Rick Rosner is an accomplished television writer with credits on shows like Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Crank Yankers, and The Man Show. Over his career, he has earned multiple Writers Guild Award nominations—winning one—and an Emmy nomination. Rosner holds a broad academic background, graduating with the equivalent of eight majors. Based in Los Angeles, he continues to write and develop ideas while spending time with his wife, daughter, and two dogs.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen is the publisher of In-Sight Publishing (ISBN: 978-1-0692343) and Editor-in-Chief of In-Sight: Interviews (ISSN: 2369-6885). He writes for The Good Men Project, International Policy Digest (ISSN: 2332–9416), The Humanist (Print: ISSN 0018-7399; Online: ISSN 2163-3576), Basic Income Earth Network (UK Registered Charity 1177066), A Further Inquiry, and other media. He is a member in good standing of numerous media organizations.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner explore the distributed nature of cognition, emphasizing neural and glial interplay, the evolving truth of historical narratives, and the adaptive flexibility of paraconsistent logic. Their dialogue highlights how brains process contradiction, update knowledge, and embody rational and irrational behaviors across multiple representational modalities.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Do you have any further thoughts and nuances on the logic? 

Rick Rosner: The current thinking is that the connectome — the complete map of neural connections in the brain — is central to consciousness, memory, and other cognitive functions. What we are, in a sense, is encoded in the pattern of dendritic and synaptic connections among neurons.

More recently, researchers have discovered that astrocytes — glial cells in the brain that support neurons — may play an active role in information processing and synaptic modulation. While neurons remain the primary carriers of electrical signals, astrocytes influence the flow and integration of information, suggesting that memory and consciousness may not be limited to neurons alone.

Regardless, it is some distributed network — involving neurons, glial cells, and their connections — that encodes cognition and identity. What we know appears to be rooted in patterns of relationships. Everything we understand is constructed relative to other elements. It is not easy to imagine it functioning any other way—every word gains meaning from its associations.

You will notice that each word is defined, in part, through its relationship to other words — a network of associations. Similarly, what is considered “true” is often restricted and constrained by the structure of that network. Moreover, what is considered accurate can evolve over time.

For instance, consider historical truths: Was Mussolini widely seen as a dictator when he first took power in 1922? At the time, many Italians supported him, seeing him as a restorer of order and national pride. It was only as his policies and alliances unfolded — particularly with Nazi Germany and during World War II — that public opinion shifted significantly. He ruled until 1943, and perceptions of him underwent drastic changes over those two decades.

This suggests the brain can store and compare contexts across time. It retains previous states or frames of understanding, allowing us to reassess past “truths” in light of new information.

Jacobsen: So, your brain stores and recalls past contexts. What was considered valid in one moment can be revisited and compared to present conditions, leading to a synthesis — a new, more nuanced understanding that integrates both.

Now, consider logic. Suppose we assume a proposition A. If that assumption leads us to a contradiction — for example, we derive both A and not A — then the assumption must be false. This is the classical method of reductio ad absurdum: to disprove a statement by showing that it logically leads to absurdity or contradiction.

In formal logic, this type of contradiction is employed to refute a hypothesis. However, in non-classical or paraconsistent logics — such as paraconsistent logic or quantum logic — contradictions can exist without collapsing the system. These frameworks enable more nuanced truth values and better reflect the real-world complexity, particularly in fields such as quantum mechanics or specific AI systems.

This flexibility suggests that logic systems can be embedded within broader informational structures — such as the human brain or the universe — capable of accommodating classical, probabilistic, and quantum logics simultaneously. We know this because humans can reason across all of these domains.

There are at least two ways for systems to lose information. One is structural degradation, such as in Alzheimer’s disease, where the brain’s architecture deteriorates and its capacity to store and retrieve information diminishes. Another is semantic decay — when information becomes unreliable, contradictory, or outdated due to new events or insights. In such cases, previous knowledge must be revised or discarded.

This is especially relevant to subjective experience. Earlier, we discussed subjectivities — individual frameworks for interpreting the world. These include both linguistic and non-linguistic forms of knowledge representation, as well as explicit (conscious, verbalized) and implicit (intuitive, embodied) forms. They also encompass symbolic (using language or systems) and non-symbolic (such as emotional or sensory experiences) forms.

The contradictions in those systems should only be contradictions within a classical logical framework. However, in a paraconsistent logic arrangement, you can have individual inconsistencies and still derive consistent information or conclusions.

So, you can handle that contradiction. Maybe these buffering systems — whether neural, informational, or otherwise — incorporate that capacity.

Rosner: I always return to quantum mechanics. In a quantum mechanical description of the world, you are incorporating different levels of certainty or “knownness,” depending on the local context. Some properties are highly pinned down, like the existence of macro objects.

For instance, every gram of matter contains roughly a mole of particles. A mole is approximately 6.022×10236.022×1023 particles. That is Avogadro’s number — a considerable number. So with that, primarily many existent things, the macro-level object reliably exists, at least locally, due to the sheer number of particles composing it.

People in another solar system may have no idea whether there is even one baseball in ours — or thousands — but within our local context, we can say definitively that such objects exist. Do you want to move on to something else?

Jacobsen: Yes. There is one more aspect here, related to systems of thought. Someone might say, “I am rational,” yet behave irrationally. That linguistic statement is inconsistent with the behavioural outputs of the broader knowledge system. Therefore, they may act in ways that are inconsistent with their stated beliefs but consistent with their implicit or non-linguistic knowledge.  Perhaps paraconsistent logic, when applied to cognition, enables multiple knowledge representations, where language is just one modality. And yes, we are multimodal creatures. The brain assigns different weights to the information it processes, including the modality through which the data is encoded.

Rosner: We have talked about this before — like how people “think with their dicks.” That is, they assign disproportionate weight to behavioural strategies rooted in reproductive drives, even when these conflict with their own long-term survival or rational interests.

You may have made a string of rational decisions, and then suddenly crash a scooter. However, next time, you will account for hydroplaning. The brain adapts — it revises its weighting scheme based on experience.

Photo by Max Petrunin on Unsplash

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