The Problem of Restricted Binary Logic.

I think that there are also two modes of questioning. There are people who look for answers to questions, and those who look for questions to answers.The former gets an answer and that line then stops. The person may then go on to some other question and once again, once they have an answer that line stops. This can be repeated for each new question, but once a question is answered it is not revisited.The later look at the answers already known. They then question those answers. And should that lead to a new question which leads to a new answer, that answer too is questioned.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

There you go FLing a BList conclusions ....

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RebelAAmerican.Zen[Deist
... to learn ... to think ... to live ... to laugh ...
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So are people inclined one way or the other naturally by their genes or is it by environment ... during 'formative' years?Are BLers drawn to absolute world views, RBLers to whatever fundamentalism is easily at hand?Are FLers drawn to the overall uncertainty principle of science?

Our Memory and method of thought are driven by the relative strengths of our synaptic connections. Repetition and positive reinforcement will strengthen those connections, while neglect and negative reinforcement will weaken those connections. If the reinforcement is strong enough and frequent enough, without exposure to conflicting exposure then that person can lose the ability to think differently on that particular subject. If the connections are weakened enough then certain POVs can quite literally become ”unthinkable’.Take the example of the acquiring of language by young children. There is a specific window in their development where they go from being capable of discerning most of the phonemes that a human can utter (baring physiological impairment) to locking themselves into the restricted set of phonemes of their parental tongue/s. Through exposure and reinforcement by their family and surrounding society their brains create a map that pigeon-holes the different vocal sounds of the languages they are exposed to into well defined mental slots. If in later life that person encounters a foreign language that uses a different set of phonemes that they were not exposed to during the critical language acquisition period, the brain finds it difficult or impossible to identify these different phonemes as distinct or separate. In other words the brain will miss-identify them as one of the set it grew up with. To the brain there will be no difference.I have had first hand experience of this. A Japanese friend of mine was trying to correct my pronunciation of the word Manga. For a maddening hour and a half we tried, but the error in my rendition of the middle syllable ”n’ that he was hearing I just could not hear. The way he said Ma’n’ga sounded, to me, exactly the same as the way I said Ma’n’ga. Had I been exposed to Japanese when I was developing my internal phoneme map I would most likely have been able to discern the difference in that ”n’.It also happens with other concepts, such as colour. From birth we have the concepts of colour drummed into us, Red is red, blue is blue, green is green and so on. These concepts are so reinforced that the notion that red is not red but blue would seem nonsensical to us. You look at a red object and it is simply red it couldn’t be anything else. Most certainly it could not be blue. If someone came up to you while you were washing your nice red car and said, “wow, what a lovely shade of blue!” you would think him crazy (apologies to those out there who are colour blind). Fortunately, on the whole, what one human identifies as red does correlate to what most humans would identify as red. If asked to point to specific colours on a wall chart of the visible light spectrum most would point to the same area.We all use RBL for many things that we take for granted. Hot/Cold, Up/Down, Inside/Outside, Fast/Slow, Black/White . . And so on. RBL does not matter if everyone agrees.What RBL boils down to, is a mental grove of such reinforced synaptic connections for a given input that it is virtually impossible to kick the brain out of that groove to reach a different conclusion. To continue the colour analogy you may well concede that we don’t actually know if we all perceive ”Red’ in the same way, and also that what we call ”Red’ could have been called anything else as ”Red’ is just a label, but whatever else is said, or acknowledged, Red is still Red.Those who apply RBL are not drawn to RBL. RBL is the result of having a particular POV drummed into them or having been convinced so completely on a particular matter that they have actually lost the ability to even conceive that the POV in question could be wrong. The beaten path through their mind simply drowns out any possible alternative.Try this: Look at a brightly coloured object, like a bright green shopping bag (for example). Now stare at it and try and convince yourself that it is not green, but red. You can’t. Green is burned into your brain so deeply that you can’t get your brain to jump tracks and say it’s red. You maybe thinking “Ok, it red. Ok it’s red. OK, it’s red” but your brain still knows it’s looking at something green. (Again I apologise to the bichromats among us).As to why one person would favour FL or BL I am not so clear on. I would guess it also comes down to the way the world was presented to us when young. Were we brought up in a world of clear cut division (Don’t eat that! Why? Because I said so!). Or: Were we brought up in world of possibilities, alternatives and reasons (Don’t eat that! Why? It might be poisonous) Both equally valid but I would expect that a predominance of the former would lead to a more BL thought structure, where a favouring of the latter would lend the young mind more towards the FL end of the spectrum.

An excellent post! I hunted and hunted looking for chickens though.

You're applying BL thinking (explicit 1 to 1 correlation) to FL concept (implied metaphor ... what came first, eh?)

Mental shorthand. I bet if you were married to the pronunciation protagonist there would be a steeper learning curve. I have to disagree with you here, based on my BL background ...We are all colorblind, the only question is how many colors you are blind to vs (say) Ned looking for dyed eggs. We only see in a few very short wavelengths (and {approximate\estimate\fudge} colors outside those bands) because we only have red blue and green cones plus light/dark rods:http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/.../vision/rodcone.html We don't really "see" purple. There are animals with more color cones and that would then have 4 or 5 "primary" colors from which other colors would be mixed.Nor do the colors get "equal billing" (again): "Fair and Balanced" reporting? Or, now we know why blue backgrounds work to mask people for special effects and news reports and the like.There is also a wide variation in the numbers of cones in people eyes, with some people having many more cones than other people. I am convinced that Vincent van Gogh saw such vivid colors (particularly the yellow?) because of extra red/green coneshttp://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/...ision/colcon.html#c1Notice that everyone has a low receptivity in the blue-green area (to say nothing of low sensitivity in infrared and ultraviolet.I also noticed that this website says: and The high sensitivity of the rods in the blue wavelengths versus their near blindness in the red ones would seem to be a likely blue light "boosting mechanism" wouldn't you think?Certainly the red-light for night vision phenomenon is purely a construction of our eyes and not a function of color or light wavelength.So are we seeing in "chords" and "hearing" overtones to see the colors in between? But I'd be able to make it blue in low light. Again this is the pronounciation of the words\learning issue, too: if you grew up in an artistic household where there was a lot of communication in colors ... I think it is part genetic and part environment, that environment can reinforce or run counter to the genetic to give you a large ... spectrum? ... of different ways to mix FL and BL.Thanks for the topic btw.{abe, for ned ...} so why did the chicken cross the road? {/abe}This message has been edited by RAZD, 05*09*2006 08:35 PM

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we are limited in our ability to understand
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RebelAAmerican.Zen[Deist
... to learn ... to think ... to live ... to laugh ...
to share.

On the colour thing, I agree with you. However, I was not basing my argument on a biological understanding of the mechanics of vision, but more on the concept of colour.How would a person who was never taught the concept of red/blue/green/puce actually conceptualize and define colour? They would have the same limited human vision but no concept of what we were talking about if were talking about Red. Despite out limited human vision when I use the word ”red’ you know what I mean. Just because our vision is colour limited in low light conditions doesn’t weaken our concept of colour.It’s these concepts that I was referring to in my post. It’s these concepts that get burned into the brain regardless of how we actually mechanically see.As an artist I don’t need telling about the subtlety in shades and hues (Orangey Reds, Yellowy Reds, Blue is Reds and so on) But again this only works if you know what red blue yellow and orange are.You are also right that there must be genetic reasons that shape how a person thinks. I would have no clue as to what that would be (read: wild speculation incoming)I guess the initial structure of the brain would be a big factor. As would that brain’s efficiency in altering the strengths of the synaptic connections. I.e. if the brain rapidly strengthened or weakened connections then could this lead to rapid acquisition of BL or RBL?