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Old 09-28-2007, 03:54 PM   #1
coberst
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Default Thinking is part of reality

Thinking is part of reality

Our educational system and our culture lie to us. We are taught by our educational system and by our culture that there is thinking and there is reality and that thinking’s job is to discover reality; never informing us that reality and thinking go together, one is not separated from the other. Reflexivity is a concept that informs us that thinking is part of reality.

In the natural sciences truth is of the utmost importance because knowledge of reality is a precondition for success. In human affairs there are shortcuts to success—one can lie, manipulate, spin, and use force to gain success. Thus in human affairs truth often takes a back seat.

In his book “Open Society” George Soros speaks of many things; one important concept is ‘reflexivity’. “I started thinking in terms of reflexivity nearly fifty years ago. It may be interesting to recall how I arrived at the idea. It was through the footnotes of Karl Popper’s “Open Society and its Enemies”…I started to apply the concept of reflexivity to the understanding of social affairs, and particularly of financial markets, in the early 1960s before evolutionary systems theory was born…”

The first chapter of this book, wherein he explains this concept, can be found at http://www.businessweek.com/chapter/soros.htm.
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Old 09-28-2007, 05:45 PM   #2
Kilroy_x
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Default Re: Thinking is part of reality

The fact that you of all people would reference Karl Popper even by proxy of referencing someone else is hilarious. You are the most obscurantist individual I have come across in ages and you pretty much exemplify what Popper described as the tendency of some individuals "to utter the most meaningless trivialities in the most impressive sounding language".

There are plenty of reasons why thoughts should be regarded as part of reality. Perhaps Neutral Monism is correct. Perhaps the mathematical truth of evolution gives us some level of confidence in our ability to discern reality, since this human faculty has prevented us from on the whole killing ourselves.

It seems to me the gist of the article is that human actions are predicated on human thought, therefore regardless of whether a given thought is true of false it influences reality. Why is this novel or significant? What is there to discuss about this?
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Old 09-29-2007, 02:25 AM   #3
coberst
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Default Re: Thinking is part of reality

kilroy

We have in our Western philosophy a traditional theory of faculty psychology wherein our reasoning is a faculty completely separate from the body. “Reason is seen as independent of perception and bodily movement.” It is this capacity of autonomous reason that makes us different in kind from all other animals. I suspect that many fundamental aspects of philosophy and psychology are focused upon declaring, whenever possible, the separateness of our species from all other animals.

This tradition of an autonomous reason began long before evolutionary theory and has held strongly since then without consideration, it seems to me, of the theories of Darwin and of biological science. Cognitive science has in the last three decades developed considerable empirical evidence supporting Darwin and not supporting the traditional theories of philosophy and psychology regarding the autonomy of reason. Cognitive science has focused a great deal of empirical science toward discovering the nature of the embodied mind.

The three major findings of cognitive science are:
The mind is inherently embodied.
Thought is mostly unconscious.
Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical.

“These findings of cognitive science are profoundly disquieting [for traditional thinking] in two respects. First, they tell us that human reason is a form of animal reason, a reason inextricably tied to our bodies and the peculiarities of our brains. Second, these results tell us that our bodies, brains, and interactions with our environment provide the mostly unconscious basis for our everyday metaphysics, that is, our sense of what is real.”

All living creatures categorize. All creatures, as a minimum, separate eat from no eat and friend from foe. As neural creatures tadpole and wo/man categorize. There are trillions of synaptic connections taking place in the least sophisticated of creatures and this multiple synapses must be organized in some way to facilitate passage through a small number of interconnections and thus categorization takes place. Great numbers of different synapses take place in an experience and these are subsumed in some fashion to provide the category eat or foe perhaps.

Our categories are what we consider to be real in the world: tree, rock, animal…Our concepts are what we use to structure our reasoning about these categories. Concepts are neural structures that are the fundamental means by which we reason about categories.

Quotes from “Philosophy in the Flesh”.
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Old 09-29-2007, 02:28 AM   #4
devonin
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Default Re: Thinking is part of reality

So uh...feel up to actually answering his questions perhaps? Here in FFR Critical Thinking we tend to require people to respond directly to, and properly address questions raised in regards to their posts.
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