↑ ThisStatementIsFalse
Page Created: 7/7/2014 Last Modified: 3/18/2016 Last Generated: 5/6/2024
When I studied African art in college, the professor spoke about the Dogon tribal group as having a completely different way of thinking than what we are used to in western society.
He said the Dogon did not use logic in the same way we did, that we think that just because we are standing in one place that we can't be in two places at once. He said that the Dogon believe that we can be standing here and somewhere else at the same time.
What!? That concept was bizarre and haunted me for years. How could a civilized culture of people reach such a conclusion?
Logic for me is primary, the underpinning of what we think is real. I studied logic within philosophy for several semesters, and my computing and electronics background meant I was fluent in Boolean logic in both programming and transistor logic gates.
One of the things you learn in logic is that there are many different types of fallacies, conclusions we believe to validly arrive from premises, but are not really logical, and therefore invalid.
My father, of Persian origin, also used a strange logic, which I would describe as circular. I remember arguing with him trying to explain to him the problem with what he was doing, but I could never convince him of it. It was like I was speaking a different "logical" language to him. He didn't act illogical, but his rhetoric was.
One of his favorite artists was M.C. Escher, who depicted objects of that were impossible in reality, forms of optical illusions.
But if you think about it, an optical illusion is a visible version of the logical paradox. Could it be that the fact that paradoxes exist at all means that logic is only a partial description of reality?
But how can this be? How can such a reality exist?
In a computer simulation, such things cannot exist, the binary nature, the duality, is a cage. In theory, however, any universal Turing machine can simulate any other, like nested levels, with no discernible difference. This is actually a disturbing thought, that if it goes one way, can it not go the other? Are we also just part of a larger simulation? Some physicists speculate that this may be true.
There was a Star Trek episode where Captain Kirk actually destroyed a computer by saying "I never tell a lie. I am lying." a form of the "liar paradox".
Here is another one: Can God make a rock so heavy that even He cannot lift it? If you believe in the omnipotence of a supreme being, then how is this possible?
My father was not fazed by logical fallacies. He still used reason, but it was a different kind of reason, one driven by perfection. He had an idea of a perfect concept, and then tried to reach it. Perhaps that is a clue.
What if the Dogon, and the quantum superposition, and M.C. Escher are saying the same thing? What if the shamanic knowledge that Graham Hancock wrote about in Supernatural was also part of the same thing?
What if logic is simply a restriction of our mind, our thinking into a reality of limited dimension, our familiar 4th dimensional space-time, and that higher dimensional thought does not have the same restriction? What if our logic is part of a binary simulation, but that there is a third direction, the tertiary that we can't see?
What if, like Kirk, we can simply end the simulation and destroy the computer, by openly speaking the fallacy, acknowledging that a higher reality is indeed at work? Curiously, that is also how he passed the famous Kobayashi Maru test, a no-win scenario constructed by his highly logical peer, Mr. Spock, in the 2009 Star Trek movie. He went "outside" Spock's logical reality, into another dimension, to reprogram the test computer. And if you think about it, the 2009 movie was a reboot of the original movie that depicted an "alternate" reality. Recursive, very, this is.
Perhaps this is the fuzzy area where brain meets mind, where we can somehow "know" a fantastical reality, like an omnipotent being or an Escher stairway that goes around in circles, or a quantum particle being in two places at once, but when we try to explain it, using our words, our logic, it all breaks down, like the way the quantum wave suddenly breaks down to reveal the illusion of the particle.
It's like there is an artificial governor that is restricting our ability to reason beyond a certain level, that to reason beyond that would lead to insanity.
Oddly enough, the Dogon claimed to have contact with extraterrestrials, and their masks look like depictions of the strange beings. I found out years later that my best friend also studied the Dogon masks independently of myself, a friend I had already had several synchronistic experiences with throughout my life. We were both fascinated by the abstract imagery of the masks we saw in the collection in the dark basement of the St. Louis Art Museum. It, like the BirdCreature, may be another ancient archetype.
Or perhaps... this statement is false.
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