Our senses can deceive us. In fact, much of reality lies beyond human experience.
All of nature is in motion in astonishing ways that are not apparent. The Earth is turning at more than 1,040 miles per hour and orbiting the sun at more than 66,000 miles per hour. And the sun moves through the galaxy at half a million mile per hour, and the Milky Way is moving through the galaxy at one and a half million miles per hour. But when we are resting under a starry sky at night, everything can seem quiet and still. Looking at the moon and stars is looking into the past. Moonlight reaches us about a minute after leaving the moon. Sunlight takes 8 minutes to reach us. Light from Neptune takes 8 hours to get here. The nearest star beyond our sun takes about 4 years to get here. The Pleiades star cluster is 400 light years away. The light from the center of our own galaxy takes about 30,000 years to get here. The Hubble Space Telescope has captured light from a distant galaxy that began its journey to us more than 13 billion years ago.So telescopes are time machines peering for into the past. Sometimes can even see the light from some stars that no longer exist, because the light took eons to get here from such great distances. Some of that light is even older than the earth and the sun. - Cosmos (paraphrased)
“Science’s biggest mystery is the nature of consciousness. It is not
that we possess bad or imperfect theories of human awareness; we simply
have no such theories at all.” (Dr. Nick Herbert, Physicist)
Consistency is what we require in order for our mind to function. We don't function as well when there is inconsistency, because we are accustomed to thinking in a linear way. The complexity of the real world is ever-changing and is beyond our understanding and we want to figure it out so we break down the complexity of the world into comprehensible, countable, geometrical units.And this is so successful (up to a point) that we can come to imagine that this is the way the physical world really is: discreet, discontinuous, and full of parts, points, and bits - and in fact a mechanism. But this is actually just a viewpoint or prejudice a particular type of personality or mindset. There are two types of thinking about the way things are, and historically there has always been the interchange of two personality types objective and subjective. One type wants rigor and precision, just the facts, well defined structure, shape with sharp, clear boundaries or edges. While the subjective mind isn't so concerned with detail about facts, but with the larger pattern or meaning of the whole. To understand the difference between the two Alan Watts used the analogy of a spotlight and a floodlight. A spotlight is used to examine intensely a small area, while a floodlight allows a view of the whole area., one tends to be finite, and the other infinite. “Linear Thinking” is defined as a process of thought following known step-by-step progression where a response to a step must be elicited before another step is taken. Linear thinkers are very much the same. They start at step one and usually do a good and efficient job of completing the task before moving on to step two. They are driven, focused, and don’t easily get off topic. For any logical process, there must be a decided-upon truth as a starting point. And the beauty of logic, is that it allows us to reach an answer from a given starting point. It’s easy, however, to rely upon starting points simply because they’re what we’ve used all our lives – starting points that either may be false, or that limit us from finding a much better answer. Much of our world is indeed structured upon the concept of logic (very basic logic at least). We learn math, deductive reasoning, and tend to apply these logical processes to our everyday life. Our drive to do so comes from our inherent need, as cognitive humans, to categorize our experiences in our minds and make projections about what the outcome of an action will be. We compare our expectations with our experience, weigh the similarity, and adjust our thought processes as needed. The Socratic method is when opposing viewpoints are based on asking and answering questions to stimulate rational thinking and to illuminate ideas. But there’s a danger in relying too heavily on logic. The danger is in the determination of the starting point. Once a starting point is chosen, there are a limited number of logical conclusions to a problem. So the Socratic method is extremely linear. But linear thinking can doom a person and/or an organization if you continue to look at something from one point of view. This explains our tendency to immediately look for a reason for a problem rather than look at the problem as the result of many interconnected reasons. Black-and-white thinkers can be rigid, intolerant, frustrating, and even toxic. The world of relationships is full-color, including every shade of gray. The whole scientific paradigm has slanted our attention to and manipulation of data rather than to the larger meaning of the data. Clearly our technology has in some ways grown more powerful than our ability to manage it. We have amassed enopugh nuculear and chemical weapons to destroy all life on earth, and placed control in the hands of a greedy few. And a few are also genetically altering biology, raping the environment, the economy, and playing roulette with our future. The difficulty is control - are we wise enough to play at being God? There are important metaphysical assumptions underlying Western common sense that influence us all, whether Christin, Jewish, or aethist. The whole tradition of Western culture has employed models of the universe that have influenced our language, thought, and logic. The western model of the universe is political and engineered so as to evaluate everything as an object or commodity. All western thought is based on the idea that the universe is a construct. And even though we have diminished the idea of a construttor ( a personal God), we continue to think of the world in terms of Newtonian Mechanics and Quantum Mechanics - as a machine. At the roots of our common sense the idea has percolated that the world is an artifact. We see the world in terms of a construct of parts and bits of information, which we have found to be very useful in being able to control what's happening. But in so doing, we have largely turned our backs on nature and the organic and intrinsic controls built into the world as part of the universe. Reductionism is a philosophical position which holds that a complex system is nothing but the sum of its parts, and that an account of it can be reduced to accounts of individual constituents. This can be said of objects, phenomena, explanation, theories, and meanings. Even if we know nothing of the origin of everything, we presume that it is all ours to do whatever we like with it. Many modern scientific thinkers have taken position that consciousness itself is an illusory faculty created by our neuronal activity. Non-linear thinking, a relatively new term, is vague enough (perhaps naturally so) that a simple google search will yield more beatings-around-the-bushes than formal definitions for the phrase. Human thought can also be characterized by expansion in multiple directions, rather than in one direction, and based on the concept that there are multiple starting points from which one can apply logic to a problem. Non-linear thinking is less constrictive – letting the creative side of you run rampant because of its inherent lack of structure. It’s kind of like letting a puppy run wild on a walk up a mountain – anything of interest will be thoroughly investigated (and perhaps peed on) before jumping to the next, possibly non-related subject! It’s very much like brainstorming – allowing thought to flow, unhindered, in attempts to arrive upon something special in the process. Non-linear thought increases possible outcomes by including intuition and not being so certain about the starting point for any logic process. Non-linear thinkers tend to jump forward, and from side to side through the steps of a project, in an effort to see the big picture and tackle those areas where they have the most interest. Where non-linear thinking falters is in finally carrying out the required action, because as a thought process it often encourages a user to agonize incessantly over where to start (that agreed upon truth, from which logic can be applied and action can be taken). The importance of both processes is obvious, so it’s important to have both types of thinkers on a team. Use non-linear thought to re-examine starting points and increase the possibility of finding the best option, and use linear thinkers and their efficient logic-based reasoning, once a starting point has been established, to get the job done in a timely manner. Whatever mixture of these two processes you prefer, take responsibility for your choices and learn from your mistakes Violating a law subjects us to its consequences. The world functioned very well without humans for billions of years, and may do so again. Rather than dissecting the world like a linear slide show, we might try relearning to “see the big picture” in which the whole takes on a new meaning. It’s ultimately a picture into which you can zoom in and out, infinitely. If instead of continuing to dissect and exploit the planet, we could find a way to re-connect with a sense of awe or reverence for it as part of the infinite universe, we may save it, and save ourselves as well.
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Saturday, September 13, 2014
Logic vs.Creativity
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