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Aristotle, Fuzzy Logic, and The Urantia Book
Ken Glasziou, Maleny, Australia
Faith that all things are either black or white reaches back in the West to at least the ancient Greeks when Democritus reduced the universe to atoms and void, Plato filled his world with pure forms, and Aristotle wrote down his rules of logic that scientists and mathematicians still use to describe and discuss what is essentially a gray universe. Aristotle taught us to always draw the line between opposites, between thing and not-thing. The better you draw these lines, the more logical your mind, and the more exact your science. Aristotle's binary logic reduces to one law--either A or not-A, either the sky is blue or not-blue, either a rose is red or not-red.
The Buddha died nearly one hundred years before Aristotle was born. He spent much of his life in formulating a belief system that penetrated the bivalent veil by thinking in terms of both A and not-A rather than either/or. His system persists to this day in the East, through Zen and Tao and its yin-yang emblem of opposites--both thing and not-thing. Now it bursts forth into the world of science and technology in computer and control systems based upon parallel processing using simulated neural networks that learn by experience.
In the West, the basic principle underlying these new developments has been labelled with the popular name, fuzzy logic (more formally, multivalent logic). Forward-looking thinkers predict that fuzzy logic will bring about revolutionary changes to the way we in the West think about our science, our technology, and our society in general.
The simplification that accompanies binary logic--either A or not-A--has had untold benefits, but at a price. It introduced the problem of over-simplification when it became a law rather than a guiding principle.
Some of our greatest thinkers in the West appreciated that a problem existed, but at the same time they tended to avoid facing up to the consequences. These may be particularly bad when we ignore the fact that binary logic does not describe reality. Einstein acknowledged that this is so in these words: "So far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain. And so far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality." Bertrand Russell put it this way, "All traditional logic habitually assumes precise symbols are being employed. It is therefor not applicable to this terrestrial life but only to an imagined celestial one." Hemmingway challenged the world to produce a single fact that is 100% true or 100% false. So far, no one has met the challenge. In spite of such reservations, the philosophy of logical positivism (that adheres closely to the "A or not-A" principle) has dominated scientific thinking during the twentieth century.
Logical positivism holds that if you cannot test or mathematically prove what you say, you have said nothing. Problems of God and metaphysics and goodness and value reduce to mere pseudo-problems. In the words of logical positivist, Moritz Schlick, "In the end, they (philosophers) will no longer be listened to. They will come to resemble actors who continue to play for some time before noticing that the audience has departed. Then it will no longer be necessary to speak of philosophical problems."
When fuzzy logic was introduced in the West it met with either ridicule or disdain. Fuzzy logic accepts that the black and white terminology of formal logic describes only the limiting values of facts, situations, and systems in which many of the examples are some shade of gray. In industrially developed nations of the East where the background philosophy was markedly influenced by Buddhism, the concept that realty is not at the edges but somewhere in the middle brought no clash with established thinking habits. However, this would probably have passed unnoticed if it had not been for the fact that their science and technology picked up the novel new system and developed it to the point that it can no longer be ignored.
In effect, systems that use fuzzy logic simulate the way our brains work. Whereas the digital computer works with a series of steps that are either on or off, our brain works with a network of interconnected neurones that function in parallel. In Japan, Taiwan, and Korea an enormous effort has been invested in the development of parallel processing computers that, when confronted with a task, are able to learn from experience in order to improve performance.
So what has this to do with The Urantia Book? The Revelators do not subscribe to our Western concept of black or white, true or false, A or not-A. The book tells us, "Truth is a living and flexible factor in the philosophy of the universe....That which apparently may be wholly true in one place may only be relatively true in another segment of creation." (42) "Truth is relative and expanding; it lives always in the present, achieving new expression in each generation of men--even in each human life." (888) "But when truth becomes linked with fact, then both time and space condition its meanings and correlate its values. Such realities of truth wedded to fact become concepts and are accordingly relegated to the domain of relative cosmic realities." (1297) "Static truth is dead truth, and only dead truth can be held as a theory. Living truth is dynamic and can enjoy only an experiential existence in the human mind." (1949)
Because of the habits of thinking in the Western world, it is virtually inevitable that our cultural heritage, based as it is upon Aristotelian logic, would incline our minds to interpret
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