Strange Notion on Logic

In another of my peregrinations, it occurred to me that most so called logic is a very static logic both in terms of time and space. For example, when one says a thing cannot be both A and not A, that is a rather static view point. In terms of time dynamics, it can be day at one time and night at another in the same place. In terms of space dynamics, it can be both night and day at the same time in different locations.

Am I missing something very obvious here or is there a basic structural issue with the notion of logic as we generally practice it?

Employment as a Scarce Resource ?

There are various metrics regularly taken about the level of unemployment. I would suggest that there is no shortage of jobs in this universe. It is vast beyond all our imaginings. What there is is a shortage of is vision. There is so much we don't know, understand. So much we have not expressed, so many dances we have not danced, so many songs yet to be sung. And to think that there is a shortage of jobs!! Our job always has been to discover the undiscovered country. There are more jobs than there is sentience in the the entire universe. That is the beauty and the mystery of this existence - there is no user manual, no predetermined future. Just this unfolding of which we are a part. And we seem to have some choice as to how the unfolding proceeds.

Applied Metaphors and translucent memes

There was a blog with lots of comments on performance reviews. A lot of the comments were similar to comments I have heard or made during my stint in the corporate world. What seemed to be missing (for me) from the dialogue was bringing to the foreground the implicitly applied metaphors and memes in the points and suggestions made. Here are what seem to me be a set of applied metaphors:

• Work is a race and hence the best deserve to win and get rewarded
• Value is a measurable entity
• Workers are widgets and can be categorized by value

Then there are memes that are not quite opaque but somewhat translucent:

• Uniformity is fair
• Evaluation is an industrial process
• The evaluation process can be made uniform and fair like an industrial process
• Uniformity in evaluation is good, as it is in the manufacture of widgets.

The meta meme here is the industrial revolution meme of uniform, repeatable, and directly controlled processes.

For one, there are many possible metaphors that may be applied to an organization and its human members. It can be viewed as a garden. You provide and fertile soil, add amendments, test the soil, observe for pests and other infestations. The measure of success is the harvest. There are both direct and indirect  analogs for these measurements in an organization.

For another, in performance reviews there is an associated vision-logic of the world as a set of competing groups. The competition is for resources of various kinds - economic, materials, human resources, etc. One can suggest a different  vision-logic for the purpose of human groups and human existence. That of a journey into the undiscovered country. In that journey all participants may have vital resources necessary for that journey. Then     the issue becomes not one  of competition but one of developing the available resources as one has very little notion of  what one is about to encounter in the undiscovered country.

Ladder of Inference

I came across this ladder of inference in my peregrinations. This is an area I have been thinking about for a while. Looking at the inference loop, I was dissatisfied with the loop and its implications. So I put together a different structure for what is going on.

It seems to me like there is a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes that we are consciously quite unaware of. As we come across phenomena (real experience), our neurologies use those phenomena to create assumptions about how the world works. What is up/down, important/less important, and so on. These sets of assumptions group (categorize) into beliefs. This system of beliefs then determines how we filter, what phenomena we are aware of, what meaning we assign to these experiences, what conclusions we draw from these meanings, and what actions (if any) these lead to. An example of this would be an unexpected reward. It could mean that

• one is a good person and deserves the reward
• one is favored by one's deity/deities
• one is lucky
• one is going to be unlucky later to balance the current luck
• and on an on ...

This ladder can be confusing in that the loop from experience to assumptions is happening at various levels:

• direct physical experience
• cultural / social experience
• vicarious experience through media
• ...?

Is it the same loop for all different types of experience? I am not sure.