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Inductive logic is the most common form of logic and is practised throughout the animal kingdom. It is the logic of observation or interaction. If the sun rose today and yesterday it will probably rise tomorrow. If I drop a stone off a cliff it falls to the ground, if I drop off the cliff I will also fall to the ground. Induction is the process where an event has happened, or a conclusion is made in the mind, and base principles are derived from it.

Care needs to be taken with both forms of logic. Correlation is not causation; just because a series of events happens simultaneously does not necessarily mean that they are caused by other events around them. We may make conclusions based on the evidence presented that are valid, but they turn out incorrect. Up until the 1800s it was thought that all swans were white until the black swans of the southern hemisphere were discovered. There are also many advanced forms of logic, the study of logic has entertained philosophers for centuries, but the principles of deductive and inductive reasoning remain the same.

Logic states that something is true because you can logically conclude it. The problem with logic is that it has many inherent flaws: incorrect premises, a basis in belief, or incomplete knowledge of all factors.

Belief states that something is true because it is. The problem with belief is that anything can be stated as true. You can believe that there are ten invisible pink elephants standing in the corner and that is true.

Value
Value is the system than enables an organism using some internal process to make a decision between two or more possible outcomes.

Value is the abstract name we give to both our opinions and unconscious reactions to events in the Universe. Before the ability to abstract we could value a given situation and make a decision on it; such as if I go to this watering hole I will get a drink, but then I might get eaten by a large animal. However we wouldn’t be able to explain to another human that if they go to the watering hole they will get a drink, but they might get eaten by a large animal. To pass on the knowledge, it would have required a demonstration rather than communication. Value is based on Truth, as an organism will only exercise value based on events it believes to be true. If an organism has no reason to believe it will get eaten, it won’t exercise value with that in mind, if a person doesn’t believe in God, then when they exercise value they will exclude consideration of God.

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Communication is the transfer of information. This transfer can be as unorthodox as the sun’s rays converting your skin cells to a different state, the passing and combining of genetic material during sexual intercourse, or a communicated disease. We commonly understand communication as multiple organisms sharing ideas or feelings with each other, imparting knowledge from one to the next. This last type of communication is special in that it results in the passing of information from one organism to another with minimal exchange, if any, of physical material. From now on when I speak of communication this is the type I am referring to. Communication can use the body and face to express ideas and emotions, voice and song to entertain and amuse, or structured words and grammar. Animals communicate with one another via visual display (actions, resources, physical and social stature), physiological phenomena (pheromone release which does involve the transfer of physical material, pupil dilation, touch) or vocal sound (language and music). In these examples communication is the outward representation of an organism’s inward state.

This form of communication therefore is necessarily representative. A communicable unit, a meme as Richard Dawkins posits or an idea in more vernacular terms, is the abstraction of a physical process that is created by one organism and interpreted by another. In the discipline called semiotics the process of creating the abstraction is identified as the relationship between the signified and the signfier. The signified is the object or physical process that is being represented, the signifier is the packet of information that an organism uses to represent the object or physical process. For example an organism may be hungry and wants food. If it then communicates the idea of food to another, the food, say a banana is the signified object, and the vocal sounds that the organism uses to represent the banana is the signifier. Alternatively the signified could be the organism’s feelings of hunger and the signifier is them physically hunching over in hunger pain clutching their belly. Either signifier, the vocal sound or the sight of a hunched fellow organism clutching their belly, communicates an idea to another organism.

This relationship between signified (the object) and signifier (the sign) is not fixed – many aspects can affect the relationship between signified and signifier. If the signifier sent is ambiguous, not well formed, or is based on other signifiers, then the signifier will be difficult for the receiver to interpret. In the example above, the vocal sound for a banana could be sent by an organism as a sign for the visual display of hunger, which itself is a sign for the physical feeling of hunger. For a receiving organism the usage of a banana to denote hunger could easily be misinterpreted. It is ambiguous, ‘did they mean banana or hunger?’ If the vocal noise that was made sounded very similar to that of happiness, the receiver might think the sender was actually ecstatic rather than starving, and that is why they are staggering about as if in a euphoric daze. The receiving organism might interpret the banana noise correctly as an interpretation for the physical display of hunger, but because the physical display of hunger may also be used to describe needing to excrete the correct interpretation requires very necessary further explanation.

The status of the receiver also effects the interpretation by their learned, cultural and physical/physiological context in which they receive the information. If the receiver has learnt that bananas are bad then when the sender starts sounding off banana signifiers the receiver may thump the sender thinking they are actually communicating bad ideas. If the culture of the receiver also says that bananas are bad, even if the receiver knows that the sender could be describing hunger pains their comprehension may be clouded by the thought of their friends reigning ridicule on them for not thumping the banana espouser. Finally the receiver could be bloated from an orgy of bananas and the idea of starving is not only foreign but the thought of another banana makes them sick so why on earth is this fellow being going on and on and on about bananas!

Communication using signifiers based on other signifiers in ever increasingly complicated systems that are not strongly tied to the physical universe create the signified systems that we label with such signifiers as language and grammar, rules of logic, culture and genre, and belief systems and ideologies. These are signifiers that are different to the exchange of momentum between two rocks colliding as they roll down a hill or a deer expressing fright at seeing a predator, they are what we call abstractions. It is our ability to create signifiers that don’t directly relate to the physical universe perceived by our senses that has led to our evolutionary success as a species, and our ability to create advanced ideas. This is at earliest most evident in the rise of cave painting where an artist communicates the signified of a deer by drawing a deer. The artwork bears the same meaning as the deer to the receivers and becomes independent of the artist as the sender of the information. The communicator is no longer the artist but the idea itself and it is far enough abstracted from the signified which is the deer. Advanced language probably occurred before this point but as there is no record of when language at this level began it is impossible to discuss.

A hypothesis is an explanatory idea that a person may have given a set of data or a particular observation. Many of the ideas espoused on this website take the form of hypotheses, they are ideas that I have based on observation (and some social experimentation!) but are as yet untested from other independent observers. A good example of a hypothesis is the incorrectly termed ‘String Theory’ which isn’t actually a theory but rather a set of ideas to explain the fundamental principles of the universe. It has a mathematical basis, but nobody as yet can observe or perform an experiment to test it’s likelihood.

A Theory is a hypothesis that has been based on principles that are agreed on by a ‘majority’ of specialists (scientists) that can be tested independently and that people have agreed is logically sound. A Theory is not necessarily true, Newtown’s laws of gravity were proven wrong by Einstein’s theory of Relativity, which in turn may be wrong. However a Theory is the current widely accepted idea, and is assumed logically correct. Intelligent design is not a scientific Theory, in that the existence of a supreme creator cannot be experimentally proven, only believed. Evolution is a Theory, in that it can be studied in the fossil record, experimentally observed over a period of time, and it’s principles proven within a computer.

The difference between belief and logic is when a belief is challenged thoroughly through logic it will eventually come down to a persons feelings about a particular subject rather than any rational or logical reason for believing this. It does not require belief to think that Jesus Christ could have been a man, but if he was the son of God this implies a belief in God. A person can have an innate belief that their culture is superior to others because X and Y reasons make them better, but what makes X and Y the objective markers of cultural superiority are themselves belief laden terms.

Everybody holds beliefs which are instilled in them at all stages of their development as an individual human being. No person throughout history has ever managed to shake all of their beliefs. For an individuals knowledge to be complete and factually True implies that one has reached Nirvana, become God etc. Many books have been written about such individuals (Buddha, Jesus, L. Ron Hubbard) but no one has walked the Earth in recent times who has been able to independently and conclusively verify that they are completely enlightened about life, the Universe and everything. As the figures in our history books are unable to testify that they were anything more than smart, enlightened people for their time, their ‘divinity’ is again the subject of belief. The Dalai Lama will not proclaim to know everything, the Catholic church won’t discuss before the Big Bang and L. Ron Hubbard’s own son committed suicide – a testament to the fact that either his beliefs systems did not factor in care for his family, or that he was incapable of using his divinity to help his son.

Without complete knowledge of everything, we can always be potentially wrong. This is evident in Karl Poppers falsifiablilty hypothesis, where no truth can be proven correct, only proven wrong. It is possible to create a far larger number of hypotheses than is physically possible for humanity to disprove. Therefore our inability to disprove god, fairies, string theory, relativity leads us to the unenviable position to entertain the notion that these phenomena may actually exist.

The answer to this problem is Bertrand Russel’s argument of the astrophysical teapot. It is impossible to disprove that a teapot is not orbiting the sun. However it is highly implausible. Therefore we are all technically teapot agnostics, we don’t know the teapot is there but we can’t disprove it. However for the sake of forwarding our own arguments, we act as if we are teapot atheists.

This however leads to the further problem of the criteria which is used to select which ideas to be agnositc / atheistic about and which to pursue for further enquiry. Godel attacked logical positivism, which asserts that all ideas and problems can be solved mathematically, by disproving that any mathematical proof was self contained, that each proof would require an infinite number of other proofs to provide the basis for the proceeding proof. In theory it could be possible after a certain number of proofs to have incidentally described the entire Universe. However Alan Turing’s conceptual Turing machine used for calculating problems has the issue of never being able to determine when the problem will actually be solved. Waiting for a calculating machine for near to infinity with no indication of an end point is not a viable solution for proving/disproving problems. The post-structuralist and deconstructive attacks on language and argument also state that any culture or discourse is reliant on the power structures that advocate it and the temporal cultural state of the people participating in it. Thus the structures will often be based on either self-referential justifications such as freedom, liberty and happiness as fundamental Truths equivalent to gravity, or false premises that hoodwink the masses into believing things that have no basis other than historical mass delusion – religion as the opiate of the masses.

At this point having used logic to disprove itself we are led to the only possible logical conclusion: logic is relative and because everything can be theoretically possible the Universe (if there is one) must be entirely subjective. The Universe is fundamentally thus based on such principles as chaos, emergence and quantum uncertainty which are entirely indeterminate beyond experiencing the phenomena in action, if indeed we are witnessing what we think we are. Or in the case of quantum uncertainty, the act of witnessing changes the state of being. Whatever it is that is driving or not driving the Universe it is completely out of our grasp to conceptualise or hypothesise.

There are two problems with absolute relativism. To live with relativist principles we need to change our normal way of thinking. We should either suspend entirely all logical enquiry in discovering new ideas or truths, or change the way we discover ideas from logic to one of unverifiable belief. These sorts of beliefs cannot be transferred in their entirety from one organism to another because they have no ultimately reducible signified – introspection is ultimately accessible only to the individual. The second problem is that superficially to our senses there appears to be some level of consistency in experience and continuity in the Universe. Whilst it is possible to create ad infinitum explanations that might explain this illusion of consistency and continuity, another possible explanation is that there is an objective reality but we have incomplete knowledge of it and it is so complex that there is a computational impasse in trying to decipher it.

An objective reality would explain the perception we have of consistency and continuity, it would follow some Universal basic principles which by existing would be discoverable through a process of reduction and logic. These principles may include an element of uncertainty but this does mean that the Universe is therefore uncertain at all levels. The Universe is also vast, and as highlighted by the earlier discussion of the Turing machine it is impossible to predict when or if we will ever discover the underlying principles. Just because we as a human species do not have the computational ability to discover something does not mean that it is therefore non-computable.

This last rebuttal and justification is therefore the post-structuralist argument of self-justifying ideas. An often used argument for God is ‘just because humans may not know the nature of God, does not mean that it does not exist’. This is equivalent to the statement regarding computational impasse. The difference between the two arguments is that if God exists the only way that God can be proven is if God chose to prove itself to us. In the case of computational impasse we are the ones in control of reaching the proof. With computational impasse humanities quest for absolute Truth is like the Turing machine. We may stumble upon it one day, which unlike God proving itself is entirely within our own capacity.

This argument is therefore based on my need to be in control of myself, or to understand the factors that influence me. I refuse to relinquish my belief and ideology to something that is incomprehensible. As Isiah Berlin posits, if I ask a person who worships trees why and they say because it is a tree I cannot understand that. If they explain how the tree relates to them, that I can understand.