Strength of Belief

Today, at LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com), which is a social networking system that we respect this far, we got this discussion, which looked pretty much uninspiring, on strength of belief (History and Philosophy of Science, Is there a way of measuring how strongly one believes in something? - started by Don Wade on the 02/10/13), finally bringing some ideas that we could be interested in.

We think that these thoughts, of strength of belief, started arriving at our minds because of Fuzzy Logic, which is a logical system started by Prof. Dr. Zadeh (http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~zadeh/)  long time ago (yet recently, if we consider the history of Science, or even the history of Logic).

Dr. Prof. Graham Priest cared a lot about this thing when we were studying with him (2000, University of Queensland).

He cared so much that he coerced us to include Fuzzy Logic (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-fuzzy/) in our talk at the Newcastle University (http://www.newcastle.edu.au/, 2000, A Solution to The Sorites Paradox, http://www.degruyter.com/abstract/j/semi.2006.2006.issue-160/sem.2006.053/sem.2006.053.xml?rskey=Tl3tg8&result=2. We do apologize for the poor revision of this article in terms of the English language. Please compare it with the last articles, published with E-Logos, and share our sadness regarding that, but also rejoice on the findings). This talk was about a solution that we had judged definite. Actually, Prof.  Dr. Hyde also believed that we had solved The Sorites in that 2000 (http://www.uq.edu.au/hprc/dr-dominic-hyde), and he is regarded as an expert on this problem.

We then did that, but our oppositions to mathematizing language are never ending… .

Basically, we must understand that language is there to try to make the other person, that with whom we communicate, see, in their own head, what we see in ours when we make efforts to communicate with them. 

We say that because we do not believe we ever truly communicate.

People who believe in Fuzzy Logic, the pure thing, not the applied concept, used in air-conditioning (http://www.simplecodeworks.com/KSCO/book/chapter7.htm), for instance, and the concept was applied thanks to an Engineer who listened to Zadeh once, believe that we communicate for real all the time instead, basically.

Trivially, were that ever true, we would be able to get some mathematical function describing the processes of human communication to perfection.

The reasons why we do not really communicate are never ending, and are also quite obvious.

First of all, communication is not a process that starts in our mouth or hands: Communication starts inside of us, or even outside, perhaps through spiritual processes, through what some people who some call spiritists have called calls from beyond.

We may be anthropocentric and then believe that all is controlled and generated by human beings.

In this case, we will certainly believe that we can control all more times than we will believe that we cannot control at least part of it.

We may also be geocentric and believe that The Globe commands all through electric discharge processes, for instance.

In this case, we would not strongly believe that we can control the communication process between human beings.

The difference then, in terms of theories, starts with ourselves, like with what we believe inside of ourselves about our own existence: Are we on top of all that happens to us or we are at least sometimes victim or passive agent?

To try to exhaust all the ways that lead to Graham Priest, we will then take his side in the story, as for 2000, personal conversations: We can do it!

Events of our life, in terms of communication, are then all anthropocentric.

Things will fall to land quite easily on this first move, but we will pretend that they do not in order to keep on going.

If we manage all processes of ours of communication, we may assume that at least one other human being also does.

In this case, communication may happen without any noise and the words can transmit perfectly well the original idea, that that we had in our own heads before making efforts to communicate.

Things being this way, we can definitely mathematically measure our discourse, provided we divide it adequately (paragraph, sentence, word or whatever we think will work).

We can measure, for instance, the strength of universal belief that one gives to our utterances, or even of personal belief.

This way, if Hamish, who we are extremely fond of in 2013 and 2014, says I love you, we could have a personal belief of, say, 20% that he does, perhaps based on his decisions regarding our practical life, like based on the why he would not stop crime against us and other practical factors that, in a logical head, would measure how much that could be true.

We believe that we have never been so fond of someone that we could touch physically because, for instance, we have swapped syllables whilst speaking to him face-to-face for the first time in our life, what then gives us a strength of 100% of belief, as for ourselves, in our utterance We are extremely fond of Hamish, from Adelaide.

Now, first of all, in the world of Graham Priest and Lofti Zadeh, obviously amongst plenty of others, we have some Mathematics that can be attached to our discourse.

With Science, we are then after a universal agreement on a factor that describes that strength and, only if that is not possible, do we go for theories, probably on the hope of approaching the truth by either upper or lower bounds, so that through refinement we get there (all extremely mathematical).

Now, let’s come back to our real life example, since communication, not language per se, which may even be cold and scientific, does involve human beings (so far, at least whilst Marcia R. Pinheiro is alive, like this is what we, Marcia R. Pinheiro, know for sure).

Well, does Hamish love us with a rate of 100% of absence of doubts or he loves us with a rate of 99.2% (or even of 20%, our own belief or what we believe to be our belief) instead?

Once more, and we beg the reader of this blog (is there any?) to also read our solution to The Liar, published with the so prestigious vehicle E-Logos, there are several complexities (that are usually unexpected) in the human world (which are obviously not found in the world of the symbols, or the semiotic world, as we will call it from now onwards). For instance, how much can we evaluate ourselves and under what conditions is that to be believed?

It is widely known, for instance, that a depressed human being will underestimate everything that could be positive in their lives, so that there would be (how much per cent?) a reduction that should be considered if we judge that we are depressed, for instance, as we evaluate Hamish’s feelings for us.

On the other hand, how much Hamish himself believed his assertion by the time he said it?

He could be saying that just to keep us going if we are suffering extraordinary crime for long, for instance, and really do not have reasons to keep on trying.

In this case, Hamish would know, internally, that he did not mean it, but we could believe that he meant that with all our soul because he put so much effort into convincing us of that that we took it for granted. In this hypothesis, he would have done that out of generosity, not out of the truth of his heart or soul.

We then start seeing that there is a never-ending universe of mathematicalities that has to be considered, even if we are insane enough to believe that communication is something that we could be mathematizing in what comes to human beings.

We obviously cannot translate human actions, and communication does involve those, into any sort of Cartesian Mathematics. 

Then, the most skeptical of the humans would say that we should go for the non-Cartesian Mathematics, and that is definitely what our friend, Prof. Dr. Graham Priest, has done: He said that we should actually change Mathematics, and that is obviously the reason why he joined the non-classicists (those who want to pervert Classical Logic, the logical system that forms the foundations of Mathematics).

Would that not be the same Graham Priest that defied Combinatorics in public when presenting the 3-door puzzle we talked about in our other post?

Surely it was!

Prof. Dr. Graham Priest should understand however that any logical system is a computer model, therefore cannot translate purely human actions, such as communication, to perfection. In fact, not even to imperfection: It cannot deal with them at all.

Even if we decided for an alternative system of measurement, and a person in LinkedIn has inspired us on this one (someone who identified themselves through the name DhanshDhai Misra and a picture but actually does not appear in LinkedIn officially and Master Eric Wasilek), say things we all believe for sure, such as it being impossible that we see stronger beliefs in humans than those of the suicide-bombers, and we used those as a reference (say we created a new ruler, a virtual one, where suicide-bomber's strength would be read, say on the last smallest piece that can be used to measure things in that ruler), we would still have problems on how to rank everything else, and that is just obvious.

This way, even when using a more human-friendly system, made of pictures, which should form our most primitive thought processes (but we ourselves believe in what we call divine inspiration, so that the most basic processes would actually be those appearing before the image), like the one we have just mentioned, the one involving the suicide-bomber, we would have to reach the conclusion that it is impossible to measure human discourse when it is found attached to human perception.

Each one of us, just for starters, would rate the strength of Hamish’s assertions differently.

It really does not matter what processes of decision we choose, say voting, as we would end up getting to in democracy: It is all deemed to be inaccurate and ultra personal, quite trivially, like it all will depend always on the nature of the group under consideration (who judges), for instance, to the least.

If we keep on going in the skeptical line and then say that it is possible to reach a universal consensus about Hamish’s assertions because, for instance, whenever we have democracy, and we put to the vote, everyone agrees that human rights are the most important thing on earth, we will unavoidably reach a limiting line that will form a gap between whatever we write and reality.

That is all obvious.

Even if we were inside of Hamish, say Hamish were bugged in his head, to the top of his spinal cord (from where we believe/know we can access things to best in what regards our bodies), we could absolutely never measure this type of thing accurately.

Why?

Well, not even Hamish can do that, and Hamish is only Hamish, like with certainty, one hundred per cent, if he is not bugged, so that bugging Hamish is creating Hamish’ and analyzing a situation that is not the situation that has been originally proposed to us, therefore is not analyzing or solving the original problem.

Also, with Hamish bugged, we are still not sure, even if we believed that Hamish=Hamish’, and we are sure that Priest would push us to accept this move, that what we see is what we get. Hamish, to the least, might have been influenced, assuming the materialistic position (all we are is matter), by images that he receives his entire life before that moment, so that he actually does not love us, but he loves, for instance, his best friend from childhood, who, by accidental processes, resembles us, say because of our voice, touch or whatever else.

In this case, so assuming that the love for the childhood friend is the actual truth, if we all watch Hamish from inside, believe that Hamish = Hamish’,  and then measure - this believing that we can do that - mathematically the strength of his assertion, finally ranking it as maximum, 100%, or equal to that of the suicide-bomber's, we are obviously committing a horrible scientific mistake.

Basically, Hamish had spent his entire childhood with that female who happened to have something in common with our figure, and his subliminal processes made him associate nurturing, care, and love with us, what then made him come back to the feelings that he used to have for that female ages ago.

In this scenario, Hamish's assertion is not to be believed at all (0%). 

Yet, all in all, why does this matter, like why would any of this ever bring progress to Science? This is about beliefs, not facts. 

It could be useful to us in decision-making if we knew that everything that Hamish says has, for instance, a strength of 20% in terms of universal belief because we have studied the facts of Hamish's life and we have determined that all he says relates to the facts of his life this way. 

Notice, however, that this is a percentage, not an absolute thing, so that we actually have nothing to help us decide. We could go Statistics, however, and use their tools to make a better decision in case that were possible.

We know that this is not possible. Hopefully, the readers of our blog agree with us by now.

All that means is that not mattering what Dr. Prof. Graham Priest comes up with, nothing that has a chance of being purely human, therefore nothing that escapes the computer world by any evaluation of lambda, may be perfectly dealt with by Mathematics, or Logic, per se.