Fuzzy Logic in a Postmodern Era

Abstract

Abstract An event is a spatio-temporally localizable occurrence. Each event in our universe can be defined within a two-dimensional space in which one dimension is causality and the other is serendipity. Unfortunately, the majority of scientists in the Modern Era in their fascination with rules of causality and wanting to believe in a complete deterministic expression of the universe have banished all notions of serendipity to the realm of fiction, religion and/or, the occult. But the hegemony of Newtonian causality finally crumbled under the gravity of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle which demonstrated that an external observer can never acquire enough information to fully express the state of a system. This was a quantum physical expression of what was later eloquently put by Heidegger in his philosophical definition of Ereignis, to designate an unpredictable and often uncontrollable disruption of the spatio-temporal causal continuity. In the Postmodern Era, when events such as 9/11 occur beyond any assessable realm of causal relationships, we can no longer afford to discard the serendipity component of events if we wish to understand with clarity.Instead we must devise rules of conformity between the causal and non-causal fields of reality. Fuzzy Logic provides such a vigorous system of thinking that can lead us to this accord. This paper uses the tools of Fuzzy Logic to find pathways for events taking place within a causal-serendipity space. As a first approach, an event is defined on a hyperbolic path in which the degree of serendipity multiplied by the degree of causality is constant. This allows for the diminution of serendipity as scientific knowledge about a subject increases and the enhancement of serendipity to become dominant when data are scarce or measurements uncertain. The technique is applied to several different types of causality – direct, chain-like, parallel, and accumulation.