mechanical logic - an introduction
This site exists to define organic logic, a different tale
about how
things happen. Organicism says things start with a vagueness, some kind
of state of unformed potential or greater symmetry. This vagueness
breaks asymmetrically in two exactly complementary directions and grows
in scale towards opposed limits.
Then all the time this is happening there is also a mixing of the
separated across the middle ground. So we end up with a triadic world,
a hierarchy, that is a stable outcome to the degree it has reached an
equilibrium balance. Further change does not result in meaningful
change and so we can say an event has definitely
“happened”.
It is an unfamiliar way of thinking about causation. So to put it in
context, this section talks about what we normally consider to be a
logical tale. One based on mechanical logic. Or what I like to call
RAMML to draw attention to its important ontological components -
reductionism, atomism, mechanicalism, monadism and locality.
As I have stressed elsewhere, RAMML is not wrong. It offers a useful
model of reality. Indeed for most everyday purposes it is likely always
to be the more useful causal model.
Furthermore organicism demands RAMML as its complementary partner. It
is only logical for a logic based on asymmetric dichotomisation that it
must itself be dichotomised. At one epistemological extreme (the most
global view) organicism may be king. But at the other (the local view)
then mechanicalism must rule.
So mechanicalism is anti-organicism in the most precise and formal
sense. Its axioms and even paradoxes must exactly contradict those of
organic logic for both to be seen as “right”
– for both to have completely dichotomised the vague space of
epistemological possibility!
Anyway, below I try to define more clearly the particular collection of
assumptions that underpin RAMML.
who did what to whom?
Ordinary logic seems to be a story about how small things add
up to
make bigger things. One event triggers another and eventually whole
sequences of cause and effect build up to make the world complex and
messy.
The classic example is a pool table. A vigorous blow may send the balls
scattering in all directions. Yet each collision can be treated as a
discrete causal event. And the sum of all these events exactly
describes the whole with nothing left over.
This way of analysing the world is even built into human grammar. All
known languages break down an event into subject, verb and object
– a tale of who did what to whom. Which ball struck which
other ball with a certain angle and speed.
As I describe in other pages, the brain is in fact an organic device
with an organic logic. It works by dichotomising –
dichotomising the world into general ideas and particular impressions
(or general habits and particular intentions, or general orientations
and particular focuses).
But language is a more mechanical thing that imposes a more mechanical
way of thought. It encourages us to break the world down into a string
of words - a sentence structure - that describes a linear sequence of
events with actors and actions, substrates and outcomes.
So the basis of a mechanical view of the world was already latent in
human grammar when Greek philosophers began trying to be logical about
the world. The ancient Greeks then brought it out into the open and
formalised it, making explicit some of its key principles such as the
law of the excluded
But let’s skip the history which is also traced elsewhere.
Now let’s just ask what is RAMML?
reductionism
The first necessary assumption of
mechanicalism is that all complexity can be reduced to simplicity. If
you have something big and intricate, a mess of causality, it can
always be broken down into a collection of smaller causal components.
Well actually reductionism is more complicated than this as there are
two possible understandings of reductionism – epistemological
and ontological. One says reduction is just an efficient way to model
the world. The other claims a complex world actually does reduce to
crisp simplicities.
This distinction is quite important. It is like the difference between
believing a painting represents some scene and believing the painting
really is the scene.
Reductionism as an epistemological tactic is about finding ways to
minimise the information we use to describe the world. A great painter
can suggest a lot with just a few clever brushstrokes. Likewise
– whether we are an organicist or a mechanist – we
will be intending to model reality using the least number of distinct
ideas.
The principles of modelling are explored elsewhere. But briefly
modelling is based on a dichotomisation! It splits the world into a
model and its measurements, or a general causal rule and its physical
particulars.
Take again the classic Newtonian example of a pool table. We can say
that it is a world full of localised particulars. There may be a ball
travelling in one direction at one speed, and then many more going in
different directions at different speeds. There is a mess of activity
and it would take a lot of information, a lot of memory capacity, to
create a full representation of everything happening. Or indeed,
everything that has ever happened and will ever happen to the balls on
that table.
However Newton reduced the motions of masses to three general rules. He
went beyond individual balls and individual trajectories to talk about
the global, or universal, regularities of the physical world. The rules
were so compact that they could be summed up with t-shirt equations
like F = ma (force equals mass times acceleration).
But Newton’s modelling was dichotomous – it reduced
the description of reality in two complementary directions. As well as
creating the idea of global laws, it created the idea of particular
measurements. You no longer needed measurements to record every moment
and action in a pool ball’s existence. Just a single
measurement of its position and momentum at some single instant in time
was enough to predict its future (or retrodict its past).
So a messy (vaguer!) impression of reality was divided into the least
number of general global rules and least number of crisply particular
local measurements. A great reduction in the information load, in the
number of brushstrokes employed.
And we can see this is not about reducing the large to the small in the
sense of breaking something big into its fundamental parts. It is about
taking something complex (and real!) and breaking it down towards its
largest scale forms (the models) and its smallest scale events (the
measurements). What gets reduced is not the world (which stays out
there in all its complex glory) but the amount of information we need
to hold in our heads or record in other ways when making descriptive
models of the world.
This is an important point as a holist or an organicist must also be a
reductionist in the modelling sense. Some holists treat reductionism as
a dirty word as it seems they must throw away details and tell only
partial stories of the world. How can a holist tell the story of
everything unless everything is in the story?
And this misunderstanding of modelling has probably held organicism
back. It certainly was an intellectual problem for me until I
understood the principles of modelling and so saw that even simple
holistic approaches like hierarchy theory and semiotics had to be
boiled down to still simpler generalities – like asymmetric
dichotomous logic.
Right. So much for reductionism as an epistemological tactic. The
reductionism we are talking about with RAMML is ontological and is
about the belief that reality actually can be reduced to a set of
fundamental physical parts. Or indeed, as modern physics now often has
it, the universe is actually composed of nothing but information
– it from bit as Wheeler has joked, completing the unhappy
muddling up of epistemology and ontology.
Anyway. to remind again, RAMML is the belief that reality reduces to
atoms which are a monadic stuff that act mechanically and locally.
Let’s consider what each of those mean in turn.
atomism
Atomism is the belief that reality is constructed from tiny lumps of
substance. And that these bits of matter move about freely in a void.
Already we have a complex package of assumptions here. So
let’s break it down – as the ancient Greek
philosophers originally had to.
The great metaphysical question for the Greeks was what is reality make
of? Everyday experience suggests that things are made from many
different kinds of material. But looked at more closely, it seemed this
complexity could be reduced. For instance, ice and steam could be
reduced to water. The earth could be heated to yield pure metals.
The early Ionian philosophers thought that eventually everything ought
to reduce to one fundamental substance. Thales said this substance must
be water. Anaximenes said it could be air. Then there was that strange
chap Anaximander who argued the one substance was what he called the
apeiron, variously translated as the boundless, the infinite. Or as we
would put it dichotomistically – vagueness.
Anaximander’s scheme was more influential in Greek thought
than many modern accounts acknowledge. He described how the initially
unified apeiron separated, then separated again, to create four
developed phases of matter – the hot, the cold, the moist and
the dry.
Later Greek philosophy paid less attention to the
developmental path, more to the crisp end product, and talked about the
elements – the four fundamental elements of fire, earth,
water and air. Aristotle added a fifth element, the aether, because
something extra with a circular swirling motion was needed to move the
sun and stars in their regular orbits.
It is worth noting that – in the spirit of ontological
reductionism - Chinese philosophy of around the same date had its own
story of five elemental phases of nature. These were the wu-hsing, or
powers, of wood, fire, earth, metal and water.
Rather than being the product of dichotomous separation, the wu-hsing
had a circular logic. They formed an eternal cycle of creation or
transformation. Wood burnt to create fire. The ash it left made earth.
Earth yielded up metal. Metal could melt to give water. Water then
caused trees, and thus wood, to grow.
Anyway, getting back to ancient Greece, we can see that they started
with a fairly organic view of the creation of the universe –
four separated properties that later “hardened” to
become four fundamental elements. The Greeks then added another
dichotomy in a pair of (symmetrically) opposed forces – love
and strife, gravity and levity, or what we would now call attraction
and repulsion.
A major problem with this emerging scheme was raised by Parmenides and
his pupil Zeno. Principally they asked how could anything that was
truly fundamental also change? For change to be possible, there had to
be in fact two things – the original stuff and the new stuff
– which meant the original stuff could not be really called
fundamental.
They came up with further logical puzzles. If the fundamental substance
was divisible, what would happen as you kept chopping it up finer and
finer? Could you dice it up infinitely many times until nothing was
left?
The atomist philosophers Democritus and Leucippus (and later Epicurus)
came up with a story that seemed to get round such paradoxes rather
elegantly. Their inspiration may have come from watching dust motes
dancing in a shaft of sunlight say some. But anyway, they argued that
substance was atomistic. And these atoms existed in a void.
An atom can be made of just a single kind of substance. All atoms would
be made of the same solid and uncuttable stuff. So reality was not
infinitely divisible. Unbreakable atoms would stop it crumbling away
into nothingness.
An atom could also have a shape and a motion that made it distinctive.
An atom could be ball-like and slippery like water. Or rough and sticky
like clay. It could move fast like fire or slow like lead. So you could
have one ur-stuff, a single universal substance, and yet you could also
have many different kinds of elements with their own particular
properties constructed from this ur-stuff.
The void was then the empty spacetime stage that allowed the atoms to
act freely. The void was an a-causal backdrop, an empty place. It
allowed the atoms to move and react according to their natures.
If the void were a global solid – imagine a gigantic jelly
– the story would have been quite different. The void would
have a causal role – it would make action difficult. But
being simultaneously a place and an emptiness, the void permitted
everything and caused nothing.
The void seemed itself rather paradoxical in having existence yet being
a-causal. Aristotle’s response was that nature abhors a
vacuum. And modern physics has returned reluctantly to that view. But
as a concept, as a modelling assumption, the void allowed a great
simplification of logic. The global could both exist and yet have no
actions that need be measured.
We can see in fact that the atomists dichotomised. They separated the
world into located lumps of substance and a global empty stage
– precisely the everywhere and everywhen that lacked
substance. And this atomistic world had a new kind of causality
– mechanical. The parts added up to make the effect. The
global existed but did not count in the causal equation. Reality could
be reduced to its smallest substantial components.
mechanicalism
How do we define mechanicalism? It is in fact broader than atomism
which depends on little localised lumps of substance.
The classic notion of a machine is a clock. You have parts that lock
together and drive each other in precise, additive, fashion to make a
mechanism. There is an exact and endlessly repeating mapping of certain
inputs to certain output.
The inputs can be a little wild and undirected – vague. The
coiled spring that supplies the input to a clock wants to release its
energy with a sudden angry hiss. Yet the ratchet and pawl of the
clockwork tames this energy, directing it, so that the uncoiling must
become an even and regular train of discrete pulses of action.
The same reduction of dimensionality is even more obvious with a car
engine. The input that drives an engine is nothing less than an
explosion. Fuel is ignited and hot gas expands in all directions.
However the arrangement of piston and cylinder then constrains this
vaguely orientated explosion to create a repeating cycle of activity.
The piston moves up and down in its sleeve with forced precision.
So the essence of mechanicalism is the rigid constraint of degrees of
freedom. Activity is channelled in ways that only certain actions can
be expressed. Causality is made mechanical – a sequence of
distinct and isolated or localised acts that add up to construct some
whole.
This localisation of cause and effect is why machines are so vulnerable
to catastrophic breakdowns. The smallest misalignment of the gears, the
most minor code glitch in the software, and the system falls apart.
Break your leg and you would still work out a way to hobble about. But
a machine has no global idea of what it is supposed to be doing. It is
made as just the sum of all its local activities. The whole is a fixed
design not a flexible and adaptive or autopoietic system.
So we can see that mechanicalism is like atomism in stressing that
causality is crisp, discrete, and localised. Global wholes might be
constructed as a consequence of an accumulation of events, but the
wholes are blind – a-causal in that they have no causal role
to play. They do not act downwards to shape the parts. They harbour no
memories or purposes - long-lived ideas about what should exist. The
global whole simply exists as the sum of a host of causes at some
particular moment. A car and a clock do what they are designed to do,
but have no desires or autonomy.
Where mechanicalism differs from atomism is that it is really a form
ontology. It is the shape of the parts that counts – that
explains the causality of the system - not the material from which the
parts are made.
Of course, while atomism is a substance ontology (dichotomising the
world into the substantial and insubstantial, ie: the void), atomism
does also depend on the causality inherent in the notion of form. It is
the outward shape, not the inward material, that allows atoms to have
many of their differing properties. Water atoms would be large, round
and slippery. Fire atoms might be tiny and jagged. But as said,
atomism’s principle claim is to dichotomise the world into
substance/insubstantial, or rather atom~void.
Mechanicalism answered atomism’s stress on substance with a
(dichotomously!) matching stress on form. It was a general vision of
how shapes of certain kinds - like cogged wheels, sleeved pistons,
rotating cams, snaplock switches, hinged levers and so forth - might
lock together with such exactness that the causality became
machine-like.
The substance from which a machine is made is irrelevant. Of course in
the real world, jelly is not as good a material as metal for making
some machines like a car engine. But even from just the blueprint
drawing of a car engine we can see that it ought to work. The causality
lies in the shapes, the way parts must fit together and act on each
other in sequence. The form rather than the substance is the cause of
why an engine is a mechanism.
Mechanicalism does not appear to focus on size in quite the same way as
atomism. An atom is defined as a smallest possible fragment of
substance (atom being Greek for that which cannot be cut up any finer).
But a mechanical form, such as a propeller or a piston, can be any size
in principle. The tiny blades of a toy boat are the same in working
principle as the mighty screws of an ocean liner.
However, eventually mechanicalism developed to the point where the
“atoms of form” were sought. The question became
what was the smallest mark or distinction, the very least or simplest
form, that could make a difference in the world? In short, mechanical
causality morphed into information theory (so perhaps RAMML ought to be
RAMMIL).
An information bit is an atom of form. And the absence of a bit is an
“atom” of void. The binary choice between 1 and 0
marks a presence and its absence – the smallest possible jot
of existence (a bare, naked, property-less, existence) and also the
smallest possible definable empty location.
So with the late 20th century advent of information theory –
it from bit – RAMML found a way to talk about atomistic
smallness regardless of whether this smallness was substance or form.
(oh, and determinism)
Before leaving the idea of mechanicalism, we ought to mention
that it
also leads to the idea of determinism. This is the modelling axiom that
every event has a cause, and that each particular cause produces some
unique effect. For anything that happens there are conditions so that -
given them - nothing else could have happened.
A machine is
deterministic because it will always produce the same output for the
same input. Causality is stable and crisply specific, so history can
repeat. By contrast, organicism is comfortable with the idea of
spontaneity or material creativity. Because all causal sequences begin
with some state of vagueness, the precise or particular outcome of a
developmental process can be undetermined (even though globally it may
be constrained).
This is of course what we see in quantum
theory. A wavefunction talks about probabilities of events, but there
is an inherent spontaneity about what actually happens. Quantum
“mechanics” is not deterministic.
So we should add
Determinism as well as Information to the developing package of ideas
that is RAMML. That would give us RAMMDIL perhaps. Or RAMIDML if we
stick to the sequence in which the components of mechanicalism are
being presented here.
monadism
Monadism comes from mono, the Greek for one. It is the presumption that
all reality is made of just the one fundamental stuff.
This seems a very plausible idea. If there is simplicity behind the
complexity of existence, then nothing could be simpler than an
existence spun from just the one fundamental kind of stuff, or state,
or force, or god principle, or material, or whatever.
Two or three kinds of fundamental things would be oxymoronic - too
complicated to be ultimately simple. The natural goal of modelling must
be to find a way of reducing the many to the one.
Of course this site exists to argue that reality can be reduced, but
not quite to the extreme that is monadism. Organicism is based on the
one, two, three of vagueness, dichotomies and hierarchies. And while
vagueness might be thought of as monadic, it is only vaguely monadic
– as much a nothing as a something. Indeed, as much as an
everything as a something.
We have also found that even RAMML is based on dichotomies. It depends
on contrasts such as change~stasis, local~global, substance~form and
particularly, atom~void. Every monad demands it complementary partner.
Even the idea of information, which succeeds in making atoms of form,
hinges on the idea of discrete localities – which then must
have a continuous globality to house its presence (or localised
absence).
RAMML says the world can be boiled down to something and nothing, a
binary 1 and 0. Yet as physics keeps finding (and metaphysics already
knew) the crisp existence of nothingness is just as problematic as that
of crisp somethingness.
It can be assumed for the sake of causal modelling. But it is an
assumption. And therefore complementary models are not excluded.
locality
Our last element of RAMML is locality. This is a property dear to the
heart of physicists - indeed so important that the discovery of
nonlocality in quantum mechanics was about as weird a violation of
causality as physicists could imagine.
Put simply, locality says it takes time and space for events to happen.
Therefore causes and effects are crisply separated.
If for example an atom emits a photon, the rest of the world does not
learn about it immediately. Instead the photon has to propagate. It has
to cover some measurable expanse of spacetime and reach these other
locales. The same is true if two pool balls collide on a table. The
crashing of two balls leaves all the other balls unmoved. Though later
of course they may be affected by the consequences of the event.
Locality is based on the atoms in a void picture. Events happen in
isolation and the void does not know or care about what is happening at
its many positions. This means that effects always follow their causes
in an additive, sequential, fashion. In RAMML, it is never a case that
the ends can justify the means. The future can have no causal
connection to the past. The far away can have no direct way of
affecting the near-to.
Of course, as said, the non-locality of quantum theory throws a spanner
in this particular story. And even relativity creates issues about
causal sequences (it is all relative to the observer).
However locality is a natural consequence of RAMML. It results from the
dichotomisation into active atoms and passive void. Causality is
rendered local and therefore global causation is excluded on principle.
the normal view
This should have convinced you that behind mechanical logic –
our “normal” view of the world – lies
quite a complicated set of assumptions. Once more, there is nothing
wrong in this intricate complexity. Models of the world should be as
simple as possible – but not too simple. Yet we can also see
how mechanical logic itself has developed out of dichotomies.
Elsewhere I have examined why the mechanical approach – RAMML
– is usually the more efficient logic, the more compact
description, the causal model more suited to control of the world.