Thinking Clearly

              Sometimes human thinking looks absolutely hopeless and the lack of information, while the constant exposure to gaslighting and morons (the two quite often overlap) further hamper the hope for success. How is it possible to “understand” anything, if there is always insufficient information? Moreover, the human mind uses static models for dynamic structures, so it resembles a two-dimensional being trying to understand a three-dimensional one.

            So what can be done, if anything at all? Here, I am describing a few strategies. Obviously, there are more, but this is a simple blog.

1.       I usually triangulate from the source of support for an activity/idea/whatever, the outcome, and from the beneficiary of the outcome.

2.       All I can try to do is reconstruct the whole puzzle from extremely few pieces, but that's not very different from human cognition in general. It helps to be able to use both sides of the brain and employ deduction along with induction; sometimes they meet in the middle, although never completely overlap.

3.       Induction from pieces and deduction from a hypothetical whole picture are necessary, but only about five percent of humanity can think deductively (the two major representative groups are the Japanese and Hungarians) and most people’s working memory cannot handle more than seven plus/minus two elements at a time on average. Familiarity and practice help and the numbers can hugely increase, assuming someone has the mental capacity. As deductive thinking is possible only if you are able and/or willing to modify your hypothetical cognitive model (you have several such models of various complexity and use the one that you need for the time being, while you experience life itself in your overall one), it doesn’t fit people who adhere to their beliefs (all “knowledge” is based on an initial premise that must be accepted without reservation).

4.       Identify the problem, decide what to expect from the solution, see who profits from the solution, and find out who has the power to implement it. It usually adds up.

5.       For truth judgment, realize the cognitive sources. People find things true only from four sources:

a. the senses (empirical)

b. logic

c. emotions and/or intuitions

d. existential needs.

Empirical input has the least convincing power, and existential is the strongest, while each overwrites truth judgments below their levels.

Realize that this is the way your mind works, too, and use the appropriate source(s) for problems emerging on the matching level. In an ideal situation, the four levels might coincide.

6.       Cognition applies several layers in a hierarchical arrangement, using both serial and parallel links between concepts and truth judgments. The brain utilizes only the applicable parts for solving problems. This is the way quantum nano-computers work, whose speed was 12 thousand times higher than desktop PCs already in 2012. This is a dynamic and recursive pattern at all levels and can mutate anytime, so even the best computers in the world will never be able to completely compute the way the world or even the way a human being works, because the element of unpredictability cannot be computed even after the computer learns to adapt to changing premises. This might be the reason why the eugenicists want to dumb down humans and turn the world into a boring and stupid computer game that has no room for goodness and beauty, only for functionality.

Note:

During my 23 years of academic teaching, I have written books and held classes on the following entries, so what you get here is inevitably fragmented, but I am happy to clarify anything that doesn’t make it across. Obviously, you will have to do your research, if you do not understand a term (e.g. quantum computing or nano-computers).