Rubbish. Aristotle was a chump.

Have you seen modern thought lately? I sat on the train yesterday and both the woman next to me and the guy on the seat across the aisle from me were reading about Angelina Jolie in the MX and were, no doubt, only moments away from drooling and moaning. One of them had presumably just got some clever person to tie their shoelaces for them.

This is clearly Aristotle's fault because his three main laws of logic are stated as:

1. A is A — an apple is an apple
2. Everything is either A or not-A — it is either an apple or not an apple
3. Something cannot be both A and not-A — you can presumably plug in your apples yourself by now.

Now this was fine for Aristotle back in his day. But we have new shit now. Heaps of things are both A and not-A. Is that light a wave or is it a particle? Well, it depends on how you measure it, I guess. Is that house painted green or brown? Well, it's a sort of greeny-brown isn't it? Do you like living next to a train station? Well, I like it because it's handy having public transport so close but I don't like it because I end up with MX readers gibbering incoherently all over the footpath.

If you feel like a bit of light reading for your own trips on trains pull out your copies of Descartes and Einstein. You will read that there is more to life than either-or. We have points of view, we have fuzzy logic, we have nuances, we have imperfect perceptions.

Light bouncing off an object goes in all directions. That which hits your eye reacts with cells causing a chemical reaction that triggers an electric response that travels along the optic nerve to the primary visual centres of the brain. Then the brain constructs a model that represents the object that the eye is looking at. And then it puts a label on it: a blue teacup. All these processes are at various levels of abstraction and if we forget that then we start living in a bizarre dreamworld where our assumptions start ruling our lives and we end up reading MX to keep up.

Either-or thinking is one old-fashioned way of thinking; another is the verb ‘to be’ which I have already used twice this paragraph. The use of that verb in the language sets up an Aristotelian identity — an A is A kind of thing — in your abstractions that may not need to be there. The teacup is a cup (‘is’ joins a noun to a noun). This particular teacup has angles, six panels, a delicate handle, a pleasing curve as it widens from the base, thin walls but a substantial weight and it has a great many other qualities denied by the identification of it with a mere ‘cup.’ The teacup is blue (joining a noun to an adjective). This seems to make its blueness some sort of integral essence of the teacup as though they were one and the same thing. No, the teacup appears a soothing light-blue colour to me.

Suspect the verb ‘to be.’ Watch it closely. If you were to cut this word out of your vocabulary you would find your entire perception change. Items you perceive are not lumped together under categories that deprive them of all detail. You would begin to notice things for what they actually are. You would become more conscious of the assumptions you make from the abstractions you have of the world about you.

But you won't drop this word from your vocabulary — certainly not from reading this badly edited ramble. I haven't and I wrote it. But still I find it interesting to think that this one word has so much power.

So, yes. Aristotle's three laws of logic? Bollocks. If Aristotle were alive today he would surely revise them. But then again, maybe not: he was a chump. He'd probably just be reading MX.

¶ 3:40 pm