Comments on Multi-Dimensional Critical Thinking

These are some thoughts on Prof. Nepejvoda’s paper, Multidimensional Critical Thinking. This page is being republished as an historical project note. Terminology reflects the late-1990s context, but the core concern remains current: when reasoning collapses into rigid, shallow patterns, people suffer for reasons that are not inevitable.

As in the M0 and Ghost Not papers, the scientific and practical aspects matter. But the humanitarian aspect matters more. When logic is snarled up, unnecessary harm becomes normal. That harm is not “the human condition” in any deep sense. It is the downstream effect of distorted thinking reinforced by culture.

This is part of the Reciprocality Project.

Language, persuasion, and “packing”

I share the view of NLP as a technique of manipulation in its usual application, whatever its original intent may have been. Before the M0/Ghost Not model was developed, I used two observable labels: “mapping” and “packing”. When asked to define the difference, I once said: “Packers are people that NLP works on.” That is still a useful quick test of whether someone is being engaged through awareness or through compliance scripts.

First-level versus holistic critical thinking

In the M0 hypothesis, dopamine self-addiction narrows attention and suppresses the brain’s feedback-driven operations. The result is the loss of higher-order distinctions between systems of statements. Holistic thinking becomes difficult or impossible, not because people choose it, but because the cognitive machinery required for it is not being used.

The Ghost Not co-component then restricts thought to the manifest and induces exclusivity: if one frame is treated as “the” frame, alternative frames are no longer conceivable. The outcome is scholastic, dogmatic, literalist mentation. Because these failures co-support one another, they tend to be enforced implicitly. This is where coercive contempt and threat displays often enter. It is not primarily intellectual debate. It is social enforcement of a narrowed logical field.

Science as learning, and science as orthodoxy defense

Is true science not learning? Of course it is. It is humble learning before nature and nothing else. Only in M0-afflicted thinking does science become the defense of an existing orthodoxy, which is the opposite of learning. In that mode, new data is rejected, and failures of theory are denied or moralized rather than investigated.

Totalitarian logic and “Doublethink”

This paper captures the consequences of an inverted logical field with unusual accuracy. First-order Ghost Not logic can be used to defend almost anything, including the kind of totalitarianism that tends to arise in highly ritualized societies. The nominal tyrant may change, but the logical mechanics remain familiar.

The reference to Orwell’s “Doublethink” was a useful shock. An explicit adoption of denial, and the denial of denial, is exactly the kind of mental contortion that appears when a culture has learned to protect contradictions rather than resolve them. Compare this with “Showing or Pretending” in “2: The Ghost Not”, and with the way “complementarity” is sometimes handled in physics discussion in “3: Reciprocal Cosmology”.

I do not know of other work that treats this exact structure in the same way, except “A Chain of Chance”, which is a strong treatment of the differing pitfalls of inductive and deductive reasoning. The term “multidimensional thinking” here appears close to what “modal logics” attempt to formalize: you need an additional dimension for indication and implementation, and in real cognition that “extra dimension” is often supplied by feedback.

“Stinkers” and cultural immune responses

I remember a science fiction story featuring “Stinkers”: people hated by the wider population because they could see alien spaceships that others could not. The ships used mind-rays to conceal themselves and to provoke the population into destroying those immune to the effect. “Stinkers” did not stink to each other.

We carry many versions of this pattern in cultural memory. When societies become more ritualized, scripts about hidden control and “something not right” often rise in popularity. That does not prove any particular story. It does suggest that natural immunes sense the social atmosphere changing and reach for metaphors that fit their experience. Non-immunes often notice little except a felt increase in competence and certainty.

Similar dynamics can surface during periods of moral panic and conformity pressure. When the social demand is to perform loyalty to a frame, those who remain perceptive become targets by default.

Exclusive framing in political persuasion

An interview with the architect of a major political campaign included a blunt strategy: keep the candidate off-screen and describe how horrible the alternatives would be. This exploits exclusive thinking. “Not X” is framed as “Bad”, therefore “X” is framed as “Good”.

This produces headaches because cultures and languages often carry the flawed logical system as default. To think around it, one must “think around the world”, not merely around the words.

Quasi-religion, proceduralization, and the loss of induction

The regress into quasi-religion is real and predictable. Someone demonstrates, by example, how a reader can re-awaken inductive reasoning. That capability is what dopamine self-addiction suppresses, but it can be kick-started. For the approach to work, the reader must apply it in a real domain and become fixated on objective reality and the novelty available in deep structure.

There are no procedural recommendations in “The Programmers’ Stone”. It is narrative and example. But when readers only observe the success of those who apply the method, they often assume there is a procedural recipe. They then advocate physically observable “steps” without doing inductive reasoning, and try to sell the approach as an algorithm for wealth, health, and social success.

The blasphemy, in the conventional sense, is not merely “claiming to be God”. It is claiming that reality is so shallow that one small algorithm can match the richness of creation. In the “6: History” sense, the blasphemy is the denial of deep structure implied by that posture.

Logical thinking and creative thinking

The claim that logical thinking is opposed to creative thinking is the same split discussed at the start of “2: The Ghost Not”, in the contrast between scientists, artists, and alchemists. In this model, the split is an artifact of distortion: deduction and induction are not enemies. They are partners.

Notes on the principles of MDCT

The reference to “full safety” recalls the M0 obsession with certainty. When people cannot directly perceive a domain, they reach for ritual and procedure as a substitute for awareness. Because images dominate, they prefer “pretend certain” methods over “real but attentive” methods. When failures occur, it is easy to retreat into blame allocation and avoidance rituals. This strategy cannot produce reliable risk assessment, wealth, or durable understanding. It only makes sense in a distorted social context that is already deep into post-scarcity behavior without recognizing it.

Feynman once remarked that he felt happier about a result when he could derive it more than one way. That contrasts with the Ghost Not idea that there is one correct way to see a phenomenon, and all other approaches are “incorrect”, even when they express the same meaning.

Deductive and inductive processes must occur together and inform each other. One must be able to do both, and be free of the delusion that they are antithetical.

Within M0, knowledge becomes rote memorized spells. The “right” spell is selected by shallow cues. If one spell is judged correct, others are judged incorrect even if they say the same thing with different word order. Meaning is not examined.

This is the distinction between understanding, which one owns and can manipulate, and rote knowledge, which is not manipulable. A practical application of this point is the “process preview” in the Programmers’ Stone.

This line of thinking also opens the development pursued in the third through seventh Reciprocality papers. It connects with the emergence of workplace “spirituality” within quality and systems movements, where people attempt to name what is lost when work is reduced to ritual.

The closing comments on “illogicality” in language may connect to the idea of what M0-free languages look like and how they structure attention. That topic remains tentative, but it is not arbitrary.

Prof. Nepejvoda captured key elements of M0 as they came together in this project after the dopamine self-addiction hypothesis was revealed by comparing effective engineers with children diagnosed as ADHD, and then following neurochemical work on dopamine receptors. It is a remarkable achievement. He also correctly identifies that the most directly damaging effects arise from the logical component.

I hope the reciprocal idea is useful: that “normal” logic may be an artificial outcome produced by distorting natural logic until it becomes the mutually concealing partner of neurochemical suppression of inductive, higher-order operations.