Beginner's guide to "Perspective Logic"
Although we can think and evaluate because of our awareness and its focus, I don't think we learn/teach enough about focusing. So, I'm writing a brief guide so that we can reduce the amount and degree of confusion caused by sticky focus, scattered focus, and so on. As I do think focusing of awareness (Perspective) is the base of logical evaluation, I'll call this "Perspective Logic".Originally posted in ILP http://www.ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=169433
Postby Nah » Mon Jul 27, 2009 7:44 pm
Edited and added for this Wiki
Often people think of "Logic" as to play with different propositions, to study the relations between them, to make theories/hypothesis about them, and so on. What I want to talk here is about propositions themselves. It's because "propositional logic" wouldn't produce useful result unless the propositions are well founded. I think there is too much emphasis in constructing "card castles" with hollow premises and not enough attention upon the premises themselves.
Also, learning the very basis of logical evaluation does help when we want to analyze and manipulate more complex ideas and structures.
The first material in the Perspective Logic is The Awareness. Without awareness, there would be no observation, no information, no focus, no evaluation, no relation. Also, awareness changes its "density" or "level" at each moment. If you think about dream awareness, or when you are tired, sleepy, etc, I think it's pretty easy to understand that the density of awareness isn't constant.
The second element is the Focus Of Awareness. Although awareness can be somewhat round and omnidirectional, often its focused on something. For example, when we have an injury, awareness can be focused on the sensation from the injury. Similarly, we can focus awareness to certain physical or non-material thing and we call it "concentrating". Without this focusing, we wouldn't be able to compare and to evaluate. And each focus is a Perspective.
Next is the property or the criteria of the focus, in other words how we focus. We can focus on an object based on its location. So the property of the object in the particular perspective is its physical location. We can focus on something red, something long, whatever. We can focus on sensations we perceive as positive, negative, as well. We can focus on warm feeling emotion, depressing thought, and so on. And the criteria used in the focus, to hold the perspective is what we call property in Perspective Logic.
Then here comes the movement of perspective or adopting different perspectives. With a single perspective, we can be aware of the focused matter but we cannot evaluate it. It's there. Something is there. That's it. Not much more. When we have two or more perspectives, we can start comparing them, measure one using another as a unit, and so on. So, the ability to shift and to adopt different perspectives at will is pretty important. If you can't move your perspective, you can't think, as far as Perspective Logic goes. Religious people can't think well because their perspectives are dictated and fixated by religious dogma and/or scripture and their perspective is confined and limited. There are different types of blocking that limit one's perspective movement. More about this, later.
After the movement, here comes the degree of concentration. Just like the differences of density, the focus can be of different degree of concentration. When fully concentrated, we would see/think only the focused area and nothing else. Strong interests, desire can cause highly concentrated awareness, naturally. But we can practice to concentrate, too.
And finally, we can have a perspective that regroup multiple perspectives. Even a simple proposition or notion may contain lots of basic perspective, when they are well conceived.
Now, let's see a little more about the nature of perspectives.
1. Focusing, adopting a perspective is the act of separating, dividing.
2. Focusing, adopting a perspective is the act of affirming, identifying, allotting positive certainty.
3. Focusing, adopting a perspective is the act of magnifying, seeing the part as if it's whole, overrating.
4. Focusing, adopting a perspective is the act of virtualization.
5. Focusing, adopting a perspective is the act of dividing conscious and sub/unconscious ares.
6. Focusing, adopting a perspective is the act of dividing positive and negative.
7. Focusing, adopting a perspective is to project awareness forward.
8. Our focus has strong bias for positively perceived/interpreted things.
I think it's enough about the nature of perspectives, for the moment. Postby Nah » Tue Jul 28, 2009 7:57 pm
Certain types of thinking, such as simply following associative linkage, isn't considered valid/useful thinking from the POV of Perspective Logic although many people "think" in this way.
Also, all concepts and notions are the result of evaluation and they contain some sort of logic in them. So, let's see how we evaluate.
To evaluate, we first need to identify and set the focus on something.
Next, the act of evaluation is to compare two or more perspectives.
Now, we can identify and then compare and evaluate things. We shall see the problems we may encounter in practicing Perspective Logic, in the next post (or edit).
ADDED:
Recap:
1. We can focus on any idea, feeling, sensation, as long as we are aware of it.
The field of awareness is entire spectrum of things we can focus.
2. To think and evaluate about something, it's important to focus on something out of everything else in the field of awareness.
If we don't focus precisely enough, we can't think/evaluate.
3. To focus, we use certain property of things as criterion, like the location, shape, color, relation to something some notions, and so on.
The focus is dependent upon these criterion (and the porperty of things).
4. To think and evaluate, we need more than one focus. With two focuses, we can compare them. We may be able to use one focus as a reference, and measure another against it. With multiple focuses, we can perform multitude of evaluations and establish the relation between these focuses about certain properties. And this is the base of logiacl thinking (especially in the broader sense).
5. We call the choice of certain focuses to perform desired evaluation as "perspective", here.
Following points are basically the same thing shown from slightly different angles.
For example, let's think about a white paper with a small round black area painted on it. When we focus on the black area, we are separating the area (circle) from the rest. We are dividing the whole.
In the same example of a white paper with black round area, we are affirming the blackness of the area, identifying the area with the blackness, and noting positive certainty about the blackness when we focus on the black area.
In the example of the paper with the black area, we can first focus on the entire paper. Then we can focus on the black spot. When we keep our perspective shifting between that of whole paper and the black spot, the black spot is evaluated as relatively small compared to the whole paper.
But If our focus is held totally concentrated, we would only see the black spot. So, relatively small black spot is now occupying the entire perspective, and thus considered as a whole, for the moment. So, it's as if the spot is magnified, overrated in comparison to the previous evaluation.
When we focus totally on something, it occupies our perspective and thus it becomes virtualized world, so to say.
Totally concentrated focus divides the whole into two parts. Focused areas and the rest. And we wouldn't be aware of the rest while the perspective is held.
Since focusing is done so by affirming and by positively identifying certain property, the rest is considered as negative, negating.
Since our focusing ability grows with sense organs like eyes, focusing has the strong directional beam pattern highly oriented in front, so to say. Combined with other natures, the ares in front of us is often focused and thus conscious areas while the back side remain sub/unconscious and negative region.
Just like any other creature, we don't like pains. sorrows, etc, and it's normal/natural to face away from them. So, a little like magnet aligning itself in the magnetic field, our focus has the strong tendency to align with our biologic, emotional, and mental preferences. This tendency creates and maintain vast sub/unconscious region because of dividing nature. It means we have to practice adopting negative perspectives if we would like to have freedom of perspective movement and more balanced view.
I'm going to stop this for now, and add another post, or edit and add to this one, later. Maybe I should add simple illustration. It can make things a lot easier.
Evaluations in "Perspective Logic"
Thinking is an act of evaluation in Perspective Logic. (See Information Processing, and How To Think for more detail)
You can see the example of "associative thinking" in action, in this thread. :D
http://www.ilovephilosophy.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=148786
As we have seen that having a perspective is an act of separating, we need to have the way we can positively identify and distinguish the object against the rest of the world. It can be done by identifying the spacial location (relative to ourselves or other reference point) and the contour, area, shape, etc in case of physical object. It can be done by pattern matching like focusing on something with certain color, for example, or any other property.
In case of focusing on immaterial thing like a concept, we can identify by the dependency, reference to certain properties. Unlike usual human thought process, Perspective Logic requires clear awareness of the properties used to identify the subject matter. It's simply because we can't identify anything without clear awareness and we wouldn't be able to think (evaluate) without properly identifying things. When we use a word to indicate a particular focus, the criteria of the focus, the property is the definition of the word for the given perspective. In other words, we don't think with words in Perspective Logic, but we do it with perspectives, evidently. :) And then, we choose and employ words to indicate the perspectives. Although this might be foreign to some people who have habit of thinking with words, I think we all are actually thinking in perspective, at least subconsciously. However, due to the way we are educated, some of us become so unaware of perspectives underlying words, concepts, notions. Because of this human condition, we need to examine and decode the perspectives of others expressed by (often confused) words when we talk to people without any notion of Perspective Logic. With some practice, we can guess underlying perspectives of others, including the perspectives in the sub/unconscious region of other people. However, exposing these subconscious perspectives to them would often cause emotional reactions simply because they were hidden in the subconscious region so that they don't have to see. :D So, you are advised to be careful in explaining things to others if you want to keep the situation "cool".
In other words, to practice Perspective Logic, you may have to examine and decode your own thought and face things you may not want to see. Otherwise, you can't be aware of your perspective and thus you would remain ignorant of your own mental activity and composition. Although it's pretty normal for a human to live and die without being very aware, it can be frustrating because you may not know what you are really thinking. hoping, and especially desiring. It should be very easy to understand the difficulty one would face in satisfying oneself when s/he doesn't clearly know what s/he want. :D Perspective Logic can clarify things like our own desire and thus it can contribute to better overall satisfaction, by paying the price of facing things we may not want to see.
If we have only one focus, we cannot evaluate it in any way. We can simply be aware of it. For example, when we focus on only an apple, we evaluate if it's big, heavy, etc. We need to have the secondary focus such as another apple to compare the common property like size and then we an evaluate it to be bigger than the other one.
There are a bit (or a lot) more on this, but i think it's enough for now.