The most obvious non-hammer hammers are air hammers and electric hammers. They look nothing like hammers but they perform the function and are readily accepted as such.
So what is the point of that?
A nail gun is a hammer.
As we go down to lower level structures we can trace two paths for a hammer concept.
One is a direction we are not going to pursue. Very far, anyway. But, lets take a whiff of it. How far it can go. And perhaps why. Or perhaps we should explore why first.
Oh, pardon me.
This is a blog proclaiming philosophy and I’m not being logical. There is no logical progression to this section of the blog at all.
That is because I am engaging in a Metalog. A MetaBlog. I first came across the term metalog in Gregory Bateson’s “Steps to an Ecology of Mind”. If you are not familiar with Gregory Bateson, I cannot recommend him too highly.
Discussing the parts in a way that allows them to all come together in an understandable way. This is because we are dealing with the imagination, which resides in the deeper structures of the mind rather than logic which resides totally on the surface.
This is why logic is so complex and requires so much “intelligence” to be able to follow it. Because it is so divorced from reality. It is Extreme Surface Structure™ and Extreme Low Context Structure™. Once it has reached the maximum Extreme Low Context Surface Structure™ it becomes almost totally divorced from reality.
In order to keep it grounded its practitioners most negotiate a bizarre maze of rules, mostly called “fallacies” that appear to the uninitiated as unending and unimaginably complex.
Imagination is both simpler and requires less “intelligence” because it is reality itself. In fact it only requires the amount of intelligence required to negotiate the context it is faced with.
Which means an intelligence only requires the imagination that is required for the survival of the life form it inhabits.
Thus an army of ants only needs the amount of imagination required to use leaves to cross the water which prevents their progress. Extreme Low Context Surface Thinkers™ ask, “How can an ant be so intelligent as this?”
A question that is nearly impossible to answer.
A Full Context Deep Structure Thinker™ asks, “How could an ant imagine this?”
In other words the question becomes, “What sensory experience can an ant bring to this problem of crossing water?” When asked in this way it becomes obvious. Ants walk on leaves. They have had that experience. Leaves float on water. Not sure how an ant would / could perceive that. One guess would be an accidental event some ants have survived.
Extreme Low Context Surface Structure Thinkers™ operate on the assumption the mind is designed for the purpose of discovering and determining Truth.
A Full Context Deep Structure Thinker™ assumes that all experience is processed by the mind for the single purpose of survival. A sort of Darwinistic approach to thinking.
Extreme Low Context Surface Structure Thinkers™ lump all sensory experience besides intellect as useless and totally discount all emotions as erroneous. They quickly and easily point out all the errors one can fall into when people rely on their emotional reactions.
And this is true.
What they don’t acknowledge is that “Logical Reasoning” and “Logical Reasoning” alone causes just as many errors, if not more, than emotional reactions.
The first being that there is such a thing as “pure reason”.
The second being that “truth” is attainable through a judicious manipulation of words.
The third is that Emotions and Sensory Experience should be discounted.
What the hell does this have to do with hammers?
Because where I am going to go with the concept of hammers has no Logical equivalent. There may be someone somewhere so skilled at Logical Manipulation to arrive at it, but I cannot conceive how they would, or even why they would.
It is not what logic is designed to do.
Logic takes itself seriously.
Logic is never playful.
The closest I have ever seen to logic being playful is the nine legged cat. And its purpose was to prove that you have to follow logical principles or you would make ridiculous mistakes.
A cat has four more legs than no cat.
No cat has five legs.
Therefore a cat has nine legs.
Extreme High Context Deep Structure Thinkers™ see reasoning as a survival tool that works best when treated as a mental playground.
The next blog will take the simple household hammer to this mental playground.
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