Hey encode,
Let’s see if I can brush off my memories of what we were talking about.
Well, I think we can get away with ordinary logician’s conditional. If C depends on B and B depends on O, then we’re saying: if C then B, and if B then O… which is: C → B, and B → O. Of course, that doesn’t capture everything you might have wanted to say, does it?
I think we sometimes think of the human brain too much like a computer. We design computers on purpose to be totally logical. We want them to be consistent and accurate. We don’t want them to sometimes make mistakes or come up with their own opinions.
We have to remember that our brains evolved through a process of natural selection, it wasn’t designed on purpose. We get things right and we think rationally only to the extent sufficient to get us by. It’s amazing how often we make leaps of logic and lucky guesses. We infer so much by instinct. For example, I’m preparing a barbecue, I ask a friend: can you go out and get burgers? I don’t need to specify that I mean buy burgers from the grocery store, not kill a cow and gut the meat out of him. How is it that the brain automatically knows the right interpretation? It’s just conditioned to make these leaps, and good thing because usually it gets it right. And you’re right about the emotional readings in the things we say–not to mention tone and special accents that fluctuate in our speech, and inferring meaning based on context, and a whole list of other things. Sometimes this is way more efficient than having to deduce everything logically, for if the chances that we’d get it right with a bit of implicit guesswork are high enough, we could save a lot of time and mental energy that would otherwise be used to do a full logical deduction.
I try not to make my spirituality depend on science or conflict with science. My spirituality essentially says that the physical universe that science studies is a material representation of God’s mind. This allows science to uncover anything, and I’m still able to say: well, that is a representation of something in God’s mind. It doesn’t matter what science discovers, or what we read in our science textbooks. I also don’t speculate much on what particular experiences or thoughts (I should say “thoughts” in quotes) go on in God’s mind, which means I don’t put any demands on how such experiences or thoughts must be physically represented, so again, science could uncover anything.
The only area of science that comes into conflict with my spirituality is quantum mechanics–having to do with non-determinism–but even there, a minor tweak to my theory fixes that.
No need to apologize. I was saying that poetry and metaphor, though requiring a bit more penetrating insight to get, also delivers a bigger punch when it succeeds. Sometimes we need to be strict and rigorous when communicating, but sometimes it’s worth using poetry and metaphor.
Hopefully not the last.
Sure, I guess you have to decode your own posts sometimes. That happens to me a lot. I don’t think a person’s words ever lack meaning. Obviously, when we speak, we have something in mind which we’re trying to convey. Sometimes we lose that meaning, we forget or our brains can’t quite capture it as it once could, but it’s very rarely the case that we intentionally decide to utter a bunch of babble.