Logic is a wonderful tool.  Some people are under the impression that we should use logic for everything.  Perhaps that’s a nice ideal, but logic can’t work in every situation, and actually fails quite a lot.

A lot of times when people use logic, they are thinking theoretically, and in their own little mental universe.  They have a hard time seeing the fact that they’re talking about a fantasy world that’s inside their head.  Usually when someone is too logical, their real life is emotionally damaged to the point where they would prefer to live in this theoretical universe in their minds, where everything makes sense, than to step outside their minds and deal with the illogical nature of the real world.

Hey - I’m not perfect either - so don’t get me wrong.  But there’s an important point to be made here.

Logic is a great tool, but we are all capable of misusing logic.  It’s important to know where logic is weak, so we can use logic properly, and gain it’s benefit without falling into the mental traps.

Logic is a creative process.  By that I mean: given a situation,  our minds are capable of creating a logical explanation for it.  Sometimes we forget that the logical understanding we have about something exists inside of our head.  Sometimes it feels like that logical understanding just exists on it’s own, and is self-evident.  This is where logic gets dangerous.

For example, let’s look at a simple phenomenon: time.  We all have our watches and clocks, and we know that there are 24 hours in a day, and there are 365 days in a year, and an extra day is added for Leap Years.  We know that there are different timezones on Earth, and that while it’s 9:12am for me, it’s 2:12pm in London.  We know this breakdown of time comes from the rate at which the Earth spins, and we know that years come from how long it takes for the Earth to complete one orbit around the Sun.

We all know this.

Have you ever researched time?  Where did this idea of 24 hours in a day come from?  What was life like back when there were no clocks?  I saw a program on the History Channel about how the first clocks were invented.  Before then, I had never really thought to myself what it would be like to not have this knowledge about time.  Think about it.  Reality would be the same, but our mental world would be drastically different.  No alarm clocks :-).  No concept of “15 minutes ago”.  No concept of “it’ll take about an hour”.  No age!  “I’m 24 years old”!

The point is that we take these things for granted.  We take the fact that time was created by humans for granted.  When we use time in our lives, it’s so natural and feels as if the fact of 24 hours in a day is etched into reality.  It feels solid.  It feels like a indisputable fact that would be true no matter where we go.  But it’s not.

This is how logic fails us.  The TRUTH is that we used logic to CREATE a system of time.  But what does it FEEL like?  It feels like time is an inherent truth about reality.  We have deceived ourselves.

But we do this all the time with logic.  Another example:

One of my friends loves logic, but he also lives a pretty crappy life.  He’s very cynical, and always criticizes other people harshly.  I wanted to get his emotions to feel something other than cynicism, so I tried to convince him to work on a video game with me.  I’m a programmer, and could do all the programming side of things, but I wanted him to do the story and art.  I wanted him to create something, and feel a sense of accomplishment, and a sense of ownership.  This way, he might be able to sympathize next time he thinks about criticizing someone else’s creation.

This challenge really short-circuited his logical mind.  I could easily convince him that working on the video game was the logical thing to do.  It’s fun, he had nothing better to do, he loves video games, it’ll be cool, it’s not hard, he can still sit on his computer all day :-), etc.  In fact, I had him convinced for a couple of days, because he couldn’t give me one logical reason why he shouldn’t do it.

Unfortunately, he eventually created a logical reason, and refused to work on the project after that.  He decided that he was lazy.  And being lazy, he obviously wouldn’t want to invest time and energy into a project.  Of course that wasn’t the real reason - the real reason was he feared being criticized by someone else over his creation.  But now that he had created a logical reason, and incorrectly assumed his logical creation was an inherent truth about reality, he had become convinced not to work on the project.

This is exactly how logic fails us.  We create a logical framework for something, then assume this framework must be true because it’s logical.  We forget that the logical framework exists inside of our heads, and could be incorrect.  We make the same mistake - it FEELS like the logic comes from the reality around us.  Just like it FEELS like time is an inherent truth about reality.  But, upon further investigation, we must concede that our logical framework was a creation that only exists in our own mental universe.

Logic is a great tool, but we need to use it correctly.  We need to be aware that just because something is logical doesn’t mean it’s true.  And we must identify the correct source of logic.  Reality isn’t logical.  Reality is just reality.  It’s our minds that try to make reality logical.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 2nd, 2007 at 9:56 am and is filed under Belief Systems. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.