What is Wisdom?
I used to think I was wise; I was the sunday-school devotee; the youth pastor took to me the most because I was passive and hungry to learn. I seemed to have a certain existential knack at an early age. A lot has happened since then. Now I don't know what wisdom is.
I'm just relaying this little personal story so @Michael doesn't delete the thread for "low post quality". In reality, all I want to ask is: "What is wisdom?"
I'm just relaying this little personal story so @Michael doesn't delete the thread for "low post quality". In reality, all I want to ask is: "What is wisdom?"
Comments (216)
Idk. Are you bringing up God because I mentioned Sunday school?
Because philosophy means "the love of wisdom"? Seem's lamely prosaic.
If "wisdom" = "thought redused to platitudes and ready-made issuances", then I agree.
But, you're defining wisdom in this way, by degrees. That's a bizarre definition of wisdom, and also an awesome use of Duchamp's "ready-made".
Philosophy, "the love of wisdom", has strong religious connotations? Now I'm starting to agree with you...
I don't think you can. But maturity is often misunderstood. What do you think, Posty?
Wisdom can mean quite a few things, such as the accumulated knowledge over many year (of course... forgetting to define what is "knowledge" and how many years is supposed to be "many years"), the ability to seek clearly and quickly the inner relationships between varous factors (a rather vague notion at best) or (even worse) the teachings of ancient men... back when things were simple and less stressful (as if). :roll:
My take is that wisdom is something attributed by others upon someone who usually didn't bother to pursue it and that this poor person who has been attributed to be full of wisdom needs to now appeal this limitation of the standards of measure to this cult following to maintain the status of being full of wisdom (which results in them being full of something else).
If one goes about with the self-attributed notion of being wise or having wisdom this might well be the indication of a strong narcissistic personality disorder. (more than not this is someone who has something to sell)
When in doubt and especially if this is a "low quality post" (I kind of doubt that it's low quality) resort to pop-philosophy like in the lyrics of "Sunscreen" regarding advice and hinting toward wisdom:
"Be careful whose advice you buy, but
be patient with those who supply it
Advice is a form of nostalgia
dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off
painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it's worth
But trust me on the sunscreen"
Meow!
G
It all seems like a conceptual leap to me. Kind of like climbing a ladder and them throwing it away once done with.
But, yes, when someone is mature you tend to apprehend the situation bona fide.
Though, I wouldn't throw away the ladder. It might still have it's use. Haha.
Did you expect to be given wisdom as a response?
[quote=His Bobness]While one who sings with his tongue on fire. Gargles in the rat race choir. Bent out of shape from society's pliers. Cares not to come up any higher. But rather get you down in the hole. That he's in.[/quote]
There you go.
Same here! I find that when I open my mouth, un-wise things come out. I've made a fool of myself here more than once.
Quoting Mayor of Simpleton
So you don't know what wisdom is, it sounds like?
Quoting Mayor of Simpleton
I don't know what wisdom is, but I know that you and I don't have it. Does that make me narcissistic? I really don't care.
Yes, because I asked "What is wisdom?"
You seem to be covering all your bases, so I don't know. What do you think wisdom is?
I think Greg already used the phrase I would. Accumulated (hand picked) knowledge. This implies some metaphysics about how do you go about "hand.picking" knowledge.
I have far too small of a sample size to make any decision.
Quoting Noble Dust
Good! I feel it would be "unwise" for me to make any guess.
Meow!
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And you expect something other than folly? I don't believe you.
Greg is @Mayor of Simpleton, yeah?
Accumulation of knowledge... that's definitely something. What is knowledge? Accumulation seems obvious.
Which would be nice if it doesn't then go on to juxtapose this with the Wisdom of God.
Strange quote to choose out of our exchange so far!
Again, I'm an idiot. Ask @TimeLine or @StreetlightX for evidence.
To idiotize the answer it seems to be justified true belief. That seems like it makes things more complicated than necessary? Who decides these things after all?
I don't believe you either. Or, rather, I do.
It can also be interpreted as the wisdom of STLX. Who knows?
"who decides these things after all" is a corollary to this thread, isn't it? I don't know who decides these things, other than idiots like us.
The feels are real today.
That kind of makes me giggle.
I tend to regard metaphysics to actually imply "MEphysics", as in... all things considered the entire universe and all the happening within the universe are simply all about me.
I believe I'd refer to it as a hand picked hermetically sealed worldview where one starts with the central answers then subsequently forming questions in respect to these pre-assumed central answers; thus creating the illusion of critical thinking.
(it's posts like these that makes me wonder if it is wise of me to post much of anything any more? :wink: )
Meow!
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Really?
Cool!
btw... exactly what am I the "mayor" of? :joke:
Meow!
G
Posty, you're not an idiot. I'm an idiot, if anything. You are very pure in your philosophical enquiry, whereas my own enquiry has a perverse color to it; I mean that. I'm interested in truth to an unhealthy degree. So, those feels you feel are right, within your own self. Feel them. Disagree with me. Breath out.
I can see some truth to your version of solipsism. I've always wondered about the paradox of holding solipsism as a propositional attitude true and false with respect to the world. One of those dead ends of philosophy that I find intriguing...
Actually I am compelled to say that in terms of philosophical schools, the one that I feel is nearest to sapience, is [neo]Thomism. And that is because Aquinas himself aggregated and commented on the ‘wisdom teachings’ of the Western tradition. There are other such schools, but in terms of those still recognisably part of current philosophical discourse, I am hard-pressed to think of any at the moment. And I don’t say that because of any specific affinity with Catholicism, but simply because the principles the argue from do, in my mind, capture something essential to wisdom.
And that is, the recognition of the soveriegn nature of reason. This is inextricable from the acceptance of real universals and forms, derived from Platonism and then criticised by Aristotle. IN the absence of the recognition of ‘the primacy of reason’, humans are, as many here will vigorously argue, a ‘clever hominid on a rock’. Homo faber, in other words.
What a "hoot"! :naughty:
Meow!
G
You're the mayor of whatever you say you are.
Meow!
M
Quoting Mayor of Simpleton
Yet they're not about The Mayor Of Simpleton, right?
Quoting Mayor of Simpleton
To begin with answers is incrediblly simple; indeed, only a simpleton would begin with answers.
But I can tell you're not the simpleton you claim to be. Nice job!
Quoting Mayor of Simpleton
Indeed, I wonder that too; would it be wiser for you to abstain from these discussions?
Meow!
M
Yeah, I still think ever since my father taught me about the Platonic forms, that is when my philosophical endeavors started and ended at the same time. Go figure.
Edit: Although, Wittgenstien saved me from that conundrum...
I've got your back.
Remember how well I can piss people off and distract them from other things by stating next to nothing?
Meow!
G
Not pissed at all, but greatly amused!
Meow!
M
YIPPIE!!!
My figuring about philosophy... the "love of wisdom"... or in my case being a "widsom stalker" runs much like Luddi W:
“A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.”
Feel free to be amused (even at or especially at my expense).
Meow!
G
I'm not sure if I've detected any wisdom yet (and what would I know?) But I like jokes; especially jokes that don't demean other people. I like jokes that elevate other people to places they don't yet encompass.
Do your jokes demean other people at all? I can't tell; you seem to be on the brink of loving jab and demeaning jab.
Feels like a party in here.
Festivities yay!
This whole thread exists to stir the non-existent wisdom pot. :rofl: Let me help. What say you, @Sapientia?
Quoting Wayfarer
What's your thought on how language functions within time, versus over time? So man used to be saptientia; now it's homo sapeins. The language changes, and what? What else changes, exactly?
It's always a party when I start a thread brah.
I don't really know either.
We seem to be living in a day and age of the professionally offended, so I supose you'd have to consult others... probably the one's who'd possibly take offence.
Believe me there are quite a few "hash tag" groups out there who'd be more than happy to tell you just how offended they are about everything that simply does not conform to the filter of their own personal comfort.
I'm too old for that in a way, as for me a "hash tag" was the little handwritten lable on a nicklebag indicating what product was being moved in a somewhat illegal transaction.
Anyway...
I find it somewhat boring to live a life through the filter of my own person comfort; thus I find being offended to be quite a waste of time.
Meow!
G
The truth has been spoken!
I get it, I get it, it's impossible to offend you. You're an incredible castle all your own. You're clearly a relic from "the old PF days". I lay my dues before you and bow.
But you don't want that, do you? The minute I offer that to you, you'll "meow", and come up with a clever response. I respect that. I don't understand it's use, but I respect it...I guess.
But, the minute I offer that bow, you'll laugh it off.
Wait, do we have any philosophical disagreement? I can't tell; I got so rapped up in this whole wonderful game.
Now I feel like I need to run and hide, especially since I'm pro-ideals and an anti-idealist.
Perhaps it's an accidental contextual truth for a very specific given moment that has been spoken and not really "the truth".
Meow!
G
But, but... Plato and them religious types that all copied his argument! How does one address the authoritarians?
I think I agree. But what I'm not sure about is changing definitions. When words change meaning...what? What is happening?
Don't get me involved.
Nevertheless! I think the word wisdom is merely an old word that attempts to describe emotional intelligence but has since become victim to a quality narcissists like to add to their repertoire to give an air of legitimacy in their judgements of others. It is to have common sense - which as Voltaire perfectly said is not so common - and an ability to regulate the inner self along with an outer life (professional, interpersonal) and to transcend societal constructs to be capable of studying the world objectively.
You are still that same child trying to impress the pastor and be better than the other kids, but now in the big, bad world you realise that you are not better than the other kids and you be like, shit. That is called growing up.
This sounds like a good description I could use on a Curriculum Vitae... that's is if I ever really applied for a job.
Opps! Like Brittany I did it again.
Another joke... or not? (difficult to say at times)
I can be offended, but it's really rare. I try to save it for when it really counts for something.
Indeed I'm a relic. One of the people of the "old days of PF"... who also was banned for getting folks to come to this refuge when the PF ship sailed adrift to crash on the rocks, but hey... it was something to do.
All we have here is an exchange of ideas in the hope to expand some awareness of knowledge that perhaps can lead to some minor aspects that could be attributed as wisdom, but always in a flux of accumulation leading to adaptation. (let me know if that made any sense and if so please try to explain it to me, as I think I got a bit lost in that comment) Why should anyone really be offended by an exchange of ideas, especially different ideas?
Oh... and please don't stop and bow for me. Since I'm blindly following your lead this would only cause me to trip and fall over you. :wink:
Meow!
G
The defining characteristic of ‘wisdom’ has been forgotten. Here’s a long and complicated article that I frequently refer to in this context.
Exit the cave and get killed for your efforts?
As for addressing authoritarians, well...
Eine neue wissenschaftliche Wahrheit pflegt sich nicht in der Weise durchzusetzen, daß ihre Gegner überzeugt werden und sich als belehrt erklären, sondern vielmehr dadurch, daß ihre Gegner allmählich aussterben und daß die heranwachsende Generation von vornherein mit der Wahrheit vertraut gemacht ist.
(A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.) - Max P
Meow!
G
Edit: Of course I have to get you involved; you love the attention!
I gave you low hanging fruit, and you swung for the nuts. I still know I fucked up, and I still know you fucked up too. Whatever.
Quoting TimeLine
Do you have examples/evidence?
Quoting TimeLine
So what's the point of studying the world objectively (and what does that mean, btw?) and what is the point of regulating the inner self, along with an outer life? Denote the wisdom, exactly, in those things.
I didn't actually call on you for wisdom; I just called on you for an example of me being an idiot. But, again, you went for the nuts. Nice job. Your input is, of course, just as valid, providing it's actually wise. And, no, I haven't found much wisdom so far. So you're doing just great, @TimeLine
If only that were true in the realm of economics and other domains of human thought. Science is uniquely exempt from the formalities of customs and conventions.
You're true colors come out! You're no-one, and yet, you're oh so crucial to the existence of this forum.
Per the debate at hand about wisdom, fuck off.
Per the existence of this forum itself, thank you.
Now, what do you think about wisdom? Give me something new.
Agreed!
Economics, as well as many other domanins of human thought, are argued mostly via cognitive biases.
Philosophy can take up the charge to point out these problems, but in the end can do little to prevent the cancer causing them (the cancer as I view it would be the formation of an idealism), as the philosophy illustrating the problems (the counter-ideals) can indeed become the foundation (new ideals) for the next cancer of the mind (of idealism).
If that made no sense, don't worry. I get that a lot.
Meow!
G
You must be a fan of Hegel then. Because that be dialects in a nutshell. Heh.
I'm young and hairless, so let me try. Cancer destroying what? Idealism opposing what? To what end? I'm so profound.
The forum would have made it without me. I just happened to be at the right time in the context of my existence to thrust forward the cause a bit quicker... leading to my logical and justifiable banning from the old PF.
Irony is that soon after I took an extended break from it all.
... but this has really nothing to do with anything here, which is why my alternative name to Mayor of Simpleton would be Major Non Sequitur.
Anyway...
What do I think about wisdom?
Well... I don't really think it's a status. It kind of brings up the irrational image of finding the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow.
I think of it in general more as a work process... with no real particular goal in mind.
Then again... that's me.
Now if we wish to discuss very specific issues then one can have or hold much wisdom in such given fields, but this is only in respect to a very narrow scope.
I'd have to think about this more and continue the "work in progress".
Meow!
G
I have to confess, I've read very little in spite of having a degree in philosophy. (dyslexia)
I've only read a few quips and quote from Hegel, but somehow I figured he'd be much more "clearerer" in expressing these notions.
Meow!
G
Man and woman I suppose.
I like the image somehow.
Quoting Noble Dust
Critical thought outside of the cancer's own worldview of worldview preference (cognitive biases) and domination?
Quoting Noble Dust
The possibility of adapation and refinement of position; thus having the bias to exclude any accumulation of information/experience?
Quoting Noble Dust
For the cancer?
To dictate what is "the truth", "the answer", "the only possible question" by suspending the arrow of time and experiences accumulated leading to refinement/adaption of understanding by negating critical thought as idealisms will tend to field final, ultimate and absolute answers without having all the possible variables, but only tak into consideration prefered truths and prefered answers to maintain an idealistic faith. (idealistic faith and stubbornness are much the same thing and the opposite of critical thought/review)?
Meow!
G
There have been a handful of examples in this thread using the word “man” to stand for humanity. Not the biggest faux pas, but seems outdated at best... (imho and fwiw) :chin:
Excellent point! (And a darn good first post). Turning mistakes into knowledge/wisdom is the lead-into-gold (or manure-into-marigolds, if you prefer) alchemy that is the ideal of philosophy. And there is an unending supply of leaden mistakes. I have a storage unit filled with them. :blush:
Deep knowledge is the best of the stuff one has learned, boiled down, fermented, dried, and cut up into 1 inch cubes and carefully arranged. In the arranging connections are made, insights gained, ignorance and knowledge discovered (along with the realization that it is too late now to learn what you missed the first time around, and that you were lucky to have learned anything at all).
So what variety of knowledge should one put in the kettle as one goes along? Really, ... whatever. Whatever you learned, whatever happens to you is good enough raw material. Whether one studied philosophy or one was a butcher, a baker, or failed at the hippie candle shop business doesn't matter.
One does have to keep thinking, though. That's the boiling down part. Wild yeast will fall into your pot as it cools. This critical stage is a matter of luck. It helps if one has occasionally been inoculated by other people's wisdom about the world.
One needs to be beaten down a few times. A good beating by the world every now and then helps the kettle boil and ferment better. You do not need to go out looking for the world to beat you up; the world is looking for you, and will come to you and administer the thrashing soon enough. Be patient.
None of this can happen until one is old enough to have filled the caldron and been beaten up a few times. It takes time. I suppose there are a few 30 year olds who have filled the kettle with learning, experience, and several beatings but not many, certainly. On earth, maybe 1 30 year old a year. Most filled kettles are like 50 or 60 and up. Some people don't come to a boil until they are 70 or 80.
Quoting Noble Dust
It wasn't wisdom that attracted him. Pastors, teachers, politicians, philosophers--all us ilk--love nothing better than a receptive audience, even if it is only one pair of ears. How lovely on the mountain are the ears of they who sit still and listen to me. If a human isn't available, an adoring dog will do. I suppose a cat might suffice, though dogs do a better job of faking interest.
As for you, Noble Dust, you have had many experiences and have been interested in learning. You seem to be boiling, and my guess is that you've had a beating or two. So you are well on your way. I'd have to stir your kettle to tell you how far along you are, and most people find being stirred during a boil a horrible experience, so we'll just skip that. Time will tell, in any case. If I were you, I'd plan on achieving a jar full of wisdom cubes at some point in the future.
By the way, not everybody here shows signs of having a full kettle, coming to a boil, or having been adequately beaten up by the world. I've submitted the names of a dozen or so forum members who the world should assault and batter once or twice more. The world told me it was well aware of the deficiencies of these learned fools, and would be sending its cosmic thugs to waylay them at some unexpected moment.
In a nutshell?
Do your best to abstain from bullshit and self-hatred, and from asking others what those are.
Oh, to have the ear of the world!
That is why the old are wise. They have had the time to develop robust habits of thought.
It is also why the old eventually break down. They get so well-adapted to a familiar way of life that they lose the capacity to adapt to the crazy new ways of living that clever folk are apt to invent. :)
The problem is that a habit can work to reliably produce horrible, unwise outcomes. Surely not all, or even most, of the old should be considered to be wise!
Wisdom is the knowledge & the practice of living well.
So yes, old habits can fail to work - due to a changed world. But by definition, growing old involves finding the habits that best accomodate your reality. We no longer need to think or invent. We can just know.
Wisdom does have its downsides. Just like cleverness.
And why shouldn't that be part of the (dichotomous) definition here? The strengths of the one are the weakness of the other.
This is only "paradoxical" if you insist on wisdom being something absolute and supreme rather than actually relative to the something else from which it develops.
I didn't say that habit is that which fails to work; I said that habit is that which works reliably (until it is confronted by different circumstances obviously) to produce outcomes which may be either wise (desirable) or unwise (undesirable). So habit cannot be equated with wisdom; or, in other words, there are both wise and unwise habits.
But you unwisely, if cleverly, ignore the argument I gave in support of my position.
I said wisdom is habit because it has that same essential character of being unthinkingly general. It does not involve a change of mind. It involves an application of a well-developed (because it has so far worked best) point of view.
And my definition was secured in contrast to cleverness. Cleverness involves novel thinking that has yet to prove it works in a general fashion.
So you need to focus on my actual characterisation of wisdom. Are you offering some different characterisation here? Or any at all?
It seems you are intent merely on conflating cleverness and wisdom as "ways of thought that achieve desirable outcomes" ... that are "wise" ... and probably "clever" too. ;)
So you are hoping to talk past my essential distinction rather than address it.
Well, actually... I was commenting there on Posty’s comment, and merely suggesting a more inclusive language (i.e. humanity instead of mankind). No worries. Though it might be wise for me to stay out of the way of others’ jousting- playful, clever, or otherwise. :monkey: :smile:
Quoting TimeLine
What about a wise man?
I've had a few beatings, yes. Your bizarre analogies are strangely encouraging. I nominate your post as the closest thing to wisdom I've seen so far.
I don't think that habit qualifies as 'wisdom'. Plenty of creatures have instinctive behaviours, which are essentially a form of habit, and indeed nature herself forms habits (as both Peirce and Sheldrake affirm). But wisdom is something more than effective repetition as it requires the element of judgement.
I think the sense in which habit can be incorporated into the overall rubric of wisdom, is the sense in which 'habit becomes character, and character becomes destiny', which is an old saw found in both Confucius and Aristotle. But even there, it is assumed that the listener is able to take such advice on board and choose which habits to cultivate, and which to avoid, which is where wisdom really comes into it.
That doesn't seem very wise. I don't know what bullshit is; you'd have to elaborate. Self-hatred is corrosive, but it doesn't mean wisdom can't be gleaned from the corrosive experience; there's wisdom to be learned from hating yourself that can't be learned any other way.
Why can't I ask you what those are, if I want to be wise? Some kind of "silence" thing? Screw that, what the hell are those things you mentioned?
I'm gleaning that per your outlook, there's no perennial anything; there's always flux, and "cleverness" (I don't like that term) is the thing that...does what? Makes the world go round? Possesses the most power? Power for who? The clever person? The community? [nah lmao]. In your conception here, wisdom appears to be a certain resin-encased snapshot of something that was once helpful. What you're missing is that your "cleverness" just continues the cycle of the human condition of oppression. Cleverness is always neutral; it will always create innovative medicine, and innovative ways to gauge pharmaceutical prices. Cleverness knows nothing of the human condition. It just knows power. Wisdom doesn't know power; you don't know wisdom.
So it doesn't supersede death, right?
Don't you mean an end to judgement? Once you have the answer, then you are wise. If you still need to judge, you at best only have a clever idea and are still seeking the kind of proof that life delivers.
Why diss habit as animalistic? It is actually a profound psychological fact that the mind develops by learning how to be as unthinking as possible in its coping with reality.
Our narrow focus of conscious attention is not a defect of evolutionary design. It is the whole point. The more of reality we can wisely and habitually ignore, the more selectively we will focus on whatever then that is left as significant and requiring our clever attentiveness and creativity.
So I might be making a bit of a joke in this thread. But it is completely in keeping with the neurocognitive facts. Habits are our wisdom - our hard-won right not to have to think in order to already know. And it is that which then, in complementary fashion, paves the way for our cleverness - our ability to home in on what is significant or surprising and in need of actual thought.
Getting old means that we then do have the time to assimilate almost everything about life to unthinking habit. Which is great - until we get caught out by significant changes in the world we need to predict.
This is just a straightforward logical model of how to "compute life". How else could the brain do its job?
Quoting Wayfarer
Sure. There is a meta-level that takes this further. You can develop the habit of not forming habits and so maintaining a need to constantly rediscover solutions.
But that is just part of the story of a balance between stability and plasticity - the neurocognitive story I am telling. And in the end, it would be wisest if it were a habit that is well adjusted to your way of life.
What? Why would that be the case? Once you have the answer, you just have knowledge you "know". Why are you associating that state with wisdom?
But that's typical pragmatism, right? Whatever works - whatever is well-adapted. But at the end of the day, the only criterion for that judgement is adaption, survival, getting along.
So you took what I said and twisted it to make it fit some template you have acquired and now you feel safe? Your habit of thought trumps my clever (because it is original to your way or thinking) analysis?
As I've said, my view is not very original at all. It is in fact the wisest views on neurocognition and evolutionary lifecycles that I've encountered.
No; I have no template. I'm actually trying to figure out what wisdom is. Novel, I know. And I could say the same to you: "So you took what I said and twisted it to make it fit some template you have acquired and now you feel safe?" Let's actually debate. I realize I said you aren't wise, which probably struck a nerve; reasoned debate generally stops there, especially with the unwise. I'll take it back if you like: I don't know if you're wise or not. I haven't seen any wisdom so far, but I'm hopeful that I may see it as we debate. How's that?
Quoting apokrisis
Using your own concept to fail at refuting my points; bad form brah. Explain ya points betta.
Quoting apokrisis
:rofl: We've found wisdom! Thread closed.
What other purposes did you have in mind for wisdom that aren't directly tied to living your life in a generally clever and well-adapted fashion?
Is that what you call taking things back? :razz:
But anyway, I set out my argument. I'll have to wait until you can identify some specific fault in it.
Why live cleverly and well-adaptedly, when you die after about 70 years? This is a question that pertains to the problem of wisdom.
Yup! Nerve officially struck. Maybe you'll learn wisdom from this thread; who knows? I'm certainly hoping I do.
Quoting apokrisis
I did; read again.
It's significant in this thread, few considered the question from the perspective of the actual subject of philosophy - philo-sophia, love~wisdom. I think, arguably, the key text at the origin of Western philosophy, was the Apology. And in that text Socrates was concerned with something other than 'living in a clever and well-adapted fashion', namely, how to maintain equanimity in the face of death. So it's quite at odds with 'evolutionary logic' - but then, humans, alone among animals, are able to contemplate such a predicament in the abstract, and wonder what it means. Which I would think is in keeping with the aphorism that 'wisdom begins in wonder'.
:clap:
Now you could make an argument for humans breaking out of this natural pattern. Wouldn't it be nice if we could forever keep learning, keep expanding, never slowing or senescing.
But even then, we would only wind up knowing everything, having the right answer to every question, and so run out of anything new to discover. That notion of wisdom might be considered a dull fate.
My own argument is in favour of a fruitful balance - one where we are getting wiser in a fashion that allows our cleverness to become ever more sharply focused.
So the template you are reaching for is a polarity. One thing must be made right so that the other can be held to be wrong. And you see that in the first responses of others in this thread.
If one says "wise", the other must say "clever". If one says "habit", the other must say "spontaneous". If one says "pragmatic", the other must say .... something or other.
And so the complementary approach I take - where wisdom and cleverness are the strengths correcting each other's weaknesses - gets completely overlooked in every reaction to what I write.
So how to act dead before you are dead? Sounds legit.
Next stop on this chain of "wisdom", nihilism, existentialism, pessimism and other varieties of life-denying miserabilism.
You're worshipping evolution as a god. I've seen this attitude in the fundamentalist church; what exposes it is that the form supersedes the function; yes, evolution, the form of physical change, is real. Agreed. So what's it's function? Nothing you've said says anything about it's function, and yet, you assume that the form of evolution precludes it's function; the form is the function. Again, essentially a fundamentalist religion.
Quoting apokrisis
So I'm positing a right and wrong, but you'e not, right? Wait no, that can't be right, because that's obviously not the case.
Read what? You talked about things encased in resin or folk being oppressed. It didn't add up to a counter-argument, just some angry spluttering noises.
Read again.
Quoting TimeLine
Of course. Have another go. Wheel out the habit, the template image of the zealot, the religious crank. Pretend you have assimilated my remarks to that.
You're hilarious. You are doing exactly what I say gets done.
Come back with counter-arguments, and I'll take you seriously.
To my arguments. Don't keep wasting my time. :rofl:
So cognitive bias must ultimately lead to something true, right? If it's such an intense issue, then it surely avails itself of something which is real, as opposed to the unreality of the cognitive bias that lead to the thing that was untrue.
I see philosophy as a quest for wisdom. Wisdom is bipartite - knowledge and morals. While both are difficult to attain I feel the latter is a harder objective because of, well, human nature.
By nature we aren't completely freed of our basic animal drives and while some of it may be essential others are impediments to achieving moral enlightenment.
One odd thing I notice here is that we seek wisdom in order to know how to live our lives and this from homo sapiens - the ''wise'' animal.
Animals know how to live.
They’re not burdened by the requirement to make choices. See this.
Well... not quite.
Cognitive bias leads to something (leads to a comclusion) that one prefers to be true (correct). Whether the conclusion is indeed true or false plays no role in what is being highlighted in my post. What's clear is that the preference for a conclusion taints the process of investigation/argument of support.
The only thing I can see that is ultimatey clear by the application of a cognitive bias is that poor arguments have been put forth, also the likelihood of begging questions or circular reasoning is present.
What a cognitive bias leads to is completely a different issue. The conclusion can be true or false, but not as the result of the application of a cognitive bias in an argument... in short the argument does not support the conclusion no matter if it is a true or a false conclusion.
Quoting Noble Dust
I feel the problem here is that somehow there is the assumption that a cognitive bias leads one to something that is false. The conclusion is not really the problem here, but rather the process applied to reach a conclusion. It is very possible to utilize a cognitive bias (perceptual distortion, inaccurate judgment, illogical interpretation) and still reach a conclusion that is true.
A cognitive bias is a systematic pattern of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment. These systematic patterns use premises (both true and false) and reach conclusions (both correct and incorrect), but are themselves forms of argumentation (neither true or false).
It seems the use of the terms true or false are not really the issue, but rather the terms valid or invalid would be better choices.
Another point to make here is just because something is real does not make it true. Truth is a matter of context in respect to a specific question.
I seriously basic example:
Both a bridge and a tomato are real.
If the question is what do you use to cross a river while driving a car and you answer a bridge... that's true, but if one answers a tomato... that's false.
Meow!
G
btw... Here's a few examples of cognitive bias for the road:
Cheerleader effect: The tendency for people to appear more attractive in a group than in isolation.
Dunning-Kruger effect: The tendency for unskilled individuals to overestimate their own ability and the tendency for experts to underestimate their own ability.
IKEA effect: The tendency for people to place a disproportionately high value on objects that they partially assembled themselves, such as furniture from IKEA, regardless of the quality of the end result.
Semmelweis reflex: The tendency to reject new evidence that contradicts a paradigm.
"Women are wonderful" effect: A tendency to associate more positive attributes with women than with men.
The list is very very long.
I don't know. When you talk about it, it kind of runs away.
I don't think "wisdom" is just a pile of good advice. Take the book of Proverbs:
1 The proverbs of Solomon son of David, king of Israel:
2 for gaining wisdom and instruction;
for understanding words of insight;
3 for receiving instruction in prudent behavior,
doing what is right and just and fair;
4 for giving prudence to those who are simple,[a]
knowledge and discretion to the young—
5 let the wise listen and add to their learning,
and let the discerning get guidance—
6 for understanding proverbs and parables,
the sayings and riddles of the wise.[b]
Then follows many, many lines of "good advice", much of which seems fairly obvious, like... if a gang of crooks invite you to join a racket, don't.
There are collections of more contemporary proverbs, like "Don't plan on winning the Publishers Clearinghouse Sweepstakes." Just plain good advice or actual wisdom?
Ecclesiastes comes much closer to what I would call wisdom. The worldview of Ecclesiastes is wider than Proverbs, less pious, and not so 'cut and dried' -- admitting uncertainty. The book opens famously with the acknowledgment that there is a time for both building up and a time for tearing down, gathering in, and scattering apart, etc. -- a time for every purpose under heaven. But the crux of Ecclesiastes, at least for me, is the summation:
I seem to remember reading somewhere in a secondary work on Heidegger that his concept of authenticity could be equated with Aristotle's conception of phronesis (practical wisdom) in that phronesis consists precisely in knowing what to do in particular situations.
The idea is that each situation is uniquely singular, and that wisdom consists in not falling into the habit of treating a situation as a generality: "one of those situations" where "this is what one does". On this reading wisdom involves more creativity than habit.
So, it seems I am offering a different characterization of wisdom than yours.
See, you've done the unwise thing and asked another what bullshit and self-hatred are. But all is not lost; that is not necessarily unwise; it depends on what you do with what you hear. Wisdom consists precisely in listening to others, but in the final analysis, living by your own lights. There are things others can tell you, determinate things you may not be aware of about the world, science things, history things, economic and political things and so on, but when it comes to fundamentals like bullshit and self-hatred (and wisdom). no one can tell you what they are.
There may be wisdom for you in hating yourself, I can only tell you about my experience. I have found no wisdom in hating myself, although obviously I needed to know what self-hatred is, since I have blindly hated myself, in order to know what to abstain from.
So, it has nothing much to do with "silence" but rather more to do with learning how to talk to yourself kindly and authentically (with your own voice, that is).
But for me, a generality, and thus a habit, is a constraint. A constraint does not dictate some particular path. It supplies the finality, the essential criteria, that define the limits by which freedoms or accidents need to be bounded.
To give an example, hitting a top-spin backhand is a habit, a phronetic generality. It took me quite a few years of practice to master it as a useful skill. So I eventually had a wicked dipping backhand return. I had a habit of constraint that was general - a topspin backhand - but was hardly fixed or rigid. It could be applied over a large range of situations. There was always something specific and singular about each time it was employed. The height of the ball coming at me could have a considerable variety of heights, spins and speeds. And the exact place I needed to hit it to would also change on most occasions.
So a physical habit has exactly that character of being a generalised ability to constrain action in a way that minimises the accidental and so maximises the ability to make particular deliberate or creative choices.
And the same would be the case with wisdom as a term for a generalised intellectual state of having developed a set of sound and useful mental habits of thought.
We can take a wise maxim like the golden rule - "Do unto others as you would have them do to you." Like setting up a wise backhand by focusing on the essential constraints - hit the ball high enough to get over the net/with enough spin to hit that strategically optimal bit of the court - the golden rule focuses us on the general thing of a rule of reciprocality in our social relations. And then - creatively, particularly - we can apply that general rule in ways that best befit any of life's highly variable situations.
So wisdom/habit/generality/constraint all have this causal character. They are not rigid and mechanical - except when we make the mistake of thinking they ought to be this way. In nature, for organisms, habits have a suitably loose fit. They focus on what are the generally desirable outcomes across a range of occasions. And then our actions become organised within that envelope of the desirable so that goals are achieved - again, within a tolerance of error that is generally wise or acceptable. We don't have to mechanically/rigidly sweat the detail if our goals are being achieved well enough.
So the argument you are making is against a rigid/mechanical/reflexive notion of habit. And yet psychology tells us that habit is not like that at all in reality.
Sure, it is hierarchical. The nervous system starts off with very simple hardwired reflex loops - the spinal cord jerking our hand off the hot stove. And then the brainstem might also develop its Pavlovian conditioned reflexes that are stereotyped.
But as the brain keeps adding extra levels of plasticity, we get to the kind of habit that psychologists (and Peirce) are focused on. We get to the generality of practical skills that are wise because all the painful learning and thinking is now in our past. We are fully equipped with a mastery over an area of skill that allows us to just do stuff, focused only on how our general goals need to be achieved on this or that specific occasion.
We don't need to invent a top-spin backhand or a golden rule anew every day, repeating that cleverness continually. We just seek to apply our developed skill to a world that is always somewhat different on every occasion, and yet we don't need to worry about that. With the unthinking smoothness of habit, we can act in a way that achieves our usual goals with the maximum of efficiency, the minimum of fuss or waste.
The ethical aspect would be that wisdom - by my definition here - is characterised by its stability, balance and pragmatism. It contrasts with cleverness in that it seems to have a high tolerance for exceptions. That is part of its generality. It makes it possible to ignore quite a lot as not really mattering (any more).
So our cultural image of the wise person does target natural features of a state of well-developed, well-adapted, habit. Smartness by definition is confrontational, novel and risky. Wisdom is its contrast in being smooth, integrated and fault-tolerant.
Your definition was oddly specific or personal. But you can see how it relates to the very characteristics I have outlined.
Wisdom would be achieving the goal-achieving generality of knowing what can be tolerated or ignored as meaningless noise. Constraint only needs to suppress material accidents to the degree that they "actually matter" - which in this case is the degree they would actually matter to "you" as the person wanting to know what external bullshit to ignore, and what internal criticism is likewise lacking any real useful meaning.
Probably we are not disagreeing; it might be just a matter of emphasis. For me, wisdom consists in how the 'golden maxims' and "topspin backhands" are creatively used in particular circumstances, so I just don't characterize the habit itself as wisdom. Of course there was wisdom (singular and creative application) involved in the historical human acquisition of any good or useful habit, and maybe that is what you are speaking about.
So, of course there is no creative freedom without a foundation of diligently acquired habit. Musicians and artists of all kinds exemplify this fact.
This can be inverted as knowing what particularities to pay attention to. And it's not as though we run through all the generalities saying "Not this, not this...".
But of course, this shows again that you are considering the mediated evolutionary perspective whereas I am taking the existential or phenomenological view of immediate experience.
Business as usual then. :)
Quoting Janus
For me, what is I am interested in emphasising is this counter-intuitive - because it ain't the usual mechanical way of thinking about it - fact that constraints are creative in this particular way.
A constraint is an optimisation function. It is a generality saying you want to get from A to B in the best way possible - exactly how on any occasion doesn't matter. And to be able to do that, a constraint also has to be able to define what level of goal-missing is tolerable - the detail that doesn't need to be sweated.
So the point is that constraint has this inherent dichotomisation. It allows you to know what generally matters (getting from A to B according to some general standard of what is optimal). And you do that by learning what it is that are the particulars of some actual occasion which are ignorable. A constraint is what separates signal from noise so that goals get achieved within practical tolerances.
Quoting Janus
Yeah. The classic creative geniuses are those who have mastered the habits and can then "throw them away" and "free-form it".
Again, my stress is on what the mechanists find surprising about the world - that constraint is what shapes our actually useful freedoms.
We are the product of modern machine culture where the opposite approach must be taken. A machine can only operate reliably if we take away all its creative possibilities.
This was quite literal in the early days. We would take a horse and harness it between a pair of handles attached to a cart with a set of wheels. Add blinkers, whips and reins. Hey presto! Nature constrained to the degree that it reduces any creative possibility to the status of an accident - but an accident of the kind that can't be ignored because it is now a critical problem. If the horse and cart don't function mechanically, some part of the mechanical system has to be fixed before we can get going again.
But I am talking about the causality of autonomous organisms. And now it is about habits or constraints - semiosis - that divide life into signal vs noise. The usefully creative possibilities are what states of constraint develop. And they achieve that by building up a fault-tolerant organisation. The system becomes hierarchically organised so that it can focus on general goals by being able to ignore the messy particulars.
But here you are talking about cleverness rather than wisdom - so attentional-level processing and hence phenomenology, rather than habit which has its own particular phenomenology.
So we need to note sharply when we are struck by an unpredicted surprise or the eventual occurrence of some salient event. At some point, our state of happy habit gets hit by an accident that actually matters.
And now cleverness kicks into gear. We have to experiment or figure it out. We must take risks to try something new.
It is because we have that state of generally well-adapted habit that we can so accurately pick out exactly when something novel and cleverness-worthy has happened. We need to turn off any stereotyped response and be prepared to learn and fine-tune.
So you are talking about the phenomenology of cleverness, sure. But have you considered what the phenomenology of wisdom is actually like by contrast?
Why are sages characterised as unshockable and unbothered by all the stuff that everyone else reacts to with unbalanced alarm or delight? What do we really think it is like to be in a wise state of mind?
Of course a wise person can move smoothly to assimilate what looks like the kind of event that would perturb others much more strongly. So they can be clever as befits the occasion.
But phenomenologically, it is the unthinking practiced ease with which they can either ignore or create that is the deep characteristic. They don't have to try hard.
For a Picasso, Federer, or whoever, even useful novelty comes easy as their skills are so sure that mistakes have become really difficult to make. They are in the zone where only the prize needs to be kept in mind. The details take care of themselves.
Wisdom is not forgetting that there are other ways to look at things, knowing some of those ways, and being able to rank them. Wisdom often has this form: sure, that's true, and that's important, but looked at this other way, you can see there's something else that's more important. Wisdom is inclusive this way, doesn't need to deny any of reality.
It's the antidote to the tunnel-vision we all naturally fall into.
You will like this clip. It features several philosophers making exactly this point (and also a really talented young jazz pianist who has sadly passed away since it was made):
Yep. But note the big difference also. This is the Romantic version of the psychology where becoming skilled is an expression of your truest self. And I take the pragmatic social constructionist approach which says becoming skilled is how a selfhood gets forged.
We would stand on opposite sides of the issue in this regard. (Although I wouldn't seek to deny some kind of genetic or biological nature - like the extrovert vs the introvert - that would run deeper than the social construction of that self.)
So the psychological facts are the same. This film would talk up the same phenomenology. The structure of our self is down to the structure of our skills. We exist in definite individuated fashion because we have developed various forms of mastery.
But against the Romantic model, I would say the self is not another transcendent pre-formed entity - a primal thing seeking its rightful forms of expression. Instead, selfhood itself is the immanent product of that development of mastery. Learning skills and habits is how we come to be created as something more than the initial dumb blob of cells.
In the beginning there is certainly always potential. But it is vague and undifferentiated, not the further thing of a preformed state of being.
You seem to reading what I say through the lens of your own definitions. Wisdom for me does not consist in following rules but in having creative insight into uniqjely particular situations in different contexts.
And learning wisdom is how we come to be something more than an evolved hominid species.
(Which reminds me - only got the symbolism of Planet of the Apes years after seeing it.)
Where for a minute did I say it was rule-following?
Talk about reading things through your own lens here. Rules or laws reflect a mechanical belief in deterministic absolutes. Procedures to be followed that then make every exception an unwanted accident.
So I said wisdom - understood organically as generality, constraint, habit, etc - is very different on that score. That was my whole bleeding pitch.
And further, I make the distinction to cleverness. That speaks to the actual phenomenology in doing justice to the actual psychological mechanisms.
You are confusing two things - even if the two things go together in a functionally integrated fashion.
So of course we would want to be wise and clever. We want to have a foundation of sound habit or knowledge from which we then can innovate and create in particular ways to suit particular contexts.
But the way we achieve that in practice is a brain that is organised by that very dichotomy. It is organised into the two general systems of a wise habit-level foundation and a clever attention-based innovative capacity.
So yes, you could now define wisdom as creative insight applied in uniquely particular situations. But who else is defining wisdom that way? Not Psychology Today for a start. Yet who would deny that was a good definition of cleverness? Do you?
Yep. Romanticism in a nutshell. Society and brute nature holds us back. If only we could tread the transhuman path, we could all turn into happy angels living in eternal bliss and harmony.
I generally associate 'transhumanism' with the attempt to artificially augment human capacities with technology, medicine and genetic engineering. I think from the 'romantic' viewpoint (to use your terminology) such attempts miss the mark, in that 'eternal bliss' has to be sought along a different plane altogether, rather than along an extension of this one. It is similar to the role that 'interstellar travel' plays in the popular imagination, as the 'conquest of heaven', which however has completely lost any sense of what 'heaven' originally denoted. 'Warp drive, Scottie!'
Yes. I meant transpersonal.
I say "I don't take a definition of wisdom created by psychologists via research very seriously."
I have to agree with Janus here.
Quoting Janus
Another way to put the same point is that the practically wise person is phenomenologically open to the unique situation, whereas the unique situation remains phenomenologically closed to the unwise person. It also seems important to practical wisdom that one is not only open to the unique situation, but that one acts 'appropriately'/'hits the mark' (I'm unsure of the right word) in their unique situation. So, not just seeing, it also involves doing. One is what one does, as Heidegger says.
Affectivity is also crucially important for both Aristotle and Heidegger with regards to practical wisdom and authenticity.
Yeah I know; like I said, I can't imagine what's unwise about asking you questions about the propositions you espoused which you claim are wisdom. If I can't ask "why?" questions in response to your wisdom, then surely you aren't wise for setting up such a rule.
Quoting Janus
I said there's wisdom to be learned from self-hatred; not that it's wise to hate oneself.
Quoting Janus
I don't know what you mean here.
Not bad, I like that. It seems a very logical definition of wisdom, so my intuitive sense of wisdom isn't satisfied, but there's certainly some wisdom in your idea.
I'd say there's some wisdom to be found there. Which I like; I like "defining" things analogically; rather than saying "wisdom is applied knowledge" or whatever, we can point to examples of wisdom. "What is wisdom?" "That is wisdom." What this does is forces us to reflect and critically analyze ourselves to ascertain what exactly is wise in a given example. And critical thought is one aspect of wisdom (but only one).
I'm just bored by the concept of cognitive bias because everyone has it. So it's important to get to the point where we recognize that we have it, but from there, there's no reason to put it on a pedestal or use it as an intellectual weapon. When we do that, we undermine intuition; you have an intuition about wisdom; so do I. It's a fantasy to imagine that you or I or anyone is abstractly analyzing human thought from a neutral vantage point at which cognitive bias doesn't exist.
Maybe the fact that you'd rather be editing photos than talking about wisdom is indicative of what wisdom is.
There's certainly wisdom to be gained form Ecclesiastes, as well as Job. It's funny, I used to secretly love Ecclesiastes when I was still in the church. I guess I can see why, now.
:100: :party:
:up:
That makes me wonder...
Do we really have choices? Aren't we all slaves to our nature?
A good book I read encourages us to take charge of our lives. It empowers us and restores control over our lives. However even in the drivers seat we must go where we want but what we want isn't something that we have power over.
Isn't that why there's so much variety in life, including human existence. We've artists, scientists, freedom fighters, rapists, altruists, murderers, etc?
Perhaps it's not our fault or, said otherwise, we could have choice but there's no good reason to prefer one option over the other and so we do what must follow naturally - give into our subconscious inclinations.
1. Y
2. N
Did you glance at the OP I linked? Very good on this.
That is one of the rationales behind mindfulness meditation. A large part of the benefit of that, is getting clear about what it is that’s driving you, instead of just being driven by it. And that’s from learning how to ‘see it as it is’ and not ‘how you want it to be’.
Bias blind spot: a coginitive bias of one having the tendency to see oneself as less biased than other people, or to be able to identify more cognitive biases in others than in oneself. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGg_HTls8ME
Quoting Noble Dust
Odd choice of words... "on a pedestal or use it as an intellectual weapon".
Anyway...
I view the awareness of coginitve biases as a useful tool that can be applied to check things and one's self... the same as logic is a tool.
Quoting Noble Dust
Intuition is always or even often a good thing?
Perhaps I should keep my tools of coginitive bias in pandora's box? Heaven forbid that intuition might be exposed for what it really is and making one's wisdom seem a bit short sighted?
Quoting Noble Dust
It's also a fantasy to imagine that any of our efforts matter in grand scheme of things, other than each individual's ability to bring their own special brand of mediocrity to a tiny aspect of reality, but hey... I personally imagine Sisyphus to be happy if Sisyphus is under the illusion that Sisyphus can choose his own rocks. Try again fail again try to fail better? It's a hobby. :wink:
Meow!
G
How is that not what I said? My point would be that wisdom would zero in on optimal solutions as a matter of established habit while cleverness would be working them out as novel possibilities.
It is a psychological fact that our brains are divided into habitual and attentional forms of cognition. You can draw a neuroanatomical map of how it works. And my claim is that the contrast between wisdom and cleverness picks out this particular difference.
For some reason, people find it an upsetting idea.
Shouldn't you have rather quoted yourself from back here?
Quoting Mayor of Simpleton
:rofl:
Quoting Mayor of Simpleton
I agree, but as I said, it's important to realize that it's unavoidable. It's tameable, but a cognition without bias would be a computer...or a mind "made perfect in Christ", etc.
Quoting Mayor of Simpleton
What is intuition, then?
Quoting Mayor of Simpleton
Nice deflection. Classic. :razz:
But ah, now your cognitive biases come out! Am I supposed to divulge into a debate of weather Camus had something, or was an average novelist but a poor philosopher? At that point I'd just be arguing with your opinions, your beliefs, your world view, your bias.
It's not upsetting, it's just wrong. Wisdom isn't habit. Habit isn't wisdom. Is it wise to live by habit? Is it unwise to be clever? Your terms are clunky and don't reflect use. The dichotomy you're bringing up is legitimate, but wisdom isn't a factor. Habit, or tradition, is what you're looking for, not wisdom.
OK...
Intutions is the ability to understand something instinctively, without the need for conscious reasoning... the ability to acquire knowledge without proof, evidence, or conscious reasoning, or without understanding how the knowledge was acquired... the power or faculty of attaining to direct knowledge or cognition without evident rational thought and inference?
Sure that's a muddle of definitions tossed together, but hey... what's your intution about what intuition is and how exactly is it such a good thing or a wise thing?
Meow!
G
I like that definition, although I can tell it’s slanted towards your feelings about intuition. As to what’s good or wise about intuition... what’s particularly good or wise about reasoning?
That was the impression I got from the emphasis on wisdom consisting in culturally embedded habits and, for example, the mention of the Golden Rule.
If this is a wrong characterization, then disregard everything I wrote that reflects it. That would be the wise thing to do.
Is that what I said? Or did I say that we have this neurocognitive division, this complementary approach, that is then something that functions in an integrated way.
Quoting Noble Dust
Huh? I’m just giving you the psychological explanation - which also happens to be the general Peircean metaphysical story as well.
Another way of talking about it is the distinction between fluid and crystallised intelligence. You can look it all up any time you want.
If it helps I didn't write the definition, but rather took it from 3 different sources. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intuition https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/intuition https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/intuition Truth is I took the first 3 definitions that came up on the search modus that were in English, so probably one could do better than my effort.
Anyway... if you care to make a point here I'd simply ask you to define intuition and the questions still stand as what's your intution (or definition) about what intuition is and how exactly is it such a good thing or a wise thing?
Afterall I believe you introduced intuition to the mix due to cognitive bias being a "killjoy" to intuition, so I'll allow you the floor.
Quoting Noble Dust
Meow!
G
You're right and I've already alluded to this: it is not unwise to ask questions, the unwisdom consists in not actively assessing the answers against your own understandings of what you are asking about, or in not paying sufficient heed to your own understanding.
What this comes down to is that you cannot simply adopt another's wisdom, you can only transform it into a part of your own.
Quoting Noble Dust
Sure, there's wisdom to be learnt, not in being in, but in extracting yourself from, any unwise state.
Quoting Noble Dust
Sure you do!
I practiced meditation diligently for perhaps 18 years, and I think it is a great tool for calming the mind. But from my own experience, the greatest insights into what is "driving" me have come from thoughtful reflection upon my patterns of thought and behaviour, rather than from practicing meditation. The general ability to calm the mind does help with this process of thoughtful reflection (and with all kinds of creative pursuits), of course, but I have not found that insights come in the absence of thought that is usually associated with meditative states. Not saying it is the same for everyone, though.
This is a really important point that I did not explicitly state. A person can be incredibly intelligent about all kinds of things, and yet remain embedded in secondary (generalized) understanding, rather than being directly attentive to what is at hand.
I think it is also true that being intelligent in terms of generalized understanding can help you to "hit the mark", and is a necessary background to being wisely attentive to what is at hand.
So why would we say that a maxim or principle like this might encode an essential wisdom of life? Obviously it aims to get you thinking about the general long-run outcomes of your behavioural choices versus the short-run benefits of more self-interested cleverness. Every social interaction offers the choice of competition or co-operation. And the quickest way of focusing attention on the fact that there is a dynamical balance worth striking is to remind that, over time, how you respond will be reflected back in the general response you will receive.
So the golden rule is a good example of practical holism. It recognises the organic and dichotomistic nature of a "reasonable" system - one that can organise itself via a dynamical balance.
As an image of a system, this is very different from the mechanical notion of organisation where outcomes are computed by algorithms, or deterministically assembled from component actions.
The golden rule is an example of something that is not actually "a rule" then. It is an optimising constraint to be applied to particular actions. It says consider the short-term in the light of the long-term. The choice still remains open - compete or co-operate, cleverly game or wisely reciprocate. The particular actions are never mandated. But the point is that accumulated experience can see the long-term balance in a way that immediate thinking might not.
Humans aren't machines. And that is a really important philosophical point. Especially when we seem pretty hell-bent at times on turning ourselves into machine-like thinkers living in machine-like societies.
That is the reason for my constant surprise that the faintest bit of organic analysis on this board is so often met with the hostility of those who both seem to hate the mechanical attitude to life, and yet then relentlessly employ mechanical reasoning to object to my naturalism.
What is wisdom? A mechanist would already be thinking of it as some kind of "thing" - monadic, absolute, stand-alone.
But an organicist or systems thinker would immediately seek out the dichotomy by which any "thingness" must develop.
So wisdom is not ignorance, naivety, dumbness or some other generalised lack of smartness or knowledge. And from an organicist perspective - a Peircean perspective - we can quickly see that that particular opposition is the developmental dichotomy. If wisdom reflects the productively organised final state, then its antithesis in that sense is the primality of vagueness or undetermined potential.
And then - because fully developed dichotomies arrive at their most definite or crisp expression in the trichotomy of a hierarchical form, a hierarchically-fixed balance - we would seek out the functional partner to this notion of wisdom. We would identify the "other" that stands in a reciprocal relation to it, thus forming the other boundary to a triadic state of hierarchical organisation.
Hierarchies express a local~global or particular~general relation. That is how a dichotomy - a symmetry breaking - achieves its fullest or crispest expression. A hierarchy is an asymmetry - broken all the way to its complementary extremes.
This is how organicism works - its metaphysical logic. In contrast to the confused picture of reality presented by mechanicalism - where either everything is bottom-up construction, or some kind of weird dualism is in place where "laws" mysteriously control "events" - the organic story connects everything with an Aristotelian four causes approach. You have the local limit - responsible for the bottom-up material and efficient cause. And you have the global limit - responsible for the top-down formal and final cause.
So take that holistic organicism and apply it to the question: what is wisdom? What do you know, the folk definition targets dichotomies that are already pretty familiar. Habit vs attention. Wisdom vs cleverness. Youth vs experience. Fluid thinking vs crystalised knowledge.
So we all sort of know what wisdom is - and why it would have the particular cultural image of a wizened old person who is calm-spoken and takes the broad view with accustomed ease. In every Hollywood flick, we are used to this opposition being personified - cleverness taking the form or the brash young hero, willing to take big risks on scanty information.
However, when asked to give a definition, suddenly there is a general confused murmur. Definitions demand some kind of mechanical act of thought. You are supposed to assemble a description by listing some set of predicates that define the monadic object in question. The thing has to be seen to stand alone in some absolute way. It is the sum of its parts. But then we are left with only that set of parts - all themselves still needed definition.
This happens all the time. And the problem is that people think that a mechanical logic is the basis of philosophical analysis. Yet philosophy got going by being dialectical. Meaning was found by analysing being in terms of its mutually formative relations. Mechanised logic - the laws of thought, predication, syllogistic reasoning - is a useful, but reductive, add-on. It is only given prominence because ... that is how you turn folk into people who think like machines and so will construct a machine-like society.
That is why wisdom is another example of how to reason differently. If wisdom is a thing, that can only be in relation to some kind of useful opposite - a partner in crime. And cleverness is that obvious partner. Then more generally, we ought to be able to see how neatly this maps to the actual structural organisation of our own brains, and eventually, to the actual structural organisation of the Comos itself - as a reasonable and intelligible organic enterprise.
[And note that while I oppose mechanicalism to organicism, reductionism to holism, I still say that they can function as complementary partners. My holism incorporates reductionism as its own useful "other". There is nothing wrong about a local/mechanical approach to logical analysis - so long as it knows its limits. Reductionism, by contrast, rather violently wants to reject holism as some kind of causal illusion. And I see that push-back on just about all my posts here.]
Yet this is what I did say. You can be clever without being wise. Sharp without being broad. Short-term without being long-term. Particular without being general.
So if we are talking about being "really smart", it is about being strongly divided in a way that is then functionally well-balanced.
Cleverness applied from a state of generalised skill, knowledge and mastery is going to be properly grounded. But for any individual, it is going to take time and experience to accumulate those background habits.
And then from a biological lifecycle point of view - one that recognises that habits can come to dominate eventually in an unbalanced fashion - it then becomes a familiar three stage life trajectory that winds up in the perils of senescence.
The immature mind is clever and hasty as it is busy taking risks learning. A mature mind has struck a balance between youth and experience. Then a senescent mind might be very wise, or optimally-adapted to a given way of life, but the dependence on accumulated habits becomes the new risk. If the world changes dramatically, the habits could become unwise. And a lack of learning capacity means the structure of thought can't be adapted.
So old fart syndrome is a thing. The old have the most experience and so are the best adapted. Yet fixing a structure in place is itself a further generalised risk.
All this falls directly out of a hierarchical/developmental understanding of nature as a system.
Like you said (more or less), intuition is arriving at truth without reason. Intuition means instinctively knowing the truth. Why is this good or wise? Because reason doesn't know what intuition means. But intuition means what reason doesn't know. And neither is "better" than the other.
Meow!
M
Of course not; that's why I re-purposed your terms to make my point, which you didn't get.
Quoting apokrisis
Appeal to authority much?
That seems at best a muddled copy of your initial post:
Quoting Janus
Quoting Janus
So wisdom is...let me guess: intersubjective? Or was that five months ago? :joke:
Have you looked up the definition of that yet?
No, never. :rofl: you're debate tactics are incredible.
Whoops, redacted! *sarcasm overlooked*
Thanks for the clarification.
I can't really agree with the conclusion, as with intuition that there is a potential (and probable) set of mistakes and false assumptions waiting to happen that lead to a further continuation of mistakes and false assumptions that intuition can subsequently deny that the mistakes and false assumptions are to it's credit by lack of reasoning as there no point in reasoning why intuition might have flaws.
Indeed intuition can mean what one cannot know by reasoning, but how is that any differenct than forcing an answer to a question prematurely (a hasty generalization) for the sake of having an answer?
OK... perhaps intution means this well with it's intentions, but is it really prudent to force an answer for the sake of having an answer?
Here's maybe a good question for further clarity?
Is there (in your notion) some sort of (metaphysical) the truth that is intrinsic to the universe or our experience of the universe?
Meow!
G
btw... I do need to make clear that this is not a game or a competition. I view this as an exchange of ideas. There are no trophies or medals to win in such a dialog. If you do view this as a game or competition then let me know and I'll end this now.
Sometimes wisdom has to be softened if it is unpalatable in its natural state, just as apples need to be peeled and blended to produce 'baby food' for infants.
Quoting Noble Dust
I have never said wisdom is intersubjective. Everything I have said points to its being personal, singular. I don't know what you think "five months" has to do with it...perhaps you think I have changed my tune? Well, I haven't...I have long argued that religious or mystical experience, aesthetic experience and wisdom are ultimately matters of personal feeling, and that 'truths' in these dimensions cannot be inter-subjectively corroborated.
This has been my main point of disagreement with @Wayfarer. Empirical and factual knowledge may be intersubjectively determinable, but neither aesthetic or religious understanding, nor wisdom, are.
On the other hand, everything about human life is intersubjective, human being can come to nothing without the culturally acquired knowledge and understanding that mediates it, and yet human being is not exhaustively constructed by culture either; but that is a another matter altogether.
Wisdom could be different set of attributes, set by one consciousness to describe the appearance of another consciousness in a certain way.
Intuition yields a different kind of knowledge (knowledge by feeling, by familiarity) than rational, empirical knowledge. It is when the former is conflated with the latter that the problems begin, on both sides of the argument.
That's because you insist that the insight aspect of religious traditions is private, subjective or personal in nature. Whereas I say that in various domains of discourse, there are indeed ways of validating such insights, in fact that is one of the primary rationales of such traditions
Of course I have never denied that there are traditional methods of validation within religious domains of discourse. For examples, the infallibility of the pope is validated by the authority of the church, and the wisdom of the disciple, at least in the eastern traditions, is certified by the master, whose own wisdom was certified by his master and so on.
But this kind of thing cannot count as the kind of unbiased intersubjective corroboration that exists in science, mathematics and logic; which is the point I have long been making and which you refuse to acknowledge, even though you have never produced any solid argument against it.
My focus is generally on the various grounds of articulating the basis for an objective moral order. If you leave such arguments aside, then indeed science and mathematics and logic are complete unto themselves, but they suffer from the lack of any specific moral orientation. In other words, they omit any notion of there being an objective (as distinct from pragmatic or utilitarian) good. So if the good really is then a private or subjective matter, it then collapses the distinction between knowledge and opinion, again.
A passage from Jacques Maritain on this:
But then, I suppose one could respond, Maritain is Catholic, doesn't all this simply culminate in the requirement to accept 'papal infallibility'? Isn't that the very kind of dogmatism what we are obliged to avoid? And a good question it is.,too. I suppose my way of resolving that is to admit a form of pluralism by positing that Catholicism is but one of a number of ways in which human culture has responded to the Divine; in that 'domain of discourse', the idea of the Good has been rendered according to the particular logic of that tradition. So one can still entertain the notion that there is a genuine revelation at in this tradition, without being obliged to accept it on its terms.
Sure, you can entertain the idea, or even believe that it is so. But if you believe, for example, that the Christian, or the Buddhist, revelation is a genuine revelation of the truth, then I can't see how you would not be "obliged to accept it on its own terms". This would seem to be some kind of prevarication, or at least, vacillation.
Your way of seeing this seems to involve a kind of cultural relativism. Where do you draw the line, for example? What religions are not genuine "responses to the Divine"? Or, on the other hand, is it the case that all religions are merely responses to the idea and feeling of the divine, and none of their claims can be consistently (plausibly) taken literally?
I think it always comes down to faith. If you are an aspiring Buddhist, you have faith in the possibility of liberation. You have faith that the masters who discipline you are themselves liberated, or at least enlightened, and so on. You have no way of knowing which masters are enlightened and which are phonies, other than your own feelings about it.
There can be no knowledge in the kind of sense that we have with everyday facts, science and mathematics. Even if you have epiphanic experiences you have no way of knowing exactly what they indicate about the nature of reality. This is true even of the Buddha and Christ; they could have no absolutely certainty that they were not deceiving themselves. If the Buddha believed that he remembered 5000 of his past lives, he could have no way of knowing that those memories were genuine, and that they were not on account of some psychic connection or an incredibly fertile imagination or whatever. Remember, even Christ said "Oh, Father why hast Thou forsaken me?"
With what matters to you, what you think is really important. In my case, there are certainly elements of those philosophies I take seriously and literally and attempt to practice. Faith is an element, but faith is not 'fideism', faith alone, clinging to belief. IN fact that's something I've tried to resist all my life.
The world we live in now, all of such ideas and systems interact with each other and are freely available from many sources. There are so many ways, so many knowledge claims, conflicting ideas and opinions. On the one hand, it's an unprecedented opportunity for learning, on the other it can be very daunting, when it seems that all such claims contradict each other.
There is an Amazon review of one of Huston Smith's books, Forgotten Truths, that I sometimes quote in this context. It says that:
That's about my assessment too.
Quoting Janus
I haven't studied Plato's theory of knowledge in depth (although I do intend to), but I do know that a great deal of it concerns questioning what we think we know or take for granted about the world. Consider the distrust of the testimony of sense - that the sensory objects are not really valid objects of knowledge, due to their mutability and corruptibility. Whereas, if we regard the 'realm of everyday facts', as normative, we're essentially asserting naive realism - 'of course the empirical world is the real world'. Philosophy questions that, although I do agree it's not easy to do that.
But that kind of questioning used to be represented in science itself - that 'science reveals the real world' - the world of ultimately-existing entities and forces, atoms or leptons or quarks or whatever. But it's one of the attributes of post-modernity that even this understanding is how held to be perspectival and no longer absolute; it comprises falsifiable hypotheses, not statements of absolute truth. 'There are no absolutes' is practically a truism.
Quoting Janus
It's more that we have no way of assessing such a claim.
I agree that there are many elements in traditions that seem fantastic or mythological. But there is no absolute objective yardstick to measure such claims against. You're not going to validate or invalidate such claims against anything known to peer-reviewed science.
I think the points of agreement between religions are mostly ethical, most notably versions of the Golden Rule and elaborations of that. Materialists can also be, without inconsistency, adherents of the Golkden Rule; in fact it is precisely what is required for mere social harmony. Disagreements abound between the abrahamic and non-abrahamic religions when it comes to conceptions of the absolute (supreme being), the afterlife and divine punishment. If there is an "objective matter of fact" then in these areas of disagreement all but one (if that) of the religions must be mistaken.
Quoting Wayfarer
I agree, and this is a personal matter, essentially affectively driven; what matters to you equates with what you care about.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, and that's exactly what I have been saying; there is no way to validate such claims intersubjectively, because there is nothing intrinsic to them that can be observed, or checked in the way claims in mathematics or science can be. So, I don't think it's really a matter of "absolute yardsticks"; there would seem to be no such thing even in science.
The difference between the kind of 'knowledge' claimed to be associated with religious or mystical experience and everyday factual knowledge, scientific knowledge and mathematical knowledge, is that the latter can be built into a falsifiable body of intersubjective knowledge.
So, perhaps we have not been disagreeing as much as it has appeared, after all...
Just because it's something that can only be known in the first person, doesn't mean it's simply subjective.
Again, I agree; although the big question is what it means to say that it is real. We know what we mean when we say that a phenomenon of the senses is real, but it's not straightforward when reality claims are made about what we might think is indicated by religious, mystical, aesthetic or ethical feelings and experiences.
Obviously there are intersubjective commonalities when it comes to such experiences, but what exactly those commonalities tell us about the nature of reality is not so easy to determine; perhaps it is not even possible to do so. I can't think of any methodology, but I do leave it open, since it could be a failure of my own imagination.
OK...
I can agree, well... sort of agree.
My take on intuition is that it is a slang term for a quick reflex observation/analysis/conclusion that indeed is founded in some sort of reasoning and based upon some sort of small set of available information. This notion of intuition is indeed a sort of knowledge by feeling or by familiarity, but it is a very short sighted knowledge. Indeed it can prove to be correct, but quite often it proves to be misguided in that the conclusion is founded upon a very short list and selected set of evidence. Intuition is a potential starting point or catalyst for a much larger and detailed investigation, but if it is unfortunately confused with being an end in itself; thus thought of as being a sort of guiding force or and actual metaphysical reality.
Of course there are situations that do not require detailed analysis, as they might well be considered trivial aspects of everyday life, but even then some sort of reasonable, rational analysis is in play. Just because the analysis is very fast does not mean it wasn't in play. Also, just because it was quick and easy analysis doesn't mean it is different than slower and more difficult analysis.
I suppose what I'm saying is that intuition is simply a potential starting point of rational, empirical investigation and not something all together different. The problem is when one begins to believe that intuition is and end in itself and enough or somehow equal to a much more detailed analysis. Sure the first notion of intuition can be correct, but the list is really long of moments where intuition is dead wrong, but the initial intuition is held onto due to familiarity, feeling, preference or just pure stubbornness.
A former PF member once wrote this reply (somewhat less vitriolic than most of his posts):
[b]"You are taking your sense of wonder, combining it with your inability to conceive of certain things, and demanding from everyone else that they remain as ignorant. That's not good."
? Kwalish Kid[/b]
I allow that to echo in my mind with nearly everything of which I begin to feel quite certain; thus I place my intuitions, as well as any detailed investigations into perspective.
I suppose I could say that intuition is a necessary thing as a starting point in the process of rational empirical investigation, but it is not prudent to allow it to be an end in itself considered to be a guiding force or a metaphysical reality. I wish not to confuse my thinking my evidence for something is that it is evident to me (my support for the conclusion is simply what I concluded).
Meow!
G
I just want to point out that I have not claimed that intuition is necessarily a good guide when it comes to empirical, scientific or even everyday knowledge. I think your definition and understanding of intuition is too narrowly focussed.
When it comes to matters that fall outside the everyday, empirical or scientific, apart from the fact that logical consistency and coherency are obviously also often important, personal feeling, intuition and experience become paramount. Think of love, the arts, ethics, philosophy and religion in this connection.
Contra the Kwalish Kid statement, I do not expect, or even think it is a good idea for, anyone to believe anything on the basis of anyone else's intuitions.
Woof!
Maybe, but how could we know how stupid he was?
Absolutely... !
Infinite wisdom only attainable after death... all the big questions answered instantly... without any room for debate!
Or not...
I think so...
That may be the weakness of intuition. Consequently, the weakness in reason is that every step of the reasoning process has to be correct for the conclusion to be correct. Reason has the benefit of exhaustivity and finality when the steps can be reasonably shown to be correct (and how often does that happen? Just read a reasoned debate on this forum for the answer. Or just read a bunch of different philosophers who disagree with each other); intuition, on the other hand, has the benefit of knowing the conclusion without taking exhaustive steps that need to be perfect; Intuition has the potential to avoid the mistakes in reasoning which lead to badly reasoned conclusions. Hence, one is not better than the other.
Quoting Mayor of Simpleton
I think you missed the poetic license I used (sorry, was being intuitive for a sec...) I'll translate: "reason doesn't know what intuition means when it says something (Reason: "Hey intuition, what do you mean by that?"). But intuition means (poetic dictionary definition): "that which reason doesn't know". It was an example of something poetic expressing a truth in a way that reason can't.
Quoting Mayor of Simpleton
You misunderstand intuition if you think it means forcing an answer. That's a pretty uncharitable interpretation of what I've been trying to express.
Quoting Mayor of Simpleton
My intuition says "yes"; my reason says "???"
Quoting Mayor of Simpleton
If it came across that way, then I was probably either agitated by feeling misunderstood, or slightly tipsy. Either one is very possible. Apologies.
One note before I comment...
I'm happy this is not viewed as a competition. I've encountered far too many folks who think this is sport; thus the flaming an trolling one encounters that is supposed to be "harmless chat". I'm less concerned about connection between my personal identity and my notions I discuss. My perspective is that this forum is a sort of sounding board and a peer review. Thanks!
Anyway...
I don't believe that reasoning has to be "perfect", but it needs to be less self-assuming; thus open to critical review. Also, I'm not all to sure what "exhaustive steps" intail, as one's exhaustion is perhaps another persons warm-up.
In any event, I still cannot help but believe that intuition alone is hasty.
Bad reasoning is still a form of "exhaustive steps" in reasoning; thus the errors can be exposed and the reasoning refined. Without the "work" of these steps how is a lack of steps really better other than it having the ability to speed up a process, by skipping steps?
Quoting Noble Dust
I'm not too sure if I'm really being all that uncharitable. Isn't the notion of intuition not the fielding of a decision? It seems to always go "my intuition tells me thus and such". That is a statement of something being evident and not an offering of evidence. One draws a conclusion... and without the aforementioned "exhaustive steps" prudent for the sake of clarity or accuracy and possible critical review of the steps, as the steps (investigations) are there... how exactly is intuition not a decision an one basically blurted out as a reflex; thus a decision fielded in the face of a question without much investigation?
I feel no need to be charitable here. I feel more a need to be accurate as to the nature of intuition no matter how brutal it might appear.
Quoting Noble Dust
I suppose it's fair if I answer this one too.
My intuition from much earlier said "yes", but my reason found a multitude of flaws and biases in my intuition and now concludes a nearly 100% certain "no".
Why "No"?
I've spent quite a deal of time and effort (perhaps exhaustive steps?) picking it apart and reviewing it in detail. Metaphysics has become a house of cards that looked to be a fortress, but I found a puff of wind or even a simply finger flick of reason/logic cused it to collapse and if left alone it would collapse upon it's own weight.
Here's a strange thing...
My review of metaphysics and the notion of intrinsic truths began with a notion of intuition that something about all this was wrong. I didn't stop at the intuition, but decided to look into it beyond what my first intuition indicated to me.
Anyway...
I still view intuition as being a potential starting point for reasoning, but in and of itself is very hasty short sighted probably extremely biases reasoning. Reasoning beyond intuition places itself under review. This is a luxury of intuition as it needs no review... it just claims to know... basta.
This is not an appeal to an authority, but rather a very good example of how I tick regarding intuition and such...
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“I'm frequently asked, "Do you believe there's extraterrestrial intelligence?"
I give the standard arguments- there are a lot of places out there, the molecules of life are everywhere, I use the word billions, and so on. Then I say it would be astonishing to me if there weren't extraterrestrial intelligence, but of course there is as yet no compelling evidence for it.
Often, I'm asked next, "What do you really think?"
I say, "I just told you what I really think."
"Yes, but what's your gut feeling?"
But I try not to think with my gut. If I'm serious about understanding the world, thinking with anything besides my brain, as tempting as that might be, is likely to get me into trouble. Really, it's okay to reserve judgment until the evidence is in.”
- Carl Sagan
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Basically that's where I landed in my investigation and I'm still curious I what direction and where the next bits of info will lead me.
Meow!
G
I wasn't directing the post at you personally. I'm only concerned with the ideas being presented and what I read. If I understood what I read is another issue.
Quoting Janus
My only problem here is that everything you have mentioned (love, the arts, ethics, philosophy and religion) do indeed have a very logical consistancy and coherency if one chooses to look a bit closer. It's really not all that difficult to prove with clear logic and evidence that one person loves another person or why certain factors found in an aesthetic experience appeals to one person but not to another. Philosophy and religion are all notions that can indeed be reviewed and understood by logic and evidence. Ethics (the study of morals) like politics, aesthetics, social norms/mores are all subsets of value theory an are more than not justified by logical appeals and attempts at reasonable/rational arguments/debates. I see not exclusive domain or difference in intuition and reasoning other than intuition is basically a hasty reflex based upon what evidence happens to be on the surface and reasoning simply looks for more factors and evidence; thus can take up greater foundation in fielding a decision.
Indeed intuition and experience (as if experience is in the sole domain of intuitive thought and plays no role in empirical or scientific review?) become paramount, but as I said before they are a beginning of reasoning and if left alone with no further progression as both the beginning and end in and of itself... well, as I said before... there are just far too many "stones unturned"; thus the truth of the certainty is founded upon a reluctance to review.
Meow!
G
Wisdom moves from the past into the future. But the future is not like the past except in the mundane sense of things always falling to Earth (gravity). What I mean is wisdom gets outdated so fast that it becomes pointless to acquire it.
You don't need to worry about me taking anything personally. In fact I cannot imagine how you could have read that into my responses.
Quoting Mayor of Simpleton
Yes, well my only problem is that you seem to think that the fact there might be appropriate logics in love, the arts, ethics, philosophy and religion has any bearing on what I have been arguing. Perhaps you could choose some of my actual statements and show how it would be relevant.
Quoting Mayor of Simpleton
This passage seems to be the closest you have come to making an actual argument. But again nothing in it contradicts anything I have said. Prior to the advent of an explicitly understood scientific method, intuition indeed reigned (you only have to look at Aristotle's physics or Chinese medicine). I have already acknowledged that intuition is not necessarily the best guide to how things actually are empirically speaking.
Of course even such early disciplines have their own logics; it is just that elaborating on intuitive assumptions, instead of inductive conjecture and experimental verification or falsification, provides the principal activity of the rational intellect in those ancient domains. In the domains of religion and the arts, intuition still reigns. People's understanding of poems, paintings, music, mystical writings and religious allegories is still mostly an intuitive process.
But, of course intuitive processes may be informed by rational thought, too. What do you think theology consists in, for example? There is plenty of logic in that discipline. Even in geometry and logic itself, what does self-evidence consist in if not intuition? How would you know that one thing is entailed by another if not be intuition?
Woof!
J
I never tried to argue that intuition should be used "alone", or that it was better; I've already stressed that. Or, if something I said led you to believe that I think that about intuition, then I didn't word it right. The whole point I was making is that both intuition and reason are valuable. I'm making that argument because you don't seem to consider intuition valuable.
Quoting Mayor of Simpleton
I said your interpretation of intuition as "forcing an answer" was uncharitable, because it's inaccurate. Maybe uncharitable isn't the right word; it was just an inaccurate interpretation of what I mean by intuition; it seems like you haven't given much consideration to what I'm saying intuition is, and what it's function is within the larger scheme of thinking. Or maybe I just haven't given a good enough picture of what I think about that.
Quoting Mayor of Simpleton
I'm more interested in Charles Ives than Carl Sagan, so maybe that's where we have an issue here? Indeed, music, especially the music of someone like Ives, is pretty much the supreme fusion of reason and intuition.
:rofl:
Can you make an argument for the idea that wisdom moves from the past into the future? To say that wisdom gets outdated fast is to basically say that wisdom doesn't exist, which is fine if you want to make that argument. Otherwise though, I can't see how that idea makes any sense; it's essentially a non sequitur.
To do so I'd need really specific statement and not generalized notions.
In addition, I'd need to know a large martix of factors ranging from past individual experiences, current individual knowledge, and factors of individual preference. The example needs to be specific, as the experiences, current knowledge and factors of preference will vary from individual to individual.
Once I have the information it is really not all that difficult to understand why someone has a preference to a certain type of art or falls in love with a specific individual; thus present a clear logic as to why such actiona and events play out as they have played out.
Indeed such a process of analysis is difficult, but it is indeed possible. The reason why such things are attributed to "magic" or "fate" or "chance/luck" has to do more with the complication involved in acquiring the information, access to the information, analysis of the information leading to an understanding... in short... it's simply easier to say "luck" than investigate into the various factors anvectors involved in an action or and event playing out as it has, but this "making it easier" does not take away the factors and vectors involved in the action and event playing out as it has played out nor does it grant credence to any "magic" or "fate" or "chance/luck". Perhaps the only thing proven by attributing actions and events to "magic" or "fate" or "chance/luck" is how little we care to actually understand what has occurred and simply wish to move forward; thus attributing actions and events "magic" or "fate" or "chance/luck" builds up institutions and a possible idolatry to willful ignorance, as these attribution do nothing whatsoever to explain an action or and event, but simply dodge the critical thought necessary to understand.
I've left quite a bit out here, as this could mull on and on and on. My reason is I'm not too sure just how far I should go with this one before I feel I'm beating a dead horse.
Quoting Janus
Well... at the risk of pissing off some folks (probably not you) various Chinese medicine (something very difficult to pin down) has been empirically tested. Much of it has been proven to be nothing more than "theatrical placebos", as in the case of acupuncture...
(take your pick: https://www.google.at/search?ei=mkf5WsS-G8OWkwWf3Ij4DA&q=acupuncture+theatrical+placebos&oq=acupuncture+theatrical+placebos&gs_l=psy-ab.12...19040.26310.0.28084.12.12.0.0.0.0.112.872.9j2.11.0....0...1c.1.64.psy-ab..1.0.0....0.NmLtThIvtYo )
... and other aspect indeed do show therapeutic value.
The question remains was this something illustraing the triumph of intuitive processes or simply a bit of "accidental discovery via trial and error"? History is simply littered from mankind's intuition getting it dead wrong.
Of course there can be bad science that emerges from poor applications of empirical processes. Phrenology and Homeopathy immediately come into mind.
One of the differences between intuition and empirical sciences is that empirical sciences will debunk and refute claims whereas intuition only changes when the individual who's voiced and intuitive claim changes their mind. Intuitions are personal observations/conclusions in one breath. When challenged this is more than likely viewed as a personal challenge attacking the individual and not just the idea. Perhaps a very important aspect of science is that it really doesn't care what an individual thinks or desires or prefers. If the science does care about what an individual think or desires or prefers it really doesn take long before the corrective process debunks the claim and it lands on a pile of pseudosciences only to be applied by the stubborn.
Quoting Janus
I now this is going to get me into trouble, but I can't help but believe this reign of intuition is simply a way of justification of claims one knows little about, but insists upon speaking of with absolute certainty. In religion it's basically evident in the claims of answering with certainty the currently unknown with the absolute unknowable, then having the feeling of accomplishing an answering the unknown, but actually all that happened was a calculated dodging the issue. Religion applies intuition in the same way a good magician use misdirection to make it seems that a rabbit popped out of a hat or a someone was sawed into two halves.
My experience of art might seems intuitive, but it is actually a complex matrix of factors and vectors that lead to me interpreting what I'm viewing. There is no experience of art that I can experience without taking the baggage of my past experiences and preferences.
Quoting Janus
I have the perfect video for this one. I find it more or less captures my thoughts well and is a bit funnier than I can ever be.
Quoting Janus
I believe this question is misleading.
Perhaps intuition is the beginning toward knowing, but in and of itself it's not knowing. Knowledge comes via critical thought and knowledge is continually refines as this process of critical thought continues. Hasty assumption is achieved via intuition alone. I try not to confuse the first couple steps of a marathon with the entire race. ;)
Meow!
G
Fine...
My point here is that intuition without continual critical investigation can lead to far more errors (thus of less value when alone); thus intuition is only a beginning and not an end.
Reasoning without intuition is not as plagued by this error prone short-sightedness found in intuition alone. Sure it might not seem so inspired or magical, but I'm more concerned with outcomes than appearance.
Quoting Noble Dust
This is all fine and good, but how exactly is intuition not a conclusion?
Also, since it is intuition and not a process of critical reasoning, how is this not a conclusion founded upon a very small sample size of information; thus a hasty (aka forced) answer?
Quoting Noble Dust
Honestly I'd say nearly all music is a fusion of intuition and reason, but no music is the result of intuition alone, but there is music that is the result of reason alone.
Meow!
G
Wisdom is basically knowledge. Knowledge has a shelf-life I believe. History is evidence for that right? Flat earth - round earth is a good example.
I'm getting a little frustrated here. Nowhere did I say intuition was an end. You seem to read into my argument a lot. So do you consider reasoning a beginning, an end, or what?
Quoting Mayor of Simpleton
Again, "inspired or magical" is a pretty uncharitable response here, simply based on the tone. Do you really think that that's why I'm placing importance on intuition? Do you think that's why @Janus is making an argument in regards to intuition? You seem to have a charicature in your mind, probably based on those days in which you placed importance on intuition, of what people who place value on intuition are like. And furthermore, a feeling of "inspiration" (not sure what "magical" means) is natural when the intuition is used. I openly take that feeling for what it is and listen to it; I don't disparage it.
Quoting Mayor of Simpleton
Ugh...again, where did I say intuition is a conclusion? What does that even mean? It doesn't even make grammatical sense.
Quoting Mayor of Simpleton
Intuition deals with the immanently personal; sample size isn't important. You're using the rules of the game of reason to try to eliminate intuition (which doesn't play by reason's rules in the first place), from whatever game it is you're playing here. Essentially, intuition can never have a place in that game if the rules of intuition aren't allowed into the ring. If intuition has to play by reason's rules, then intuition is indeed worthless, which is basically what you're trying to set up here. But again, that's an uncharitable charicature of what intuition is, and it reveals your own lack of intuition.
You're only addressing the role of intuition vis a vis empirical matters, so since I already more or less agree, I can't find much to respond to.
No you didn't say intuition was an end... I did.
If intuition is the ability to acquire knowledge without proof, evidence, or conscious reasoning, or without understanding how the knowledge was acquired, would not intuition simply be a non-supported assumption of how things are without bothering to continue an investigation?
One's intuition tells one "this is evident to me that..." and subsequently moves on building upon that notion with further intuitions and suddenly applied reasoning.
I consider reasoning a process. Indeed we can know things to, but only to the best possible evidence or support we can have at the time. What is known can change and refine via this process. The problem with intuition is it does not have the process of reasoning involved in it's decision making; thus often falls short or stagnates in stubbornness.
Quoting Noble Dust
Sorry for the selection of terms, but honestly if the term require charity to hold up then is it really worth as much as one might believe it to be?
To be honest I believe that far too much charity has been granted to intuition and perhaps it's overdue for a reality check.
Quoting Noble Dust
Honestly I have really no idea why you'd place more importance or even equal important upon intuition.
Quoting Noble Dust
I think we've sort of cleared that up, as I will only consider this vis a vis empirical matters. I'll answer that to Janus in my reply to his/her post.
Quoting Noble Dust
Not really... I'm simply placing the two concepts intution and reasoning acrossed from one another and looking at the pros and cons.
I'm not interested in the private or social placebos that make one "feel better", but rather I'm looking at the two concepts to determine which of them is the better process to gaining knowledge that is less biases and information that is less narrow of a perspective. So far reasoning is far in the lead.
Quoting Noble Dust
Again... I said it was a conclusion, as illustrated by it's definition.
Quoting Noble Dust
This seems a bit silly now, as the alternative would be to use my intution about what intuition means; thus why are we bothering having a debate and attempting to reason out what intuition means?
Why not simply call it whatever one chooses to call it and move on? Why the post and the relies?
Quoting Noble Dust
Intution has rules?
I thought the point of intuition was to simply call it as one sees it according to what one sees.
Are the rules of intuition "anything goes"?
Quoting Noble Dust
So you did get my point.
Intuition alone or without subsequent reasoning is indeed not worthless, but is only of worth to the one who fielded the intuitive notion.
- Accupuncture works!
- The earth is flat!
- The sun revolves around the earth!
- Air is breathable as long as I don't see smoke!
- My rally hat caused the team to come back and win!
- The Comulians are the one true gods as the literally control the weather I see (Rick and Morty)!
OK... that might have been uncharitable.
I suppose if there is any evidence to support intuition it would be anecdotal evidence, but my take on this type of debate regarding intuition/ancedotal evidence vs. reasoning/empirical evidence is reflected in this cartoon:
Let's avoid that.
No matter...
I'm going to be out of your hair for awhile. A trip to Paris for a week with no internet. Just art, food and my wife. I suppose I'll have an unfortunate (good) time applying my reason in experiencing the art. ;)
Meow!
G
Indeed.
I'm not really that interested in a long laundry list of the personal examples of intuition being a "great thing" (evidence collected in a casual or informal manner and relying heavily or entirely on personal testimony... aka anecdotal evidence), as this simply become pleading special cases leading to errors of sample size.
At the risk of a tautology, intution is simply intuition... a potential beginning process for a more accurate and clearer investigation via empirical reasoning or it becomes a stubborn stopping point for those who wish to have an investigation/answer in one breath; thus ending investigation or the continuation of a carefully protected investigation in a hermetically sealed worldview allowing nothing more than believing in believing and faith in faith supported by anecdotal evidence.
Indeed anecdotal evidence does have a value, but only when in combination with empirical methods/evidences. I view intuition in the same manner... it only has a value when combined to checked by empirical methods. When alone intuition is the breeding ground for superstitious thinking and dangerous pseudosciences with no checks in place to control the danger.
My take on this whole muddle is that intuition has had a protected status and has been quite romanticized and overestimated for the sake of granting credence to knowledge assumed to be true knowledge that has no foundation. Oddly enough the ones granting the credence to intuition tend to be the same ones who field the notions of knowledge assumed to be true knowledge that has no foundation.
Strange thought now... I can't get this moment out of my head... I wonder why?
Anyway... I'm off to go to Paris... Pompidou, d'Orsay, Sacré-Cœur... ;)
Meow! (Miaou!)
G
OK, well, you're entitled to your views, of course. For me though, they come across as tendentious; I agree with @Noble Dust that your account of intuition is a superficial 'simpletonistic' caricature. Happy trails!
That seems a very unwise position.
I read somewhere that wisdom = good knowledge. ''Good'' is an adjective'' but ''knowledge'' is a noun. Said otherwise we first have to find knowledge and then determine if it's good or not.
Try replacing 'knowledge' with 'understanding', and 'good' with 'true'.
If it was a big serious business, one would probably be fired not being able to perform a normal mail correspondence.
Well, I think change is the only unchanging truth. If there's wisdom worth holding onto then that's it.
Doesn't that mean wisdom needs to update itself with time?