Dark Logic?

My friend and colleague David Hanson (best known for his robotics work) has posited the speculative but fascinating concept of "dark logic" -- analogous to "dark matter" or "dark energy".

Dark logic, as I understand his concept, refers to chains of inference that occur outside the scope of the world of ordinary physics and ordinary states of consciousness -- but that still have an impact on our everyday world.

We can think of human ideas as coming from multiple possible sources, including conscious ratiocination, social "global brain" dynamics, and unconscious creative dynamics resident in our brains.  However, numerous people throughout history have emphatically pointed to an additional source -- which some call "divine inspiration",  the Vedanta call the "Realm of Bliss", etc.  (As Rimbaud said, the poet is the Thief of Fire...)

So dark logic, as I understand Hanson's conception, would be something like the actual logical operations underlying the operation of "the creative dynamic sometimes known as divine inspiration."    But much as James Carpenter's "First Sight" views psi as a generally unrecognized part of everyday life (positing that e.g. humans and animals use weak precognition to help navigate our everyday lives on a routine basis), Hanson views dark logic as an everyday ingredient of our reasoning, thinking and intuiting.

Much like Carpenter's "first sight", in ordinary situations dark logic exists around the edges of other kinds of thinking and interacting, contributing bits and pieces here and there.  And then in particular circumstances -- like Rimbaud's astounding poetic skinny-dips into the "other world," perhaps -- dark logic may become a dominant factor.


Conceptualizing Dark Logic in terms of Causal Arrows

Suppose we have an observer O1, and then another observer O.   The observer O1 may note some phenomenon P that O cannot observe.  In this case, P is "dark" to O (within the world of O1).

But what happens if P is part of a causal chain that begins and ends in O?  That is, what if we have A and B that are not dark to O, and causal arrows of the form

A --> P --> B

that are observable by O1?   Then we have an instance of dark logic, with respect to O's dynamics and O1's observation.

Where things get more interesting, from a human point of view, is where A and B are patterns in our spacetime continuum and P is outside our spacetime continuum (elsewhere in the eurycosm).   This might be called "eurycosmic dark logic"...

What kinds of "logic operations" are typical of eurycosmic dark logic causal chains involving human minds?  Good question!  But I have a lot of more urgent stuff to do today, so I'll address this in a later post in the series....

In cases of dark logic based creative inspiration, like Rimbaud's poetry, what we have are (eurycosmic?) dark-logical leaps that are dark to Rimbaud's ordinary everyday self, his "ordinary waking consciousness" and his normal psychosocial self-model.   But in the fire of inspiration, an expanded Rimbaud  exists ("temporarily", we would say, relative to our spacetime continuum), and then certain causal chains emerge in the mind of this expanded Rimbaud -- they are not dark to him.

This is a eurycosmic model of "inspiration as a transcendent phenomenon."  It is easiest to understand in the context of amazing feats of creative inspiration like A Season in Hell and Rimbaud's other great works.   Yet the same phenomenon may exist in all sorts of everyday instances of inspiration, even a small child playing creative mind-games with a stick or a toy car.


Classical vs. Quantum Dark Logic?

In light of the ideas presented in the "Quantum Logic for the Eurycosm?" post, it seems that dark logic reasoning should be treated as quantum-logical from the perspective of the observer to whom it is dark.

To an outside meta-observer, like O1 in the above formulation, on the other hand, the reasoning that is dark to O is not dark at all -- and thus to O1, the dark logic reasoning should be classical.

(Side-note for the pedantic: In the eurycosmic view, as in the relational interpretation of QM, the (reasoning chain A-->P-->B cannot really be viewed as the same chain in both O and O1's world.   But if we have "variants" of A-->P-->B in O and O1's world that are structurally analogous, it seems acceptable as an "abuse of notation" to consider them as both representing the equivalence class of events A-->P-->B. )