From why to how

Or “Pervasiveness risks banality”, an essay on logic, the construction of reality and information theory. Readership: medium.

When you think about logic and what it means to most people, you soon realise it is generally of little interest. It’s at best a cognitive tool that if you even deign to start thinking about soon seems too obvious and pervasive to give attention to. Be that as it may; it is a tool that improves the experience of human life, and if you’re a bit bored or incapacitated like me, then you might think that tools that can have that effect could merit closer inspection. Especially if you’re into health and realise that there just might be an opportunity to optimise clinical logic and its effects.

Currently, logic attracts a growing niche but influential readership. As with all influential man-made tools, its increased usage will eventually come to permeate as we as a society understand it better. Academically speaking, logic resides in the fields of linguistics, philosophy, mathematics and computing. In real life, it is already integrated deeply into human life through language, industry, Ai and robotics.

This essay treats the idea of logic as a simple object, meaning a singular “thing” that does a thing. A role noun. This isn’t just for my amusement, here are advantages to considering complex subjects as simple objects, which I will get into shortly, but it’s worth noting that there aren’t many simple objects in the real world. Logic is one of them. It’s a simple object in that it’s thing that does a thing. Like love, tool or leader, logic sits in a small body of ideas that can be relabelled and described a million ways for a million different sets of circumstances but technically they are simple objects in that they, in each situation differently, are what they are singularly: uniquely ineffable. And that is a problem because soon words get either technical, magical or poetic and divide or loose your audience. The audience you keep of course compensates but it also potentially emprisons.

So logic is useful, seductive, mysterious and pretty, but what about it? Well, if we do logic better life gets better and logic is a brain-based human tool everyone has born access to. That means that if people get better access to logic under better circumstances then optimisation would naturally make things like communication and health outcomes better. Like a human thumb, other animals have their versions of it and live accordingly. In one sense you could say that the animal is their logic, defined by the outputs that emerge from the surrounding inputs. This is particularly visible in healthcare; our genetic predispositions in context of our internal stress management systems meeting our external circumstances over time equals our health status.

This may seem reductive, and I would say that it is that and also anything but. We are able to report and reflect on health data and calculate what would benefit us through rational management. We have done it for thousands of years and we now call it the science of medicine. And not just that, it also reduces cost and results in more effective, healthcare, which already seems important enough. Regardless, the point is that applying logic to healthcare data is good for us and applying logic better is better for us still. The equally important and peripheral observation is that it is a battle against banality. Prevention is obviously better than cure, but for that, we must invest more in banal measures to motivate the individually chosen direction. The path that is supportive of the combination of helpful behaviours and habits to help individuals achieve their goals.

Thank you for your time reading,

Stefaan Vossen