Do we really have choices? Aren't we all slaves to our nature? — TheMadFool

1. Y
2. N

Did you glance at the OP I linked? Very good on this.

However even in the drivers seat we must go where we want but what we want isn't something that we have power over. — TheMadFool

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’.

I'm just bored by the concept of cognitive bias because everyone has it. — Noble Dust

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

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. — 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.

When we do that, we undermine intuition; you have an intuition about wisdom; so do I. — 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?

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. — 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

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. — bloodninja

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.

Bias blind spot: — Mayor of Simpleton

Shouldn't you have rather quoted yourself from back here?

Well... not quite. [Etc, etc, etc...] — Mayor of Simpleton

:rofl:

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. — 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.

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? — Mayor of Simpleton

What is intuition, then?

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. — 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.

What is intuition, then? — Noble Dust

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?

Where for a minute did I say it was rule-following? — apokrisis

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 it wise to live by habit? Is it unwise to be clever? — Noble Dust

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.

Your terms are clunky and don't reflect use — 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.

I like that definition, although I can tell it’s slanted towards your feelings about intuition. — Noble Dust

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.

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. — Noble Dust

Meow!

G

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. — Noble Dust

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.

I said there's wisdom to be learned from self-hatred; not that it's wise to hate oneself. — Noble Dust

Sure, there's wisdom to be learnt, not in being in, but in extracting yourself from, any unwise state.

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). — Janus


I don't know what you mean here. — Noble Dust

Sure you do!

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’. — Wayfarer

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.

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. — bloodninja

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.

Yes I mentioned the golden rule as a specific example of how it would work.

...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 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.]

This is a really good 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 intelligently attentive to what is at hand. — Janus

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

Is that what I said? — apokrisis

Of course not; that's why I re-purposed your terms to make my point, which you didn't get.

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. — apokrisis

Appeal to authority much?

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. — Janus

That seems at best a muddled copy of your initial post:

In a nutshell?
Do your best to abstain from bullshit and self-hatred, and from asking others what those are. — Janus

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. — Janus

So wisdom is...let me guess: intersubjective? Or was that five months ago? :joke:

Appeal to authority much? — Noble Dust

Have you looked up the definition of that yet?

No, never. :rofl: you're debate tactics are incredible.

Thanks.

Whoops, redacted! *sarcasm overlooked*

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. — Noble Dust

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.

That seems at best a muddled copy of your initial post: — Noble Dust

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.

So wisdom is...let me guess: intersubjective? Or was that five months ago? — 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.

Empirical and factual knowledge may be intersubjectively determinable, but neither aesthetic or religious understanding, nor wisdom, are. — Janus

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

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 — Wayfarer

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.

Well, if you pick something like 'papal infallibility' as an example, then of course it will be impossible to take issue with you, unless I wanted to argue for such principle, which I never would.

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:

the standards and values at play in human life can be understood only in terms of sense experience, and consequently lose any intrinsic universal and unconditional validity founded either on the truth of human nature as accessible to human reason or on the eternal truth of divine Reason.

When it comes to Ethics, we have only relativized or subjectivized values, which deal with the patterns of conduct accepted by a social group in a certain place and at a certain moment, and which are data of observation for the psychologist, the anthropologist and the sociologist, but which are in themselves as impossible of rational justification and as extraneous to the field of truth and error as an emotional outburst or a national liking for beef, borscht or spaghetti. How could moral obligation derive from the sway of the idea -- the universal idea -- of the good over man's practical reason? It can derive only from psychological pressure created by habit, fear and social taboos.

There is no room, moreover, in the Empiricist view for the notion of bonum honestum, the good for the sake of good: it is replaced by the notion of the "good state of affairs", meaning an advantageous state of affairs. Utilitarianism -- that is, the holy empire of the useful, or of the means, with a chaste looking away from any end, or a naive looking for some means irrationally made into an end, -- utilitarianism is the ethics of Empiricism.

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.