Whilst searching for a mathematical short-cut, the conservative German physicist Max Planck begged his colleges to please explain the joke complaining that a sense of humor was never amongst his list of job requirements. What he could not have known with any certainty, but must have suspected, was that this particular shortcut would haunt the modern sciences for the next century. In fact, for decades afterwards a popular subject at cocktail parties among physicists was how to design experiments to discourage practical jokers. Planck's friends noted in his later years that he had intentionally acquired a very agreeable sense of humor and, along with the enduring mystery of quantum mechanics, other physicists thought it prudent to do the same. More than half a century after his initial discovery a few bold physicists whose reputations were beyond question began cultivating a more off-the-wall sense of humor with John Wheeler once famously declaring, "A black hole has no hair! Gravity without mass! Time is what prevents everything from happening at once! There is no law except the law there is no law!" To which Richard Feynman was quick to add, "Some say Wheeler's lost his mind in his later years, but he's always been that way."
More frequently Feynman is quoted as saying, "If you think you understand quantum mechanics you are wrong." The implied corollary joke being that if you believe you don't comprehend quantum mechanics then you most certainly do understand, because it never made any sense to begin with! Once, someone frustrated with my arguments insisted that I don't know anything about the subject and should stop talking about it altogether, to which I was quick to promise that the minute I have anything intelligible to say about quantum mechanics I will. Over a century later, in the hallowed halls of academia the continuing howls of indignation are now beginning to spread to every branch of the sciences along with the slowly dawning realization that mother nature has a wicked sense of humor and an endless supply of zingers because existence itself is paradoxical and instant karma is always gonna getcha baby!
Donald Hoffman, for example, is a Game theorist who spent ten years studying all the neurological evidence and after running one computer simulation after another he finally concluded that, according to all the evidence, if the human mind and brain had ever remotely resembled anything like reality we would already have become extinct as a species. Which, of course, means that his own discovery can be considered just more self-contradictory nonsense along the same lines as quantum mechanics which, nevertheless, appears to be much more useful than anyone's silly ideas about reality. In response to this relentless string of zingers some, like Stephen Hawking, have championed taking one upon the chin for queen, country, and tradition insisting Einstein had to be right and God would never be so malicious as to leave us completely in the dark. Nevertheless, in spite of all the objections from researchers that they see little to laugh about under the circumstances, the evidence continues to mount that, assuming there is a God, its impossible to know with any certainty what he had in mind when he created the universe.
Without realizing that they had corroborated this, a group of mathematicians examining all of classical mathematics and causal physics concluded that any number of simple metaphors can be used to describe causality equally well. If you want, you can take your pick and insist that everything as merely composed of black holes, balls of string, bouncing springs, rubber bands, clockwork, wavy gravy, lime Jell-O, or lotions in motion on vibrating rubber sheets for all I know! A similar mathematical study established that, not only can you take your pick from among countless causal explanations, but only two dimensions are required as if, in reality, life were merely a cartoon. Like Donald Hoffman and Max Planck before them, what the mathematicians have just confirmed is that all of academia has traditionally relied upon what Rainbow Warriors call "Cartoon Logic", that is, the logic of small children who will adopt whatever rationalization conflicts less with reality as they know it or just happens to appeal to them more at the time.
So, the question is, should anarchists reject classical logic as merely another tool for allowing money to do all driving at the point of a gun? Does classical logic, according to the evidence, define anarchists as conformists?
