The death of logic and some of its consequences

The computer as a materialized expression of formalized logic, particularly with the development of social networks and their penetration into all aspects of our lives in the process of forming the “Internet of Everything”, makes people equal in access to it. Due to the objective impossibility of competing for a resource equally accessible to all, people and organizations that traditionally competed with each other precisely on the basis of the logical constructs that are the foundation of traditional thinking, transfer competition with each other to unusual and non-traditional forms of non-logical thinking.

Meanwhile, modern pedagogy does not demonstrate the ability to educate children in the skills of intuitive thinking, similar to the education of logical thinking that it has fully mastered. There is no doubt that in time it will master the results of Soviet experimental pedagogy of the 1960s and be able to solve this problem, ensuring widespread development of creativity in children, based on intuition. But for this it must halt its systemic degradation, conditioned tactically by the primitivization by control systems of societies that have become too complicated for their capabilities, and strategically, by the formation of a platform society that needs only an inner circle of specialists capable of critical thinking and even education as such.

Until these factors in the degradation of pedagogy are eliminated (and they will not be eliminated, since they are objective), the inability to massively educate in children the intuitive thinking skills that they increasingly urgently need ensures a continuous deepening of the crisis of the entire society, which is unable to provide its members with the necessary adaptation to the conditions of their lives.

The inability of control systems to handle people who think intuitively is also important. This problem has been clear since the late 1930s-there is no solution.

This provides a crisis of manageability “at every point” in society.

The natural reaction of control systems is the removal from real participation in decision-making of a part of society that cannot be controlled, namely, first and foremost, creative people who think intuitively.

As a result, competition is increasingly implemented precisely through these new forms of mass thinking-through intuitions and predictions or through original and complex logical schemes that have not yet been fixed in computer algorithms.

Competition based on the latter is a “rearguard battle” of traditional formal logic and the society based on it, doomed to defeat, as with the formation of artificial intelligence and as it develops, more and more original logical schemes become available to the computer (which are more complex than those accessible to most people's perception).

As a result, the competition between people and the organizations they form has shifted into the realm of non-logical thinking, mainly into the realm of intuition.

But only “mostly” them! - because people who think non-logically cease to succumb to management and, because of the death of logic, there are more and more such people (those who do not think productively on the basis of intuition and are not capable of logic and therefore, in principle, non-productive people).

As a result, they turn away from decision-making because of not only uncontrollability but also justice: those who are unable to make a positive contribution to the development of society should not influence it.

Exclusion from participation in the management of an arbitrarily imperfect majority of society means the death of democracy, which further exacerbates the crisis of governance.

In this sense, the structure of the social platform society is a response not only to the change in dominant technologies, but also to the social and managerial crisis generated by this change.

The non-viability of this system increases the threat of the likely self-destruction of civilization.

Original column by Mikhail Delyagin

Translation by Costantino Ceoldo