I will just point out that a photon being a wave and a particle is not logically equivalent to a photon both being and not being a particle, because it being a wave does not logically rule out its also being a particle. — Janus

TMK, a particle is localized thing with volume, density, and mass. Whereas a wave function is not. So a wave function is not a particle. And hence the term "wave-particle duality". Am I missing out on something?

To corroborate my current understanding:

As Albert Einstein wrote:[1]

It seems as though we must use sometimes the one theory and sometimes the other, while at times we may use either. We are faced with a new kind of difficulty. We have two contradictory pictures of reality; separately neither of them fully explains the phenomena of light, but together they do. — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave%E2%80%93particle_duality

edit: I get that a photon is considered massless. But wave-particle duality applies to mass endowed particles just as well. It even applies to some small molecules.

My impression is that we are talking about entirely different things. For what it's worth I don't think philosophical argumentation wherein people pit their worldviews against one another is a particularly useful part of philosophy. All I'm addressing is,if you want to engage in such debates, then your argument better not contradict itself, or it won't be taken seriously or be of any use to anyone.

I can imagine arguing that contradictions get weeded out because they're inherently useless, being necessarily false, but I doubt even that's right. We often have good reason to believe both sides of a story, so we keep our options open, and for a while they live side by side. So what? — Srap Tasmaner

But you are also saying that you cannot imagine arguing that contradictions get weeded out because they are inherently useful, being necessarily true, and that you doubt that even that's right. And you are also saying that we never have good reason to believe both sides of a story, so we don't keep our options open, and they never live side by side, right?

So what?

TMK, a particle is localized thing with volume, density, and mass. Whereas a wave function is not. So a wave function is not a particle. And hence the term "wave-particle duality". Am I missing out on something? — javra

No, a wave function is not a particle, but light can (supposedly) be both wave and particle, and if that is correct it cannot be a contradiction, because it is not a proposition but an actuality. In any case it is not analytically contradictory to say that light or an electron can manifest as both wave and particle. It would be a contradiction to say that a wave is a particle, but that is not what is being claimed AFAIK.

In short, I don't agree with Einstein's assessment because if it is true that light really is both a wave and a particle, then the difficulty is not that that is a contradiction, but that due to our lack of some relevant understanding it is merely the case that it might appear to be a contradiction.

If reality could be logically contradictory, then it would be so much the worse for logic and all of our purported knowledge.

In short, I don't agree with Einstein's assessment because if it is true that light really is both a wave and a particle, then the difficulty is not that that is a contradiction, but that due to our lack of some relevant understanding it is merely the case that it might appear to be a contradiction. — Janus

Remember, these are models of the quantum realm, models that have a very high degree of predictive value, but models just the same. In Einstein's quote, he doesn't say that reality is contradictory but that we have contradictory pictures of reality. This makes a world of difference in what is affirmed by him.

Remember, these are models of the quantum realm, models that have a very high degree of predictive value, but models just the same. In Einstein's quote, he doesn't say that reality is contradictory but that we have contradictory pictures of reality. This makes a world of difference in what is affirmed by him. — javra

Right, I get that, but I still don't see why something manifesting as both particle and wave is logically contradictory. The laws of nature changing every few seconds would not be logically contradictory. If we think that light manifesting as a wave is equivalent to it not possibly being at the same a particle, then that would make it seem contradictory, but I don't see how it would logically follow that something manifesting a wave entails that it cannot also be a particle. The thinking seems to be that it cannot be both, that it must be one of the other, but its being both is not logically contradictory or impossible. Is it physically impossible (which would be a different thing to its being logically impossible)? I don't see any reason to think that something could be logically possible and yet physically impossible. Could the obverse obtain?

In any case all of this is kind of a red herring given the subject of discussion was concerning self-contradictory argumentation.

My impression is that we are talking about entirely different things. — Janus

We are, yes, absolutely. I'm just kind of curious to see how it goes.

All I'm addressing is, if you want to engage in such debates, then your argument better not contradict itself, or it won't be taken seriously or be of any use to anyone. — Janus

Maybe. I think @Isaac would agree with that -- rules of the game we play here.

If there is such a convention, I could certainly choose to follow it, and that might be worthwhile, depending on what I get out of playing the game. That would leave a couple questions: (1) is it anything more than a convention -- a law of the universe, say? (2) if it is a convention, does it have a purpose and if so what?

(1) I'm just going to ignore, but (2) is exactly what I'm interested in.

You've suggested a couple times that if I contradict myself, you can't tell what I'm advocating. Let's say that's true. If I contradict myself, there's no clear response for you -- at least agreeing or disagreeing with me don't seem to be options, but you can still call me out for breaking the rules, and you can indicate you don't intend to break the rules yourself. So that's a cost you willingly incur, making the effort not to contradict yourself, and that should count for something, a bona fide of your intention to engage seriously. Someone who breaks the rules has refused to ante up, and is not taken seriously. Everyone agreeing to incur some cost, to put in a modicum of effort, builds trust. That's clear enough.

If there's a cost to not contradicting yourself, if it takes effort, then we must be sorely tempted to contradict ourselves, must be on the verge of doing so regularly, and that doesn't sound right. I don't expect people to hold consistent beliefs, but direct self-contradiction is still pretty rare -- it's like we don't have an introduction rule for 'P & ~P', just not the sort of sentence we generate except by accident. (If there are contradictions or inconsistencies, they're generally more subtle. I searched the site for accusations of self contradiction, and, as you can imagine, the accused party universally denies that they have done so, and then there's a back and forth about whether what they said really is a contradiction or not. It's never dead obvious like 'P & ~P'.)

I mean, maybe the cost story holds up even if the cost is minimal -- it's the thought that counts -- or maybe it works better as a package, agreeing to something nearly amounting to all of classical logic and some induction and some probability and on and on. Now we're talking quite a bit of effort.

But is there something else? Some reason for this rule in particular? Do I have a motivation to make sure you have clear options of agreeing or disagreeing with me? I might, if we're choosing sides. Might just be politics. Anything else? There is the standard analogy of assertion as a bet -- you look at the odds but then you have to actually pick what to bet on to stand a chance of winning anything. (Cover the board and you'll tend to break even.) Do I have a motivation to gamble in our discussion? Do I stand to win anything by picking one of the two sides I have evidence for? Maybe, if it makes your response more useful to me. If I have evidence for both sides of an issue, it might not even matter which side I pick, so long as I can elicit from you more support for one side or the other, by giving you the opportunity to argue against me, or add your reasons for agreeing.

So that's two arguments for a strategy of respecting the LNC: (1) especially when taken together with other conventions of discussion, it represents a cost incurred by participants, which builds trust; (2) it's an efficient strategy for eliciting responses useful for updating your own views. (The latter is the sort of thing apo mentions regularly, the need for crispness, all that.)

Good enough for now, I guess. I'm still mulling it over.

All I'm addressing is, if you want to engage in such debates, then your argument better not contradict itself, or it won't be taken seriously or be of any use to anyone. — Janus


Maybe. I think Isaac would agree with that -- rules of the game we play here. — Srap Tasmaner

Partially, yes. I'd take issue with @Janus's use of "taken seriously", and "be of any use to anyone". Both of these responses are both possible and regularly seen consequent to arguments which are self-contradictory. So the claim is just not true on it's face. People do take contradictory arguments seriously and many find them useful - presumably. As you say...

the accused party universally denies that they have done so, and then there's a back and forth about whether what they said really is a contradiction or not. — Srap Tasmaner

... so we can safely assume that, in posting, they take this self-contradictory argument seriously (let's assume the interlocutor is right here), and we can (less safely perhaps) assume they find it useful.

An attempt not to self-contradict, is part of the rules, and that, I think, is why we don't even have a grammar covering "P and ~P", it fails off the bat. But beyond that, actual self-contradiction doesn't seem to be much of a problem because up until the point it's 'uncovered' things seemed to be going along perfectly well for the party holding that belief set.

Which raises the question of what the importance of the LNC actually is, apart from as a rule in a game.

If it's to give us better belief sets (where 'better' here could be any measure for now), then we're putting the cart before the horse in our argumentation methodology, we should be saying "look how successful my belief sets are - that proves they cannot be self-contradictory", forget logic - point and counter-point should be various successes and failures in our personal lives!

But we don't. We think it the other way round, we think that one ought hold a belief set which adheres to these argumentative rules regardless of whether it's useful or not. As if there were some nobility to doing so. Perhaps we'll be rewarded by God...?

But, as you said earlier (I've been reading along), the reality of our thought doesn't adhere to these argumentative rules anyway. We are only capable of thinking A then ~A, we are never capable of thinking A and ~A, but not because of logical contradiction - rather because of a physical limit on the construction of propositional thoughts. We can't think A and B either, only A then B.

So where does that leave argument? It can point to a contradiction which a) isn't ever really there in our thoughts, and b) is claiming a flaw which can more easily be demonstrated than argued anyway and if not demonstrable, doesn't seem to be a problem.

So the claim is just not true on it's face. People do take contradictory arguments seriously and many find them useful - presumably. — Isaac

I would say that is true only when it is not realized that the arguments are contradictory, unless you can offer a counterexample.

If it is only true in cases where the contradictoriness of the argument is not recognized, then it has no bearing on what I've been arguing.

This all seems fine on a cursory reading. So, I won't respond further until I find time to think on it some more.

If it's to give us better belief sets (where 'better' here could be any measure for now), then we're putting the cart before the horse in our argumentation methodology, we should be saying "look how successful my belief sets are - that proves they cannot be self-contradictory", forget logic - point and counter-point should be various successes and failures in our personal lives!

But we don't. We think it the other way round, we think that one ought hold a belief set which adheres to these argumentative rules regardless of whether it's useful or not. As if there were some nobility to doing so. Perhaps we'll be rewarded by God...? — Isaac

This is the main thing I'm trying to get past. I think there's a typical assumption that our beliefs have a clear logical structure and if an inconsistency has snuck in then your beliefs are in a sort of defective state, you'll make worser predictions, and you'll end up mistakenly drinking bleach. Or at any rate, false beliefs get weeded out through contact with the real world, leaving behind true ones you can safely make sound inferences from. That kind of model. Representational, computational, and rational.

Certainly some chunks of our beliefs look to us like they were stitched together with some care, and some don't, but I'm not convinced that whatever consistency, whatever structure there is is there by choice. Even before "AI" became something people said everyday, there was talk of evolutionary algorithms at places like Facebook and Google, so complicated that none of their engineers understand them. I assume something a lot like that is true of our beliefs. There's probably something identifiable as structure in there but it's nothing at all like the two column proofs you learned in school and it's inconceivably more complicated. That's my guess anyway. The occasional dumbed down summaries of what's going on in there are what we call reasons and arguments.

That still leaves room for an account of reason as a social practice rather than, I guess, a cognitive faculty.

Is this roughly where you are?

I think Kahneman's view is that we can learn how to intervene in our own thinking process, correct our misguided intuitions using logic and math, and over time thus improve our habits of thought. I'd like to believe that...

This all seems fine on a cursory reading. — Janus

But it's also whacko. I'm surprised you're nonplussed, but cheers.

Is this roughly where you are? — Srap Tasmaner

Yes. Roughly.

I tend to frame the effect of reason in terms effects on our priors, so reasoning is still post hoc, but has an effect. Basically, if the process of reasoning (which is effectively predictive modeling of our own thinking process), flags up a part of the process that doesn't fit the narrative, it'll send suppressive constraints down to that part to filter out the 'crazy' answers that don't fit.

But all this is after the first crazy thought.

What I'm convinced doesn't happen (contrary to Kahneman, I think - long time since I've read him) is any cognitive hacking in real time. I can see how it might cash out like that on a human scale (one decision at a time), but at a deeper neurological scale, my commitments to an active inference model of cognition don't allow for such an intervention. We only get to improve for next time.

I tend to frame the effect of reason in terms effects on our priors, so reasoning is still post hoc, but has an effect. Basically, if the process of reasoning (which is effectively predictive modeling of our own thinking process), flags up a part of the process that doesn't fit the narrative, it'll send suppressive constraints down to that part to filter out the 'crazy' answers that don't fit. — Isaac

:up:

I'd likely have said "intuitions" rather than "priors" but there is a lot of overlap at the very least.

What I'm convinced doesn't happen (contrary to Kahneman, I think - long time since I've read him) is any cognitive hacking in real time. I can see how it might cash out like that on a human scale (one decision at a time), but at a deeper neurological scale, my commitments to an active inference model of cognition don't allow for such an intervention. We only get to improve for next time. — Isaac

I don't recall getting such an impression from Kahneman, but because Kahneman seems to have come to his conclusions from a more psychological than neurpsychological direction I wouldn't be too surprised if he made such a mistake.

In any case, I very much agree that shifting our fast thinking (or deep learning) generally takes a substantial amount of time. Though there can be sudden epiphanies, where a new paradigm 'snaps into focus', the subconscious development of the intuitions underlying the new paradigm may have been taking place over the course of many years.

What I'm convinced doesn't happen (contrary to Kahneman, I think - long time since I've read him) is any cognitive hacking in real time — Isaac

I don't recall getting such an impression from Kahneman — wonderer1

It's probably me misremembering or misunderstanding, and I'll look again. Mercier & Sperber mention in the introduction to Enigma of Reason that their model is different from Kahneman's in not really having two different types of reasoning process.

I do remember feeling back when I was reading TFS (which, full disclosure, I didn't get all the way through) that the thrust of it was that we reason logically less than we think we do, but we can make an effort to notice when a bias has crept in and respond. (Remember the little self-help sections at the end of the chapters? "Gosh, maybe I'm letting system 1 get its way here, and I should slow down, have a system-2 look at this." To which my response was always that I already spend a hell of a lot of time in system 2, so, you know, "does not apply" boss.) If that's so, logic is still a system of rules for getting better -- meaning, more likely to be true -- answers and its status is still unexplained.

I'll just go look at the book, but another general impression I got from the book is that we rely on system 1 so long as it works well enough, but system 2 is there for when things go wrong, and the response to surprise is that the slow, careful process takes over, and it has different rules, actually looks at the evidence, makes properly logical inferences, and so on. Which, again, leaves what logic itself is and why it works unexplained.

But I'll go look.

Basically, if the process of reasoning (which is effectively predictive modeling of our own thinking process), flags up a part of the process that doesn't fit the narrative, it'll send suppressive constraints down to that part to filter out the 'crazy' answers that don't fit. — Isaac

Corrective rather than constructive, and the consistency being enforced is that of the narrative your current model is organized around, rather than "the way the world really is" or something.

Some of that seems almost obviously true, but here's what still bothers me: if logic is a system of constraints that enforce (or, as here, restore) consistency, even if that consistency is with something like a narrative arrived at by other means, that still leaves logic as a set of universal, minimal constraints that everybody ends up following. Our narratives may be handmade and idiosyncratic, but unless the consistency I enforce (with that narrative) is also handmade and idiosyncratic, logic is still universal.

We don't have to go straight there. One of the things @Joshs talks about is paradigm or culture as the constraints on what counts as evidence. You could see something like that operating at the layer we were describing here as the corrective constraints. The next level up from your narrative might be this cultural layer that enforces a specific sort of consistency that would be different in another culture or under another paradigm. That's plausible. And there could be any number of layers, a hierarchy of constraints, variously idiosyncratic or cultural or community-driven, or even species-specific. But it seems like that pattern points to a minimal set at the top that looks a lot like logic, which annoys me if there's no explanation for where that set of constraints came from.

If, on the other hand, the most general constraint level is constructed by successively generalizing from the lower layers, whatever they may be, then that sounds a bit like the story I was hoping to tell about logic emerging from our practices rather than pre-existing them. Once in place, of course they can cascade (selectively) back down through the hierarchy to constrain our belief formation and so on, so they play that normative role of something we strive to conform to, but we're striving to conform to rules we ourselves have made and can take a hand in remaking and revising. All that's needed is a mechanism for generalizing and some motivation to undertake such a project. (And I swear to god this sounds almost like the old empiricist theory of generalizing from experience.) It is still a little uncomfortable for us to be converging on very, very similar top-level constraints, but maybe it shouldn't be.

One thing I haven't paid much attention to yet is that logic, like language, needs to be usable while it's being built. You can generalize a new higher level constraint and begin cascading that back down as soon as you build it -- and handling some specific case immediately is probably why you've built it, though it might take like forever before you get around to enforcing that constraint everywhere -- it's more of an as-needed, just-in-time thing.

There's also some question about whether the constraints at any given level are consistent with each other. Could very well not be and that could go on until some major failure forces you to add a new level with a rule for sorting that out. And if it comes to that, this might really be a hierarchy only in the sense that it has a kind of directed graph structure where two nodes may not have a parent (only children) until there's a conflict and a parent node is created to settle that conflict.

We're not a million miles away from Quine's web of beliefs, but he tended to talk in terms of a core area of the most abstract rules like logic, and a periphery that is the most exposed to experience. And he continually waffled on whether the rules of logic at the core were subject to revision.

Is this all just empty model spinning, or does it sound reasonable? @Janus? @wonderer1

Corrective rather than constructive, and the consistency being enforced is that of the narrative your current model is organized around, rather than "the way the world really is" or something. — Srap Tasmaner

For me at work, it is often a matter of a 'picture' rather than a narrative, and I am trying to bring my mental image of how an electronic gizmo works into better compliance with how thing work in the world. If my mental image is out of compliance with the way things actually work in the world, the world may well inform me of this with flames, puffs of smoke, or minor explosions. (Although more typical is that the circuit just doesn't work as expected.)

That said, I agree with most of what you said, inasmuch as I am interpreting it correctly.

Corrective rather than constructive, and the consistency being enforced is that of the narrative your current model is organized around, rather than "the way the world really is" or something. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, that's the idea. Our lower order modelling cortices spit out all sorts of junk all the time, white noise random synapse firing, and it's all filtered out by the same mechanism, which is a higher order model saying "that doesn't sound very likely - it's not what I'm expecting". So it's all corrective to expectations until something breaks, the noise overwhelms the suppressive feedback (literally overwhelms, as in more signals), or as wonderer put it...

there can be sudden epiphanies, where a new paradigm 'snaps into focus' — wonderer1

...then the higher order model is expecting the noise (or what was noise) and starts suppressing anything which isn't it.

Some of that seems almost obviously true — Srap Tasmaner

Hey! A lot of hard work went into that!

unless the consistency I enforce (with that narrative) is also handmade and idiosyncratic, logic is still universal.

We don't have to go straight there. One of the things Joshs talks about is paradigm or culture as the constraints on what counts as evidence. You could see something like that operating at the layer we were describing here as the corrective constraints. — Srap Tasmaner

That's right. I've talked before about narratives being 'picked off the shelf' from the available narratives. Not that we can't make up our own, it's just easier to pick the available ones (less chance of surprise). Logic is just one such narrative model of how our various mid level cortices put data together and churn out belief states (tendencies to act as if). In fact I think Logic is even too broad to be a single narrative, it's more like a collection. I don't think we ever literally apply the rules, it's more a general feel for what might not work if we looked at it too hard.

That said, I don think there's scope for some hard-wired suppressive feedback models. There's evidence from infant studies of a few such mechanisms for basic physics, so I don't see any reason why there shouldn't be any for logic, but I expect they'd be limited as the physics ones are and they'd seem far more useful to have the full set hardwired in.

we're striving to conform to rules we ourselves have made and can take a hand in remaking and revising. All that's needed is a mechanism for generalizing and some motivation to undertake such a project. (And I swear to god this sounds almost like the old empiricist theory of generalizing from experience.) — Srap Tasmaner

I think, if I'm honest, my gut feeling is that we've got the category 'logic' wrong. I get what you're pointing at here and I think it's right, we can generalise some of this from experience (the light is never both on and off, so data suggesting it is can be suppressed on the basis of empirical priors, not the law of non-contradiction). It's just that I think habits of thinking, ways we expect our systems to output results, are also cultural. I think the category 'logic' may be just too broad and in cognitive psychology terms isn't a 'natural kind' at all, but rather two (or three) completely separate processes, which involve both sensory data, and interoceptive modelling.

I think the category 'logic' may be just too broad and in cognitive psychology terms isn't a 'natural kind' at all, but rather two (or three) completely separate processes, which involve both sensory data, and interoceptive modelling. — Isaac

Okay, that's helpful. Toward the end I was starting to imagine an almost adhoc building up toward the general, generalizing just as much as you need to resolve a conflict. But it bothered me that once again I was starting to treat inference rules as premises, habits as beliefs.

I like this less abstract approach of considering what sorts of cognitive departments an organism might develop and then looking at what those could conceivably do and what that would look like. My whole approach in the last post was way way too abstract.

it is often a matter of a 'picture' rather than a narrative — wonderer1

I do think that's really important. (Sellars used to actually draw pictures in his typescripts and commented once that everybody uses images it's just that he leaves them in. One of his two most famous papers has the word "image" in the title and the other has "myth".) These days I almost always approach probability problems by imagining a rectangle and then carving up the total space into areas. Numbers are decoration. (Bonus anecdote: Feynman describes an elaborate visualization technique he used to figure out whether a conjecture in mathematics was true or false, game he used to play I think as a grad student talking to guys from the math department. If he got it wrong and they pointed out the condition he missed, he'd reply, "Oh, then it's trivial," which is incontestable when talking to mathematicians, kind of an "I win" card.)

Blah blah blah, I'm just so focused on linguistic and symbolic reasoning that it's hard to know what to do with visual reasoning, but if it's not obvious then I must be doing something wrong. This is probably me being too abstract again and it would be clearer if we considered how organisms like us rely on visual "input".

I don't think I posted this but I did a little introspective experiment last week where I looked at objects on the porch and out in the yard and imagined them moving. I developed some skill at that kind of visualization as a chess player, though I'm rusty now. The result was that I did not hallucinate the objects moving, there is no interruption of the visual stream, which still shows the lawnmower in the same place, but it "feels" like I'm seeing it move. It's like hypothetical movement does fire the extra "what this means" pathway but stays off the main "what I'm seeing pathway", almost like the reverse of Capgras delusion. When I coached young players I used to tell them to imagine the pieces very heavy when they calculate so they could more easily remember which square a piece was on in their imagination. Curious.

A chapter into Mercier and Sperber and the model is pretty exciting.

filtered out — Isaac

suppressive feedback — Isaac

This! I'm always forgetting how much of our mental processing is devoted to filtering. That's another point that makes my last post feel off.

Are you asking what arguments there could be for an ideal of justice that is not grounded on power? — Janus

The dialogue did not gloss over the central role of power. Whether the City is healthy or not as an individual soul is the ratio the gang of the powerful cannot answer for itself.

In any case all of this is kind of a red herring given the subject of discussion was concerning self-contradictory argumentation. — Janus

OK. Point taken. To then better address the issue you’re pursuing:

While I stand by the belief that the LNC is sound, it of itself is in no way prescriptive. If indeed sound, it is strictly descriptive of what is. So I so far don’t find that one can obtain an ought from the LNC.

That said, I’ll present the outline of an argument for why self-contradicting arguments are bad. First some simplistically expressed premises:

• Premise 1: The objective world is singular (hence, we don’t inhabit a world wherein two or more objective realities co-occur, if this is even possible to contemplate).
• Premise 2: This singular actuality, or reality, of the objective world we all partake of is itself coherently structured so as to comprise a unified whole. (This postulate can become complicated by the possibility of ontic randomness in part occurring in the world. But, even so, this random aspect of the cosmos would nevertheless here be an integral component of the unified whole which will interact with non-random aspects of the world so as to, again, result in a coherently structured, singular, objective reality.)
• Premise 3: The word “truth” references “conformity to that which is actual, i.e. real”.

I get that these premises can be debated and that they might be too simplistic in present format, but in here tentatively granting them all the same, the following then results. Truths will in such world never contradict; this because the singular and universal actuality, or reality, which truths conform to is itself coherently structured, hence consistent, hence noncontradictory. By comparison, an untruth will always be that which does not conform to what is actual and, because of this, two or more disparate untruths will always contradict each other – as well as contradicting that which with is actual.

Here, an expressed contradiction in one's reasoning will signify either that all but one of the contradicting parts do not conform to what is actual or that all the contradictory parts do not so conform. In short, a contradiction will here always entail a lack of conformity with what is actual.

Conversely, an argument that is devoid of self-contradiction then givens no indication of being untrue.

Further granting that what is sought is conformity with what is actual (that we seek what is true), then self-contradictions shall in this case always be bad due to always entailing untruths.

That said, there are other goals that individuals can pursue, some of which will find untruths and the resulting contradictions quite useful so as best fulfill said goals. As one example, we can tell untruths to a murderer so as safeguard a loved one. As a more unpleasant example, we would not be able to understand the psychology to Orwell’s 1984 (complete with the Ministry of Truth’s dictums of “War is Peace”, “Freedom is Slavery”, and “Ignorance is Strength”), nor find the story-line believable, were untruths to not be beneficial in sustaining autocratic power within everyday life.

This is a rough outline of a general perspective I hold. In summation, contradictions always evidence untruths. But whether untruths are good or bad will be fully dependent on the ends which one seeks to fulfill. (That said, none of the contradictions here expressed which result from untruths will themselves be the logical contradiction which the LNC states cannot occur - in so far as hypocrisy and doublethink can occur despite the LNC nevertheless holding.)

I like this less abstract approach of considering what sorts of cognitive departments an organism might develop and then looking at what those could conceivably do and what that would look like. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes. It gets complicated when we get into redundancy and duplication, but I don't think either need disrupt this project right now, it's still reasonable to say that the brain is hierarchical and that those hierarchies are based on physiology primarily.

I did not hallucinate the objects moving, there is no interruption of the visual stream, which still shows the lawnmower in the same place, but it "feels" like I'm seeing it move. It's like hypothetical movement does fire the extra "what this means" pathway but stays off the main "what I'm seeing pathway", almost like the reverse of Capgras delusion. — Srap Tasmaner

There was some work a little while back by Paul Allen at Kings reviewing data on hallucination in schizophrenia where he pointed to the regular importance in studies of the inhibitory networks (and even the actual neurotransmitters used to carry out these inhibitory functions). Even though the causes of schizophrenia seem to remain multiple, there is a trend toward a combination of hyperactivity on sensory processing regions, and lack of inhibitory function in the anterior cingulate and subcortical regions. Basically, all the stuff telling you that the visual pathway you stimulated by imagining the moving lawnmower was you doing it, not the outside world.

Back to filtering again... removing from the working memory of scene creation, the hypotheses about potential futures where they are just noise, like all the things you could say are just noise in the production of what you actually do say. We produce a lot of crap, it's a miracle of ruthless editing that anything sensible results at all.

Basically, all the stuff telling you that the visual pathway you stimulated by imagining the moving lawnmower was you doing it, not the outside world. — Isaac

So visualizing, imagining, hypothesizing, all that sort of thing, might be accomplished at least in part by inhibiting channels to an area involved in all sorts of practical issues (wiki says error detection, reward anticipation, decision making, on and on). That's extremely interesting.

it's still reasonable to say that the brain is hierarchical and that those hierarchies are based on physiology primarily. — Isaac

Nifty segue!