Alan G. Carter
alan@melloworld.com
These are some thoughts on Prof. Nepejvoda's paper, "Multidimensional Critical Thinking".
As in the M0 and Ghost Not papers, although the scientific and practical aspects are important, to any sane person the humanitarian aspects are even more important. Human logic is currently snarled up, and the consequence is much unnecessary suffering. This suffering is not an inevitable of the "human condition" - unless the "human condition" is taken to refer to a condition of erroneous logic and nothing more!
I share the view of NLP as a technique of manipulation - in its usual application if not in original intent. Before I developed the M0/Ghost Not model, I just had two observable types of behaviour tagged "mapping" and "packing". When asked the difference between the two, I once commented that "Packers are people that NLP works on!". For an extreme example, look at the "Speed Seduction" link at the end of How To Control Packers in the Howtos.
Regarding first level as opposed to holistic critical thinking: In the M0 hypothesis, dopamine self-addiction reduces the attention span of the thinker, and the squelching of hardware feedback loops in the brain prevents the use of modal logics - which can find and differentiate between systems of statements. Holistic thinking is thus rendered impossible. The Ghost Not co-component then restricts thinking to the manifest and induces an exclusive attitude, so that alternative systems of statements are not conceivable. The resulting mentation is indeed scholastic, dogmatic, and literalist. It is because these are consequences of a pair of mutually concealing errors that they are enforced implicitly - this is where the characteristic coercive contempt/threat display comes from.
Is true science not learning? Of course it is - it is a humble learning before nature and nothing else. Only in M0 afflicted thinking does science become the defence of the existing orthodox paradigm - an activity completely opposed to learning since the purpose is to reject new data and deny failures of existing theory.
How accurately this paper captures the consequences of an inverted logical field! First order, Ghost Not logic can indeed be used to logically defend anything - particularly the kind of totalitarianism that is inevitable in highly ritualised, M0 societies - whether the nominal tyrant is Stalin or Torquemada.
The reference to Orwell's "Doublethink" - an explicit adoption of denial and its denial - is something that had never before occured to me! It is completely appropriate. Compare with the section Showing or Pretending in "2: The Ghost Not", and Bell's description of the "complementarity" of Bohr in "3: Reciprocal Cosmology". I don't know of any work by Lem that addresses this, except "A Chain of Chance", which is a wonderful treatment of the differing pitfalls of inductive and deductive reasoning. I suspect that the term "multidimensional thinking" here is equivalent to the idea of "modal logics" as introduced in "Laws of Form" and always requiring an additional dimension for indication and implementation - using feedbacks.
I remember reading an SF book many years ago that featured Stinkers. Stinkers are hated by the population at large, who cannot see the alien spaceships that the Stinkers can see. Alien spaceships use mind rays to conceal themselves and make the population destroy those immune to mind rays. Stinkers do not Stink to each other. We have many models of this same concept in our cultural histories. Recently, the reappearance of TV series such as "The X Files", "Fourth Wave", "The Visitors" and best of all "Dark Skies" correlate with rising ritualisation, and the population becoming zombiefied and following a hidden agenda. The same thing happened during the pathological normalcy and demonisation of immunes during Macarthyism in the USA. The TV scripts are written by natural immunes who form the impression that something odd is happening at these times. Non immunes don't notice anything except their (delusional) rising competence and excellence in all things.
The architect of the Yeltsin 96 campaign was interviewed on UK TV recently. He said that the strategy was to keep Yeltsin off-screen, and concentrate on describing how horrible possible alternatives might be. This exploits Ghost Not exclusive thinking. Not Yeltsin == Bad therefore Yeltsin == Good. This stuff makes for headaches because our whole cultures and languages are based on the flawed logical system. To think around it one must "think around the world".
The interest groups listed for MDCT are very similar to the interest groups proposed on the Irregular Activities page for the Ghost Not concept. Of course.
The points about the regress into quasi-religion are well made. What happens is that someone demonstrates by example how a reader may re-awaken their inductive reasoning capability. This is the feature of cognition that is removed by dopamine self-addition, but which can be kick-started. For the approach to work, the reader must actually apply it in a problem domain and become fixated on objective reality - the novelty available in the deep structure. There are no procedural recommendations in "The Programmers' Stone". It is all narrative and example. When readers do not apply but simply observe the success of those who do, they assume that they have a proceduralist recipe for success, and advocate going through the physically observable actions associated with the ideas without doing inductive reasoning. Then they attempt to sell the approach as a prescriptive algorithm for wealth, good health and sexual success. The blasphemy (conventional sense) lies not so much in claiming to be God, but in claiming that God is so unimagintive that one stupid, shallow little algorithm found in a paperback book can be equal to the richness of creation. The blasphemy ("6: History" sense) lies in the very denial of the deep structure that doing this entails.
The points about logical thinking being opposed to creative thinking are identical to those made at the start of "2: The Ghost Not", about scientists, artists and alchemists.
Comments on the summary of the main principles of MDCT:
The reference to "full safety" recalls comments in "1: M0" about the obsession with certainty experienced by M0 victims. Since they cannot directly perceive anything, they must adopt ritualistic approaches that they believe will deliver certain results. Since their images dominate their reality, they will always adopt a pretend certain approach than a real one that they have to be aware while applying. Come the regular failures, it doesn't really matter because after all, the world is an infinite chaos, so they go straight into blame allocation and avoidance rituals. Such a strategy cannot produce material wealth, correct risk assessments or anything else of worth. It only makes sense in a distorted social context which is already well into post-scarcity economics and doesn't even know it.
This point re-iterates Feynman's comment that he always felt happier about a result when he could find more than one way to derive it. This contrasts with the Ghost Not idea that there is one (1) correct way to see a phenomenon and all other ways are not correct.
Oh yes! The deductive and inductive processes must occur together, and inform each other. Of course, one must be able to do both, and be free of the Ghost Not delusion that they are antithetical.
Within M0, knowledge consists of rote memorised spells. The appropriate spell is indicated by the most shallow analysis of the situation. If one spell is seen as correct, all others are incorrect, even if they say the same thing with the words in a different order. Meaning is not examined.
This is the distinction between understanding, which one owns as a part of one's self and can manipulate freely, and rote learned knowledge which is not manipulatable.
A practical application of this point is the "process preview" in the Programmers' Stone.
This point opens the door to the line of development in the third through seventh Reciprocality papers. It also matches the arising of workplace spirituality described in the Deming Quality movement.
The final comments on the "illogicality" of Russian may have some bearing on the comments on the structure of M0 free languages - such as Native American - in Reciprocality.
Prof. Nepejvoda has captured the key elements of M0 as they came together in this project after the dopamine self-addiction hypothesis was revealed by comparing effective engineers with ADHD children and thus accessing the neurochemical discovery of the polymorphic D4 receptor. It is a remarkable achievement. He has also correctly identified the most directly damaging effects of M0 as being due to the logical component.
I hope that the idea that "normal" logic might be a bizarre result of distorting natural logic until it serves as the mutually concealing co-component of the neurochemical loss of the ability to perfom inductive - higher order - logical operations will be of use in return!