is not bandwidth limited by the way humans think and perceive and communicate.

I'm not sure what it is, but pretty sure what it is not: It cannot be serial messaging in nature.

What we call "reason" and "reasoning" are incomplete, and will never span the problems we are trying to solve, let alone span them in the time we have left to work on them before we annihilate each other and our planet.

Reason and Science have worked very well on problems that could be flattened into a flat space without damage, such as building machines. They have not worked on problems that cannot be detached and flattened, such as every social problem. This will not be fixed by waiting. It will not be fixed by "trying harder". So, it is doubly cursed - even if "there" made sense and covered all cases we care about, you cannot "get there" from here. Reason alone will not work.

Mindless defense of "reason" as the only pathway to our future
hurts more than it helps, because it prevents adequate research into methods of finding truth that are better than reason, and that converge much more rapidly in the actual world with actual humans, messy politics, corruption, legacy hatreds, etc.

Denial that anything could possibly be better than reason
is a religious statement, based on faith, not solid facts or even solid
theory.

No one could possibly know that, for almost any definition of "better."

This is not an argument to go back to superstition, but an argument to go forward to actual mature capacity to face and deal with hard problems together. Such maturity undoubtedly uses reason, but was not and will not be created by reason. There is something else at work.

The astoundingly poor record of science to cure the worlds ills, and, in fact, to seemingly only solve some at the expense of making others far worse, argues that science is not close enough to the right path, or the right speed, to be left unexamined.

If scientists do not recognize this issue, and continue to paint all their critics as some kind of blind, irresponsible, religious zealots, their arrogance will bring about their own extinction, along with everyone else's.

Seriously - if everyone in Congress simply had 8 more years of math and science, do you contend we'd now have a balanced budget? If they all had dual PhD's in math and science, would we be home free? I have to look at the University of Oxford, which can neither balance it's budget nor select an email system, and say, "No."

No, because the problem is way bigger, deeper, and wider than that. Reason itself only works in a social context, and reasoning is not the process by which social contexts have ever been decided or determined. Reasoning about Oxford will not "fix" Oxford, and I can't begin to grasp the solid basis for an assertion that it could, based on the contrary evidence of the last 1,100 years.

We can't even make committees of 5 that work, people.

It's time to address the actual problem, not this straw man. Something else is wrong. Get "unreason" out of our faces so we can see what it is.

Wade