What the fuck did you just say? [Student Thread]

[Onep]

I think it's kind of silly to say new ideas come from irrational thinking.
Rational - proceeding or derived from reason or based on reasoning.

People come to these conclusions because they make sense. If you believe in Zeus, Zeus throwing lightning makes sense. As you discover electricity and how electrons work, it starts to make sense that it might function differently. Thinking that Einstein came to the conclusion of relativity irrationally is paradoxical. Why would he think that if it wasn't rational? People don't discover things because they think irrationally, it's because they're thinking differently and from other points of view.
I can look at the horizon and see it's flat (it's actually curved, but my glasses are reaaally thick). I could assume that the world is therefor flat. But, because I've seen and read numerous reasons why it's round, I can firmly state the Earth is round. It'd be irrational for me to go against the insane amount of data and call it flat.

[sMartins]

Outside of the box thinking doesn't equal irrational thinking

Anything you think stems from something you've seen/heard of/experienced. All inventors take what they know and then work with it to get to their end goals or to fill a need that they've found within the world around them. It's not like people are born, think up a new colour and then make it happen just because they're "lol so random xDDD"

It was only an inaccurate semplification to let him understand, what you said it's not wrong at all, but it's another thing ...
The huge problem here is language and colture.
I'm sorry to tell you that English language, and Anglo-Saxon colture is very innaccurate to talk about man, human.
Italian is pretty inaccurate too, but better than English.
English language doesn't even have masculine and feminine for the words, and all your colture is very pragmatic, so i can see why for you is very hard to understand these stuff.
German is one of the last language that allow the better culture (about the man), cause his language is very "solid" and it's not a coincedence that the greatest philosophers of all time are from Germany. (again, not me saying these stuff, I don't speak German, but i'm saying to you what philosophers said)
You English guys don't even have a real philosophy culture.

If we were only rational we'll be all the same, instead we are different from each others, cause our irrationality.
Said that, if you ask me I can try again from the beginning to explain you what is the Sacred dimension of the men, and then should be easier to understand what rationality means.

[sMartins]

I think it's kind of silly to say new ideas come from irrational thinking.
Rational - proceeding or derived from reason or based on reasoning.

People come to these conclusions because they make sense. If you believe in Zeus, Zeus throwing lightning makes sense. As you discover electricity and how electrons work, it starts to make sense that it might function differently. Thinking that Einstein came to the conclusion of relativity irrationally is paradoxical. Why would he think that if it wasn't rational? People don't discover things because they think irrationally, it's because they're thinking differently and from other points of view.
I can look at the horizon and see it's flat (it's actually curved, but my glasses are reaaally thick). I could assume that the world is therefor flat. But, because I've seen and read numerous reasons why it's round, I can firmly state the Earth is round. It'd be irrational for me to go against the insane amount of data and call it flat.

Yeah ... i can see how you think, and yeah it's hard trying to let you see starting from this kind of thought .... but this is a very important topic, and I'd be glad to let you see better how it is ... i'll take some time to meditate and I'll try again to explain you all in a easier way, I hope it won't be a waste of time, we'll see.

One question: Do you guys study at school Greek mythology? using that should be easier ... even if i have no idea how to translate that to you...

Also, first of all, read again this and let me know if you have some questions about:

So ... I can try to explain, cause I like a lot philosophy that's the father of psychology ... but I need you to tell me if you understand what i'm saying (cause the different language), otherwise it's not usefull to talk about.

First of all we need to understand what rationality means, and what, even more important, Sacred means ( sacred, not holy, but sacred it's the opposite of rationality, well not really but you can see it like that, not really cause Sacred is everything, rationality also).

Sacred: it's a Indo-European word that litterally means separate, detached, discrete. Christianity confuses this word with "Holy", but it's a totally different thing.

Take in mind that all the Western Civilization is Christian, we nowadays think and act like Christians, everybody, science, psichology, lay, laws, me and you.... we are all Christian, all the modern ideas of our civilization are Christian ... if you are not sure about this i can explain it later, but in short i can tell you that Christian culture is characterized by the positiveness of the future, the future is good. And it's not like that for the other 2 great monotheisms, Ebraic and Islamic religion.
Only Christianity think like that, and it was his strenght, cause with this positiveness allowed western men to evolve a lot.
It's not a coincidence that science and tecnology are born in western civilizations, that's due to Christianity. A huge thrust, motivation, that allowed us to beleive in the positiveness of the future and create all of what we have created.
Christianity changed the idea of time, time it's not anymore cyclic ( Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter) or (born, grown, die) and so on .... like Greeks thought.
Christian time become eschatological.

So past is bad (sin, pity), contemporary is redemption, future is salvation. This is Christianity.

Sciences, same thing: past is bad (ignorance), contemporary is research, future is progress.
Psichology: past is bad (Childhood trauma), contemporary is psychological analysis, future is healing, recovery.

Everything in the western civilization is Christianity.
And we, being Christians about how we thought, it's not easy for us to understand what Sacred means.

Sacred: in short it's the chaos, shambles, the irrational, ourself and everything is Sacred. The humanity came out from the Sacred.
Sacred is the undifferentiated, the versatility of everything.

A water bottle can be just a bottle to drink, or a container or it can be an Improper weapon, if I throw it to someone, or anything else.

But in a world where the Sacred rules (our past), where evrything means everything, communities are not possible, language is not possible, if a word means that and means a lot more of meanings.
Everytime someone take in his hands a bottle, a branch, or anything, i could be scaried, cause he can throw that bottle to me .... and so on.
It's not possible to live in this world in the Sacred dimension.

So men, first of all created ritual, rites, then religions and then rationality.

I'm tired , let me know if it's clear,if you have understood what i mean or if you have some question about this. If you are interested more, and have understood the above, later on I can keep going. But i think i have to explain better what Sacred is, before to talk about rationality.

P.S. To be clear, it's not me, of course, saying these stuff, but the greatest philosophers of our time.

[sMartins]

I found this on the Web that maybe could help ... it's very simplistic, but it says pretty much what i'm trying to explain to you:



Einstein, Anne Lamott, and Steve Jobs on Intuition vs. Rationality
What the libraries of yore have to do with today’s information economy and the heart’s will.
BY MARIA POPOVA

In putting together this recent reading list of nine essential books on reading and writing — a master-toolkit for a worthy New Year’s resolution to read more and write better — I found myself rereading Anne Lamott‘s Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, one of my all-time favorite books.

A particular passage from it has stayed with me over the years, and reemerges by some uncanny, invisible mechanism at critical times of my life, as if to remind me where the truth lies:

You get your intuition back when you make space for it, when you stop the chattering of the rational mind. The rational mind doesn’t nourish you. You assume that it gives you the truth, because the rational mind is the golden calf that this culture worships, but this is not true. Rationality squeezes out much that is rich and juicy and fascinating.

A similar sentiment is attributed to, though likely a paraphrasing of, one of history’s most celebrated heroes of science — the alleged pinnacle of rationality, Albert Einstein:

The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.

Steve Jobs reflects in Walter Isaacson’s much-discussed biography of him, one of the best biographies and memoirs of 2011:

The people in the Indian countryside don’t use their intellect like we do, they use their intuition instead, and the intuition is far more developed than in the rest of the world… Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect, in my opinion. That’s had a big impact on my work.

Western rational thought is not an innate human characteristic, it is learned and it is the great achievement of Western civilization. In the villages of India, they never learned it. They learned something else, which is in some ways just as valuable but in other ways is not. That’s the power of intuition and experiential wisdom.

In the olden days, librarians were expected to use intuition to categorize books. When did we lose this value system in how we think about the categorization — curation, systematization, organization — of today’s information sphere and, perhaps more importantly, of the heart’s sphere?


Link: https://www.brainpickings.org/2012/01/1 ... tionality/


The last thing of Steve jobs is not that much relevant, except the fact that rationality is something to learn and not innate into men, cause humans are pure irrationality untill they learnt how to relegate, confine, exile it ... that is litterally the meaning of the word religion. But this doesn't mean irrationality left us, it's still the most part of us.
If you still want i can explain what Einstein means with: "The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant."
But it will be not easy, it needs a long explanation.

[MrPunchers]

You guys sound pretty smart to be playing a dumbo game like this

[MagicManICT]

I can look at the horizon and see it's flat (it's actually curved, but my glasses are reaaally thick). I could assume that the world is therefor flat. But, because I've seen and read numerous reasons why it's round, I can firmly state the Earth is round. It'd be irrational for me to go against the insane amount of data and call it flat.

If I recall from my geography math, nearly everyone has to get to something around 20k ft (~7000m) before seeing any pronounced curvature of the horizon. If people could have seen this 500 years ago, there'd have never been an argument. (And if I recall my history correctly, the idea actually dates from Ancient Greece, but there was no rigorous proof then.)

And as far as intuition and the rational mind... I rate very high as intuitive on the Jungian personality test. I'll make it very clear that it has been shown that strong intuition comes from creative, rational minds, not from abandoning rationality. There are things you need to abandon, such as convention and traditional lines of thought. This still doesn't change that intuition is very rational. It's really the difference between the young child that can add 2 + 2 without paper or counting on their fingers and the person that can multiply two six digit numbers without a calculator. That's the scale of simplification of the thought processes require to start becoming intuitive.

edit: let me add in a very obvious example. Take a child's "dot to dot" type maze (connect the dots in numerical order... makes a picture; not sure what they may be called in various locations, but they're common the world over as a learning tool). As a child, you can't see the image before you actually process the maze. As an adult, even an older child, you can see the image before you even do the maze. This is intuition. The same thing goes with Cartesian math. Look at an equation, and a student won't be sure what the curve it makes is. A professor can not only look at the equation, but likely know exactly where in space it will lie, too. I did forget to mention a matter of experiences in my above statement, and that's a large part of intuition. Intuition is how mentalists (those that can seemingly guess uknowable things like what color you're thinking of).

[iamahh]

Lee Smolin on the future of physics: Outside the box

[sMartins]

....

Greeks knew that the world is round ... and Eratostene even estimated the circumference (about 200 before Christ) with a mistake less than about 500 Km.
Greeks are the most clever civilization that our world ever had.

Creative, intuition come from irrational ... our real essence.
Rationality are just codes and rules, we cannot create anything with rationality.

You guys sound pretty smart to be playing a dumbo game like this

It's very important to talk about those stuff, and very usefull for young people too.

[ArvinJA]

Of course all this psychology stuff is going to be full of convoluted meaningless bullshit, because psychology isn't a real science. At least I've never seen it make non-obvious predictions with any degree of accuracy.

Eh, IQ research is unintuitive to some people at least, might be because of social norms/ideology, but whatever. Anyway, lots of people claiming "IQ doesn't real". Lots of other things that are at very least controversial outside of psychology that isn't very controversial within psychology. Even though a lot of the research is shitty (as is the case in all of science), there are still things of value there.

[MagicManICT]

Kicker is that people that argue against psychology are the ones that are unwitting guinea pigs of the darker sides of the science.

But if you think this is any different in other fields, just go look up some physics papers from a few peer reviewed journals, or some of the comp sci stuff where it's not meant to be written for people that don't understand the terminology and shorthand.