The leap of faith into absolutes

[coberst]

The leap of faith into absolutes.

 

Karl Popper authored the book “The Open Society and Its Enemies”. The concept Popper illustrates in this book sounds much like the concept of a liberal democracy but his concept is more epistemological than political. It is based upon our imperfect comprehension of reality more than our structure of society.

 

Popper argues that all ideology shares a common characteristic; a belief in their infallibility. Such infallibility is an impossibility, which leads such ideological practitioners to use force to substantiate their views and such repression brings about a closed society.

 

Popper proposed that the open society is constructed on the recognition that our comprehension of reality is not perfect—there is realty beyond our comprehension and our will cannot compensate for that lack of comprehension. Even though the will of the power structure can manipulate the opinions of the citizens sooner or later reality will defeat the will. Truth does matter and success will not always override truth—truth being reality.

 

American culture has lost respect for truth. We have been swamped with PR and spin and untruth to such an extent that we have lost confidence in truth and it has lost its value.

 

I think that many Americans display and embrace their symbols so extravagantly because we have devalued truth and have glorified infallibility. When we reach such a situation ideologies become more and more important and the adoration of symbols is our method of showing our evaluation of our ideology which is one of our gods.

 

I think that for many Americans the natural sciences have come to represent that which is infallible. Rather than a solution science/technology has become the problem because it is ill used, especially when applying the scientific method when dealing with human problems.

 

I think that the more attached we are to what we consider to be absolute truth the more we idolize such things as science/technology and symbols such as flags, nations, and religion. Would you agree?

[TZK]

I agree completely with most of this, but I don't think it is our society that causes it but rather human nature.

 

You and I are different from other people. According to the hierarchy of needs theory, people have a second tier need for security meaning it comes before anything other than immediate pain and suffering.

 

For most people security just comes from being around people they trust, who may have supported them in the past, etc.

 

For a few though, they are randomly punished early on and learn that security doesn't come so easily. For me security comes from understanding my surroundings so that I can anticipate threats, specifically from people since it was an abusive person that constituted the random punishment.

 

Others try to understand their surroundings to avoid threats from nature and perhaps helped their loved ones avoid them to.

 

So I guess my point is, these people are just not the same thing as us. They are do not simulate an intelligent being like I do, they are just animals. If a complex task comes between them and their food sex etc they can find an answer but they are not driven fundamentally by a need to understand.

 

And we are, because at the core of our personality is the belief that we must do so and avoid any danger. With this in mind, how is it possible to translate this to a person that has different motivations?

[coberst]

TZK

 

Humans are meaning creating creatures. We create our world that we give value. Some of us work harder at understanding than do others.

 

How do we come together with comprehension and create a better society than the one we now have. I think it starts with some few of us becoming self-actualizing self-learners. Maslow places self-actualization at the pinnacle of the hierarchy of human needs. He did, I think, estimate that 4% of individuals reach this level of need. If we had just 0.4% who would become self-actualizing self-learners we could change the world.

[TZK]

What that means is, You have someone who has all the food, shelter etc they could want, a girlfriend who makes them extremely happy, a useful place in the community etc so they look for ways to better themselves while maintaining what they have so far.

 

These people aren't much use to accomplish things because any time what they are trying to accomplish conflicts with one of their more elementary needs they will go back to focusing on that need.

 

I doubt you are one of them. I know for a fact that my desire for knowledge is driven by my second order need for security. Most great people in history are probably the same. It doesn't fit the model of people who fight like crazy to obtain some abstract goal at the expense of if not their personal life than the approval of everyone else.

 

You are talking about someone who is basically a king, and who out of boredom one day says "Since I am your king and I am so great I have come up with this great idea so you can love me more".

 

The people who really get things done are the ones saying "You can just coast through life and expect everything to go your way, if we don't do this then we are going to melt the ice caps and drown ourselves, if I don't lock my car someone is going to break into it, we should come up with a laser system to shoot down meteors if one happen to comes our way."

[coberst]

TZK

 

No, in America with a population of 300 million, I am talking about 12 million people. These 12 million are not kings but are people with an advanced critical thinking capacity.

[coberst]

We live in two different worlds.

 

I recently had occasion to hang out in the waiting area of St Joseph Hospital in Asheville for a few hours. I was free to walk many of the corridors and rest in many of the waiting areas along with everyone else. It was early morning but it was obvious that the hospital functioned fully 24/7.

 

A person can walk the corridors of any big city hospital and observe the effectiveness of human rationality in action. One can also visit the UN building in NYC or read the morning papers and observe just how ineffective, frustrating and disappointing human rationality can be. Why does human reason perform so well in some matters and so poorly in others?

 

We live in two very different worlds; a world of technical and technological order and clarity, and a world of personal and social disorder and confusion. We are increasingly able to solve problems in one domain and increasingly endangered by our inability to solve problems in the other.

 

Normal science is successful primarily because it is a domain of knowledge controlled by paradigms. The paradigm defines the standards, principles and methods of the discipline. It is not apparent to the laity but science moves forward in small incremental steps. Science seldom seeks and almost never produces major novelties.

 

Science solves puzzles. The logic of the paradigm insulates the professional group from problems that are unsolvable by that paradigm. One reason that science progresses so rapidly and with such assurance is because the logic of that paradigm allows the practitioners to work on problems that only their lack of ingenuity will keep them from solving.

 

Science uses instrumental rationality to solve puzzles. Instrumental rationality is a systematic process for reflecting upon the best action to take to reach an established end. The obvious question becomes ‘what mode of rationality is available for determining ends?’ Instrumental rationality appears to be of little use in determining such matters as “good” and “right”.

 

There is a striking difference between the logic of technical problems and that of dialectical problems. The principles, methods and standards for dealing with technical problems and problems of “real life” are as different as night and day. Real life problems cannot be solved only using deductive and inductive reasoning.

 

Dialectical reasoning methods require the ability to slip quickly between contradictory lines of reasoning. One needs skill to develop a synthesis of one point of view with another. Where technical matters are generally confined to only one well understood frame of reference real life problems become multi-dimensional totalities.

 

When we think dialectically we are guided by principles not by procedures. Real life problems span multiple categories and academic disciplines. We need point-counter-point argumentation; we need emancipatory reasoning to resolve dialectical problems. We need critical thinking skills and attitudes to resolve real life problems.

[TZK]

What I am saying is that if you understand the hierarchy of needs, to look at a percentage of people that meet all their needs and then look to self actualization is the wrong thing to do when trying to figure out where intelligent people come from.

 

Self-actualizers are not the ones who get anything done.

 

In fact your question about the things people accomplish reference people who use reason to achieve all different level of needs. You basically have a bunch of monkeys, who see a bunch of bananas across a very wide river, so they do something like engineer a bridge. They do it to get the bananas.

 

In order for the human race to take a significant step forward, we have to increase the number of people who associate a need for understanding with their second order need for security not their like 5th order need for self actualization that only comes into play after everything else.

 

What Maslow meant when he said only a small percentage reach self actualization was that most people never satisfy their more important needs which translate into things like being successful, having a family, being well respected by their community etc...

 

And even if they do reach that point they only care about self-actualization to the degree that it doesn't interfere with any of their more important needs.

 

Science as a machine that can take anybody and output advances in understanding fails. Only people capable of critical thinking can even use science correctly for anything other than getting better dimensions of things. People with poor reasoning skills cannot properly apply results or properly conduct science or review other peoples.

 

For example, a study has shown that cognitive (and sometimes psychomotor) ability is the only thing that predicts job performance. From there it was shown, that job knowledge for a person that already had and was trained for that job in the past is an indicator of success (for the obvious reason that if you were taught something and didn't understand any of it, you may have poor cognitive ability). Furthermore testing people's reaction to job situations was also correlated if the person had the job before for the same reason (knowing the best thing to do after having the job for a while shows you learn things) Furthermore, simply asking a person what they would do in a given situation, IF they had the job before, still provided significant correlation to future performance. Behavioral interviewing.

 

Only thing is, people are too stupid too understand how or why it works. So they use this type of interviewing even for entry level candidates. This is incorrect because how you react to something in one job type says nothing about how you would or should react to a similar situation in a different job where different goals exist.

 

It takes reasoning ability to even use science. Furthermore people with exceptional reasoning ability can often predict the results of formal science.

 

A system that takes people with poor reasoning skills and uses them to output advances doesn't work because a system cannot question itself. No system can be pre created to adapt to all unknown factors because by virtue of being them unknown the system creator did not know about them.

 

Rather the significant attribute of people who make significant advances is their reasoning ability. They are great detectives, their organizational skills are all but irrelevant.

 

It is nothing more than a means of control - we use simply use excessive organization to show grade school children things that they may not have figured out on their own because they cannot organize the information they have in their mind that well. Then we call it science and hope they gain an affinity for the idea so that when they are adults they simply trust what scientists say to be true.

[coberst]

I do not think that people are stupid. There are various levels of intelligence I agree. It is my opinion that almost no person realizes their potential. I think the most important thing we can do to improve our world is by getting a life--getting an intellectual I mean. When the school days are over we all need to begin the hobby of developing an intellectual life.

[coberst]

Framing the issue: Petraeous—Betray us

 

George Lakoff, linguist, cognitive scientist, author of “Philosophy in the Flesh” was the mind behind the ad. He has framed the issue that will focus upon dishonesty and untruth for the next 16 months. One cannot say Petraeous without thinking ‘betray us’.