What is the "John Lee puzzle"?

Why science happened in the West instead of China is called the John Lee mystery.

Because China's philosophy is a philosophy of benevolence and moderation,

It is optimistic and tolerant, and China's philosophy is constantly being absorbed.

Take Mohism, Confucianism and Taoism as examples,

With his own philosophical theory.

Because of the inclusiveness of China's philosophy, his thoughts are not coherent.

Conservative in strength and thought, unwilling to analyze things logically,

As a result, China society has stagnated.

For example, it was China who invented printing and the compass.

Because the spirit of China's philosophy is too logical,

So that these great inventions were eventually carried forward by the west.

I think the philosophy he said is nothing more than the kind of ethics advocated by Confucius, such as the golden mean, such as not making progress in everything and doing everything according to the words of saints.

Under such a consciousness, who would make extreme remarks? Except for Wang Anshi (people are not afraid to speak, and God's will is insufficient), it is really difficult for me to find more people. Moreover, if everything is done according to the sage's words, there will be no independent thinking. What's more, China never encourages others to ask "Why": Why? You do what the ancients did, and you do what others did.

Why science happened in the West instead of China is called the John Lee mystery. In the materials I have read, it is said that China has technology, but there is no rational thinking to evolve technology into scientific theory, which happened in ancient Greece in the west. I think this is also caused by the long-standing habit of asking why.

Sociologists once thought that China's huge population forced people to spend all their energy on agricultural technology. However, with the loss of silver to China, the West has to spend all its technology on industry, because its population is too small. Therefore, science began in the west.

I have always felt that when I talk to many people in China, I can only have one small talk that did not build. Once a serious topic is discussed, you will feel very tired, because the other party may use specious theories to entangle life experiences, the plot of the story, and even the deeds of his mother's aunt's niece's cousin's neighbor. At this time, you can only keep silent, or use sophistry to counter sophistry, although the correct way may be "shall we discuss it on the platform of formal logic?" But it's really boring

Generally speaking, for thousands of years, China people have been lacking the ability of abstract thinking. This topic should start with the philosophy of our ancestors. The lack of metaphysics in China's philosophy leads to the backwardness of thinking mode, which is embodied in the lack of deductive induction and formal logic.

Every leap in human knowledge is inseparable from induction and deduction. It is the only way for modern science to induce abstract assumptions from concrete phenomena and then deduce them into concrete assumptions on the premise of induction. But our ancestors have always been in low-level ignorance in this respect. Take Pythagorean Theorem of Geometry as an example. Although our middle school textbooks say that our ancestors discovered the Pythagorean theorem long ago, in fact, our ancestors' theorem is just a sentence of "hooking three strands, four strings and five". Perhaps our ancestors found concrete examples from a large number of civil engineering, but because of the loss of inductive ability, we can only say "hook three strands, four strings and five" in the original way, which is far from the theorem.

The "Four Great Inventions" talked about by dung people, no matter whether this invention is as magical to human beings as we boast, we just need to think about why the "Four Great Inventions" were all before the Song Dynasty, and more than a thousand years after the Song Dynasty, all China people lived in vain. The reason is simple: the four great inventions were all discovered by accident that something had some practical function, and they were obtained by accident. At that time, China had the largest working population base in the world, so it was a high probability that the four great inventions occurred in China. In a word, the four great inventions don't need much abstract thinking ability, and the lack of abstract thinking ability makes China 1000 years without scientific and technological inventions.

The development of modern western science is the inevitable result of their excellent abstract thinking and strict logic, which must be traced back to the outstanding philosophical achievements of ancient Greek sages such as Aristotle and Euclid. Almost at the same time, it was also the heyday of China's philosophy. We can see what the philosophy of our ancestors has brought us:

Although China's philosophical works also contain the views of "simple materialism" such as Lun Heng, this book is full of mistakes and has little influence, so it is omitted. The consistent central idea of China's philosophy for thousands of years is "the unity of man and nature". The so-called "harmony between man and nature" is actually the residue of religion in the primitive ignorance stage. Today, if we sort out the folk stories in the backward areas of ethnic minorities, we can generally see that a hero or god has fallen, his hair has turned into a forest, his blood or urine has turned into a river, and his breast has turned into a mountain peak, similar to the legend of "Heaven and Man are one".

Let's take a closer look at the classics of China's philosophy. The Book of Changes has always been regarded as the standard of China's traditional philosophy, because it was written by King Wen and because it is the most sacred teacher's favorite. 10 years ago, the Book of Changes was popular in China. People often said calmly, "I recently read the Book of Changes", just like a master. It took me some time to follow the fashion, but I finally found that Yi is really the best in the world, but it is the best masterpiece in the world. I also consulted those so-called "masters" who read the Book of Changes in doubt. As a result, they said it was either vulgar knowledge of interpersonal relationships or nonsense, so I had to stick to my point of view.

The elderly and strong gentleman once claimed that he had solved Lee John's puzzle, that is, why China's modern science and technology was backward. Yang's answer takes the Book of Changes as an example, saying that the reason is that China culture is only inductive but not deductive. This answer makes me wonder if Yang has read Yi. How does the so-called "induction" in Zhouyi proceed? After divination, people get some divination symbols and variations, and then find the corresponding divination names, divination words and variations according to these divination symbols and variations. Then, according to the diviner's wishes, according to the divination names, divination words and variations, images and numbers, this process of "inductive judgment" can be said to be circling in the symbols of subjective ideas, which obviously has nothing to do with any natural and objective practical experience. This basically confirms that the above-mentioned "inductive judgment" is invalid. Such an invalid "inductive judgment" can't have any value of philosophical and scientific thinking except fortune telling and self-deception.

The "relative law" of the three laws of formal logic requires that the empirical condition or premise of synchronous relative law must always be met between objective objects and subjective concepts. In other words, subjective concepts and objective objects must correspond to each other one by one and cannot be changed in the process of induction. Yi's inductive process violates the "relativity law" and actually abandons the practical experience directly related to objective nature, which is the only premise to obtain inductive judgment with practical value (efficiency). Giving up effective inductive judgment is actually giving up effective thinking. The Yi Zhuan (also known as Ten Wings) compiled by Confucius and his later scholars is actually just tossing about the symbol traps (divination symbols, divination names, divination words, rhetoric words, etc.) in Zhouyi. ), and they are only making "inductive judgments" out of imagination (which has nothing to do with the natural experience of fortune teller's practice). Obviously, all such "inductive judgments" can only be invalid "judgments" with no practical significance. Such "invalid judgments" can be regarded as Master Yang's "inductive judgments", and I have to suspect that he doesn't read Yi at all.

Look at Tao Te Ching, which is another classic of traditional philosophy popular in recent years. Although the first few words scared many people, the attraction of Tao Te Ching lies in dialectical concepts like logical paradox. To put it bluntly, it is nothing more than looking for paradoxes that are contrary to people's daily life experience, such as "rigidity" and "softness" and the difference between "strength" and "weakness".

Classic, you can imagine how brainless other words are. No wonder, for thousands of years, China has never seen several good articles with strict logic and complete reasoning. It is full of old documents, which are unreasonable and demanding. -In fact, up to now, Mao's speeches are all unreasonable and unintelligible, but many people appreciate them and find them unique.

Finally, borrow a passage from Mr. Li Zehou to make a summary:

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Like Mencius, "eloquence" often violates formal logic and only threatens people with momentum (emotional power); Sober as Xunzi, but opposed to famous artists because of no practical value; Taoism emphasizes the dialectical view of logical paradox; Legalists such as Han Fei pay attention to the "logic" of practical functions. Since Confucius, all attention has been paid to the relationship between "name (concept)" and "reality", which is the value of "the principle of also needing name" rather than the independent development of "name"; The fundamental reason is that the tradition of witch history, in which heaven and man are not distinguished, cannot develop a highly abstract "transcendental" concept and thinking method on the basis of independent science. This makes China people's mind and language indulge in thinking and ethics about the concrete relationship between human experience and success or failure in reality for a long time, and can't create an abstract logical deduction system and inductive method in theory (Mohist school is slightly lost). Chinese lacks abstract vocabulary, philosophy lacks metaphysics, thinking lacks abstraction, speech composition does not follow formal logic, and calculation and deduction do not pay attention to axiomatic system.

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Compared with the stage of human mental development, it should be said that the lack of abstract thinking ability and thinking that does not conform to formal logic are the signs of incomplete development. Naive children often think with "strange logic" because they have not yet formed a complete formal logic ability. In children, it is their childishness and cuteness, but if they are adults, you have to think that they are abnormal. It would be terrible if the whole nation were like this.

Terror is not only reflected in the backwardness of science and culture, but also in the backwardness of political and economic systems. Abstract thinking ability is a necessary tool for system design and improvement. It is the backward thinking ability that is the important reason why China never knows how to reflect. Hegel once said that China is a country with no history, only dynasties change. Indeed, in thousands of years of history, there are only winners and losers and "prosperity, people suffer;" Death, people suffer ",exactly the same cycle, because this nation never knows how to reflect and improve." A nation that does not know how to reflect has no future.

Our ancestors, in the most important philosophical and logical thinking ability of mankind, indulged in the stage of underdevelopment for thousands of years, which is a great shame!