Arithmomorphic vs dialectical thinking

Are people kind or cruel? The best reply to this kind of question is simply to say it is not a good question, because the concepts kind and cruel are not arithmomorphic, but dialectical.

Don’t leave me, hang in a little longer. You may find this kind of thinking is not as painful as you expect, you may even find it interesting, in spite of the big words. I am now reading a heavy volume entitled The Entropy Law and the Economic Process by Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen. It is the perfect contrast to a novel I am listening to called The King of Torts, which I will review later.

When I scanned over Entropy Law, I was sure I made a mistake in buying it. It made my old brain tired just looking at it. Then I discovered, quite to my surprise, that it was quite readable. It’s never going to be a best seller, but it is considered a seminal work by some big brains. I will not dwell on the similarity between the words seminal and semen, but I don’t think I have to.

He starts off by saying: the boundaries of every science of fact are moving penumbras. And he contrasts this with pure logic where there are rigidly set and sharply drawn boundaries between symbols. We have ten fingers, for example, no one can argue with that. He calls these arithmomorphic concepts. Plato gets the credit for this type of thinking.

Hegel gets the credit for dialectical thinking, which is well-suited to dealing with things like good and evil, which have very fuzzy edges, and even worse, can sometimes be seen as one thing. But this logical inconsistency doesn’t make these concepts useless; it is actually part of their charm. The human mind has no trouble with them at all, and indeed cannot live without them.

And it has no trouble understanding the arithmomorphic world and the dialectical world at the same time. As you know, it ordinarily doesn’t bother to distinguish between them, which sometimes gets it into trouble. Consider the concept of democracy. This is not an arithmomorphic concept, and we can easily get into trouble by arguing that one country is more democratic than another. Dialectical ideas like this are surrounded by moving penumbras.

Comments

[Jane Hagan]

I am familiar with the concepts of arithmomorphic and dialectical. I think I just use some different words to describe them. I use these contrasting concepts to try to explain to people how hypnotherapy works. A really good example is people who are trying to normalize their weight. The arithmomorphic concepts says calories in should equal calories out. Logical, reasonable; but not effective, unfortunately. For that reason we have to use a different concept, a "fuzzier" one. I call it non-linear, representational thinking. In other words, what does food represent to the individual. When we begin to understand that better, the client can get out of the business of trying to regulate calories (which only the body actually does effectively), and get back to eating to live rather living to eat. Weight will normalize quite effectively when that happens.
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For more info, see her site at inrpower.com.

[Alexandra]

I am actually amazed to find you just these days when I study and write on NGR! Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen was a great thinker, not only in economics - he owned the genius of interdisciplinarity. We developed an academic Platform of Interdisciplinary Training and Research which bears the name of NGR.

We could keep in touch if you were interested in more reading about his works.

Best regards.