Logic is Illogical

Logic doesn’t always make sense.

“What?  What is this eighteen-year-old girl saying?  Is she actually dissing logic?”

Yes, kind of.

If you’ve ever read the book “I, Robot”, you might remember one of the stories.  I myself read it a while ago, so let’s see if I can remember it well enough to explain the premise.  

Two men are on a space station of some kind in a different planet, let’s say it’s Mars.  For whatever reason, they have to man this specific machine at this specific time every day or else the sun will burn either them or earth (It’s confusing, I didn’t really understand the whole premise myself,  I read it for school and no one likes being forced to read).  

Anyway, in order to take care of this delicate machinery at this specific time of day, Earth sends these two men a robot that has been designed to take care of this problem.  They build this robot, which I think has some kind of A.I. built in, and start talking to it.  

The robot goes bonkers.  It freaks out, runs outside, acts pretty obnoxiously, and in general is probably more pain than it’s worth.

The robot looks at the station, the men, and himself and comes to a conclusion.  The main engine of the station must be God.  The men must be God’s slaves because they spend so much of their time taking care of this engine.  Why and how would men create something that was better and more powerful than they?  The robot is there to take care of the machine (at least he got that part right), and the men are there to serve the robot,  because clearly it is superior to the soft, delicate humans.

 The robot looked at the facts, used logic, and still came to the wrong conclusion.  

Even when the men got a second robot and put it together right in front of the robot to prove that they were the superior beings and therefore in charge, the robot refused to accept the actual facts, and created his own new reality based on this new information he’d learned, which was wrong.  Though the humans were frustrated, the robot still did what it was designed to do and kept them alive.  They offered that bit of evidence to the robot, but still it denied that the humans had actually created it.

I think we see this a lot in society.  If everyone’s logic was perfect, everyone had all the facts, and we had no emotions to get in the way, then wouldn’t we all come to the same conclusion?  Everyone has different opinions, which means someone’s logic is flawed somewhere.  Logically, this means we shouldn’t be using or trust logic, right?  But that logic is probably flawed.

Logic is a useful thing.  It helps us make important decisions, it helps us shape our opinions.  However, it’s important to remember that just because we think we’re using “logic”, we may not still be right.  I mean, the logic I used to come up with the conclusion that logic is flawed could be flawed (did that sentence make sense?  It did, it’s just confusing to read).  I caution you to be wary of your own logic and of other people’s logic.  People are often wrong, and I promise you that you are not always right.