Emergencies

EMERGENCIES

In an emergency we have to make a rapid decision one way or another. There will be no point making a more logical one if we are flattened by an oncoming truck before we can finish doing the logical deductions. This doesn’t mean you should do something that goes against logic.

If there is a fire you will, I hope, have an instinctive reaction “I must get out!” If this is an instantaneous instinctive reaction, it probably wasn’t exactly processed logically. But it isn’t illogical either. We could at a stretch express this as a series of logical deductions from

A: There is a fire.

to

X: I must get out.

It might go like this:

A is true (there is a fire). A implies X (If there is a fire I must get out) Therefore X (I must get out) by modus ponens.

Unfortunate stereotypes about mathematicians aside, I can’t really imagine anyone being pedantic enough to run from a fire shouting “Modus Ponens!”

I can, however, imagine explaining to a child why it is important to escape from a fire. Maybe the child doesn’t understand fire yet, so you might have to insert another level of explanation:

Let A = There is a fire. Let B = I stay here. Let C = I burn.

Then we have:

A is true. A and B implies C. C implies bad. Therefore I must make sure B is false, i.e. I must get out.

Expressing that in logical terms is a bit over the top but it does show in what way escaping a fire is logical deep down, even if you don’t go through those logical steps each time to come to the conclusion, because you have internalised them.

On the other hand I think we can all agree that this would not be a logical deduction:

There is a fire. I will stay here.

Sometimes something starts logical and then by repetition we embed it somewhere deeper in our consciousness so that we can access it more quickly than by logical thought processes. (This is a bit like embedding foreign language verbs into our consciousness by using them, rather than just learning to conjugate them using the rules.) I would say that the conclusion is logical even though we haven’t accessed it by entirely logical means.

There seems to be a process by which something logical gets embedded so deeply in our feelings that we then access it by feelings rather than by logic, but if we really needed to explain the logic of it we should be able to turn it back into a logical explanation. Accessing things by feelings is often faster than accessing them by logic, which is why I think one way to become powerfully logical is to convert logic into feelings, just like when you can find your way around a city just by feelings or instinct, without necessarily being able to draw a map or give someone else directions.