From: burt@aupair.cs.athabascau.ca (Burt Voorhees)
Newsgroups: rec.org.mensa
Subject: Re: Intelligence & Logic (was Atheism and Intelligence)
Date: 15 Dec 92 01:06:40 GMT
 <burt.724296175@aupair.cs.athabascau.ca> <1992Dec14.210034.27873@cbnewse.cb.at

[lots of stuff deleted]

I'm not sure how you got from my statements about limitations of logic
to assuming that I'm supporting the idea that we all go on our gut feelings.
And from your last post I'll substitute rationality for logic since for me
at least logic has a very specific technical meaning.  Perhaps it was my
reference to empathetical reasoning...  But just because I say that under
certain conditions empathy is not only valid as a form of reason, but is
to be prefered doesn't mean that I'm pushing universal emotionalism over
a reasoned life.  My favorite example of empathetical reasoning is in
Jonas Salk's (sort of) autobiography where he says that when he was young
he use to imagine that he was a virus in order to develop some (empathetical)
understanding for the way viruses worked.  Scientific work us suppose to be
completely rational yet if one investigates the way scientists actually work
one finds that there is an interconnected blend of empathy, analogy, and
analysis.  Analysis is usually what is thought of as being "logical",
however, and so scientists don't talk much about the other things, except
with each other.  So the question is not which form of reasoning is "right"
but rather how to use all to gain a complete understanding.

And as far as gut feelings go, one can trust gut feelings only to the
extent that a) one has mastered the basics and subtlities of a field
(which could be a non-academic field such as politics, etc.,); and
b) has learned enough about ones own ego structures to leave them out
of the picture--we don't get much accuracy when ego desires and/or fears
gum up the machinery.  One can also base reasoning on asthetic
considerations.  The physicist Paul Dirac (In an article in Scientific
American sometime in the late 60's, I beliefe) describes how Erwin
Schrodinger set out to construct a relativistic quantum equation, but
when he got it found that it didn't agree with experiments when apploied
to electrons.  So, he very "logically" discarded it, and invented the
non-relativistic Schrodinger equation instead.  But, it turned out that
the experiments were wrong because electrons had a property, spin, that
was unknown at the time.  So somewhat later
a relativistic quantum equation was devised,
and became known as the Klein-
Gordon equation.   Dirac's comment on this story was that Schrodinger
should have gone for the elegance of his original equation rather than
altered things to agree with experiment, because "It is better to have beauty
in your equations than to have them agree with experiment."  Not to
criticize either approach, but one could say that Dirac (as Einstin)
held a perhaps "illogical" faith in the elegance and simplicity of
nature, while Schrodinger (and Heisenberg, Bohr, etc.) looked more to the
"logical" process of empirical verification.

Anyway, off to warmer climates for the holidays,
Merry Christmas (or, have a fun time off, or Joyful
Equinox, etc.)
Newsgroups: rec.org.mensa