Circular reasoning

Circular reasoning (Latin: circulus in probando, "circle in proving";^[1] also known as circular logic) is a logical fallacy in which the reasoner begins with what they are trying to end with.^[2] The components of a circular argument are often logically valid because if the premises are true, the conclusion must be true. Circular reasoning is not a formal logical fallacy but a pragmatic defect in an argument whereby the premises are just as much in need of proof or evidence as the conclusion, and as a consequence the argument fails to persuade. Other ways to express this are that there is no reason to accept the premises unless one already believes the conclusion, or that the premises provide no independent ground or evidence for the conclusion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_reasoning

Example #1:

Pvt. Joe Bowers: What are these electrolytes? Do you even know?

Secretary of State: They're... what they use to make Brawndo!

Pvt. Joe Bowers: But why do they use them to make Brawndo?

Secretary of Defense: [raises hand after a pause] Because Brawndo's got electrolytes.

Explanation: This example is from a favorite movie of mine, Idiocracy, where Pvt. Joe Bowers (played by Luke Wilson) is dealing with a bunch of not-very-smart guys from the future.  Joe is not getting any useful information about electrolytes, no matter how hard he tries.

Example #2:

The Bible is the Word of God because God tells us it is... in the Bible.

Explanation: This is a very serious circular argument on which many people base their entire lives.  This is like getting an e-mail from a Nigerian prince, offering to give you his billion dollar fortune -- but only after you wire him a “good will” offering of $50,000.  Of course, you are skeptical until you read the final line in the e-mail that reads “I, prince Nubadola, assure you that this is my message, and it is legitimate.  You can trust this e-mail and any others that come from me.”  Now you know it is legitimate... because it says so in the e-mail.

https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFallacies/66/Circular-Reasoning

Circular Reasoning Has Ruined Discussion

Circular Logic in Religion

In certain religions, circular reasoning is just commonplace. In Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, for example, the Bible or the Quran is the word of God because the same book says it is the word of God. The argument is simply using the source itself to justify its status.

Circular Logic in Politics

In politics, circular reasoning exists heavily on both sides and is a constant in the political landscape. From views of how the government functions to social issues to political leanings, politicians find circular reasoning to be among the most useful when it comes to making their claims and standing on their rock solid foundation.

When two opposing political views interact, the aggressive and circular arguments fly and neither side is willing to give up and attempt to understand the other. The following are common examples in the political scene:

• Our second amendment rights are absolute, therefore gun control laws are illegal.
• Affirmative Action can never be fair or just. You cannot remedy one injustice by committing another.
• The news is fake because so much of the news is fake.
• Smoking pot should be illegal, because it is against the law.

Now to reveal a truth, all four of those examples are actual quotes from politicians and political leaders. To be honest, it was difficult boiling it down to four. But notice how reasoning and real understanding is thrown out the window in favor of creating confusion and misunderstanding. Politicians are masterminds at avoiding deep dives and creating an atmosphere that creates more questions than it does answer any questions.

Eliminating Circular Reasoning From Our Lives

Circular reasoning is simply a crutch, and it handicaps us. This logic pretends to know everything and disallows us from actually learning and growing. Romain Rolland from his book Above the Battle pointed to the following truth;

“Discussion is impossible with someone who claims not to seek the truth, but already to possess it.”

The beauty of discussion is that, by its very definition, we are to process things together in order to reach a decision or exchange ideas. Circular reasoning is the opposite of what makes a discussion wonderful. It is not about processing. It is not about reaching a decision. It is not about exchanging ideas. And the saddest part, it is not about togetherness.

We have to stand against this. In order for the world to truly grow and learn to better understand each other, we must humbly enter conversations with a mind that does not have all of the answers, but instead, a heart that desires to bond with the person across from us. For this to happen, though, eliminating circular reasoning from our vernacular is absolutely needed.

Instead of all of us having our own truths, let us strive forward seeking truth together always with a mind and heart that is ready to learn, grow, and even be challenged.

https://owlcation.com/humanities/Circular-Reasoning-Has-Ruined-Discussion

For 1st Time In 4 Years, US Life Expectancy Rises — A Little

Life expectancy in the United States is up for the first time in four years.

The increase is small — just a month — but marks at least a temporary halt to a downward trend. The rise is due to lower death rates for cancer and drug overdoses.

“Let’s just hope it continues,” said Robert Anderson, who oversees the report released Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The latest calculation is for 2018 and factors in current death trends and other issues. On average, an infant born that year is expected to live about 78 years and 8 months, the CDC said.

For males, it’s about 76 years and 2 months; for females 81 years and 1 month.

For decades, U.S. life expectancy was on the upswing, rising a few months nearly every year. But from 2014 to 2017, it fell slightly or held steady. That was blamed largely on surges in overdose deaths and suicides.

Suicides continued to increase in 2018, as did deaths from the flu and pneumonia during what turned out to be an unusually bad flu year. But declines in some other causes of death — most notably cancer and drug overdoses — were enough to overcome all that, according to the report.

Cancer is the nation’s No. 2 killer, blamed for about 600,000 deaths a year, so even slight changes in the cancer death rate can have a big impact. The rate fell more than 2%, matching the drop in 2017.

“I’m a little surprised that rapid pace is continuing,” said Rebecca Siegel, a researcher for the American Cancer Society.

Most of the improvement is in lung cancer because of fewer smokers and better treatments, she said.

Also striking was the drop in drug overdose deaths that had skyrocketed through 2017. The death rate fell 4% in 2018 and the number of deaths dropped to about 67,400.

Deaths from heroin and prescription painkillers went down, however, deaths from other drugs — fentanyl, cocaine and meth — continued to go up. And preliminary data for the first half of 2019 suggest the overall decline in overdose deaths is already slowing down.

It’s still a crisis, said Katherine Keyes, a Columbia University researcher. “But the fact that we have seen the first year where there’s not an additional increase is encouraging.”

The national decline was driven by dips in 14 states, the CDC’s Anderson said. Those include states where overdose deaths have been most common, like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, and West Virginia.

In Ohio’s Hamilton County, which includes Cincinnati, overdose deaths fell in 2018 and preliminary data indicates another drop last year. County health commissioner Tim Ingram credited efforts to try to expand access to treatment, and to widely distribute the overdose reversal drug Narcan.

“We almost saturated our community with Narcan,” he said.

Nationally, for all causes of death, more than 2.8 million Americans died in 2018. That’s about 26,000 more than the year before, the CDC report found. The number went up even as the death rate went down, because the population is growing and a large group are retirement age baby boomers.

Other findings:

• The 10 leading causes of death remained the same, with heart disease at No. 1. The death rate for heart disease declined slightly, by less than 1%.
• Death rates also dropped for stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, chronic lower respiratory diseases and unintentional injuries, which includes drug overdoses.
• Americans who were 65 in 2018 are expected to live another 19 years and six months, on average.
• The infant mortality rate fell more than 2%, to 1 in 177 births.
• The suicide death rate hit its highest level since 1941 — about 14 per 100,000. The rate peaked during the Depression in 1932 then mostly declined until 2000. It’s been rising most years since then.

The U.S. has the highest suicide rate of 11 wealthy nations studied, according to a separate report released Thursday by the private Commonwealth Fund. That report also found U.S. life expectancy is two years lower that the average for the 10 other wealthy nations.

https://www.keranews.org/post/1st-time-4-years-us-life-expectancy-rises-little

How to Make God Real: Exercise Your Imagination

NPR recently broadcast a 52-minute Hidden Brain program that dealt with the perceived reality of hallucinations and perceptions of God. The program pointed out that many Christians believe they are speaking with God or Jesus on various occasions. Their belief is that it is the real God or Jesus that speaks to them and sometimes carries on otherwise normal, even mundane conversations.[1]

At 11 minutes into the program, the topic of communicating with God came up. One researcher, Tanya Luhrmann, currently postulates that the human imagination can be trained to both hear God and believe the God is literally real, but just not in this world.


The research faces a conundrum because in essence it tries to get inside the mind of other people and what they are experiencing. One researcher commented (15:50 - 16:20) that in order to try to understand what is happening and to understand the mind of another, a person needs to ‘let go’ of who they are to try to open their own minds to the mind of the other person. The idea is to just listen without judging the other mind you are trying to understand.

One religious sect the researcher worked with included imaginary people they called ‘contacts’ because they could guide people spiritually. Over a period of months in attending meetings with this groups of people, the researcher found her own mind sharpening various images. She believed her mind was changing somehow as he practiced the group exercises in imagining various things and, on one occasion, she had an experience of personal power and extreme alertness (19:00 - 22:20). The upshot was that the researcher came to believe that imagination can be practiced and sharper perceptions of reality can arise from the practice.

The researcher realized that the modern view of imagination and earlier versions are quite different. Later, in 2002, the researcher started doing research on Evangelical Christians who practice what she calls ‘inner sense cultivation’, which is a way to develop an intense personal relationship with God. The practice can be simply just sitting down and having a cup of coffee with God or doing other mundane things with God (24:25 - 25:33).

The point is this: As people exercise their imagination, the experience begins to feel more real than imaginary. This is how Evangelicals develop a personal connection to God.

The researcher wrote in a 2013 paper in the Journal of Cognition and Culture:

“A secular observer might assume that prayer practice affects those who pray by making the cognitive concepts about God more salient to their lives. Those who pray, however, often talk as if prayer practice – and in particular, kataphatic (imagination-based) prayer – changes something about their experience of their own minds. This study examined the effect of kataphatic prayer on mental imagery vividness, mental imagery use, visual attention and unusual sensory experience. Christians were randomly assigned to two groups: kataphatic prayer or Bible study. Both groups completed computerized mental imagery tasks and an interview before and after a one month period of practice. The results indicate that the prayer group experienced increased mental imagery vividness, increased use of mental imagery, increased attention to objects that were the focus of attention, and more unusual sensory experience, including unusual religious experience, although there were substantial individual differences. These findings suggest that prayer practice may be associated with changes in cognitive processing.

Those who prayed avidly reported more intense, unusual spiritual experiences. They sometimes reported that they had heard God speak audibly, or seen the wing of an angel. These unusual experiences differed in several respects from hallucinations reported by persons with psychosis: they were brief (rarely more than a few words), rare (congregants who reported them rarely reported more than one or two), and not distressing, although sometimes described as odd (Luhrmann, 2011). The congregants identified these unusual experiences as having sensory content, and as different in kind from ordinary thoughts, intuitions and mental images. These observations raise the possibility that there are significant cognitive consequences to prayer practice and that those changes may be relevant to what people report as the experience of God.”

This research is by Dr. Luhrmann, an anthropologist. It isn't clear how well accepted by experts her hypothesis that practicing imagination makes it more real is. If what Luhrmann reports is accurate, it helps explain the basis on which some religious people hear God and truly believe the experience is literally God. The experience of God is real in the brain of the person experiencing it, regardless of actual external reality.

What is of personal interest in this research is that it again points to a human need for some form of spiritual experience. At the least, some or maybe most people appear to be hard wired for experiencing hallucination as real. Some appear to be driven to spirituality, usually in the form of organized religion, to satisfy some deep-seated need(s). If that is true, then maybe a political ideology that does not include some overtly spiritual aspect or content is doomed to remain just an academic curiosity.


Footnote:
1. A prior discussion here discussed a brain structure, the paracingulate sulcus, that was associated with people hearing voices they believe are real, but without any source outside the person’s head. That structure is associated with reality monitoring and when it is smaller than average size, people tend to experience more auditory hallucinations. Otherwise healthy people often or usually know that the voices they hear are not made by other people, but are hallucinations.

Another prior discussion discussed a recent hypothesis that humans perceive reality by a controlled hallucination process where the brain guesses about what the senses are detecting, e.g., hearing, sight, touch. Over time with repeated experience, the brain (mind?) gets better and better at being correct about what is perceived for many things, but not necessarily all things. This could be where the messiness of dark politics gets unleashed.

Blue Wave??

In light of the anticipated U.S Senate vote to acquit Donald J. Trump on the Articles of Impeachment (scheduled Wednesday, Feb 5th @ 4pm ET), there is sure to be much outrage among the Democratic-voting public.  I expect many Democrats to be apoplectic.  [Could we get a defibrillator in here please?!] 😲

But, on the upside, almost nothing stirs people into an indignant counteraction faster than a perceived injustice.  So, [full disclosure] as a straight Democrat-ticket voter, I choose to see Trump’s unjustified acquittal as some kind of “blessing in disguise.”  Like in 2018, I’m daring to hope for another “blue wave” in November, 2020; this time even bigger... tsunami-like.  Democrats may even take back the Senate.  TBD.

Question:

Do you see a blue wave a-comin’?  Yes, no, maybe so?  Give your predictions.

Thanks for posting and recommending. 

(Happy palindrome [02-02-2020] and Groundhog Day!) 😊