open-mindedness

I only opened this thread to share a video about open-mindedness…somehow it inspired me to solidify my ideas about philosophy.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T69TOuqaqXI[/youtube]

There’s been a lot of talk about the value of reason, science, and open-mindedness, which all arise as outgrowths of critical thinking. Critical thinking is prior and more fundamental than any system of formal logic or any scientific method.

This is my conception of philosophy: critical thinking.

I’m also resistant to my own conception because I sense that it is too limited a representation of what I have known as philosophy. “Critical thinking” is what I will call the efficient view of philosophy, much like “neurochemical event type X” is an efficient view of the phenomenon love. An efficient conception aims for a universal scope and objective quality that deliberately excludes other aspects of the fullness of experience. Fundamentally, philosophy wouldn’t be philosophy without critical thinking; this is the necessary component of any conception of philosophy qua philosophy. Yet “critical thinking” does not convey the grand totality of meaning, i.e. the passion, wonder, worth, and value, that I ascribe to being a philosopher.

And what about wisdom? I want to defend the idea that critical thinking is wise in and of itself. Love of wisdom just is affinity for critical thought. I don’t think it’s an appropriate paradigm of philosophy to think of wisdom as true knowledge that one can possess; rather I think wisdom is the dynamic quality of thinking critically, which entails seeing possibilities. Wisdom is not static. It can’t be possessed like a fact or accrued like experience. It’s an activity.

a lot of people on this forum love to pull that shit. lots of anti-philosophy goin on here.

Lots of ignorance and non-philosophy too . . .

Yes, there are a few people that I had in mind when posting this video. And I try to reconcile some of the recent conflicts of attitude toward reason and science in my subsequent view of philosophy.

WaPo asks Richard Dawkins the wrong question. This is regarding the rapture as exhorted so horatorially by Family Radio evangelist Harold Camping, where Dawkins so caustically and wittily lays waste to the gullibility of the opiated mass-produced religionists in America. Enjoy!

washingtonpost.com/blogs/on- … _blog.html

Philosophy differs from other disciplines like biology or logic or math because those subjects necessarily include bodies of knowledge to be learned and memorized, whereas philosophy is primarily a skill …something you do, not something you know. You don’t have to know any specific philosopher or theory or fact to be a competent philosopher. The historian of philosophy, but not the philosopher.

Philosophy is like art in this respect: it is more about doing something than knowing anything. Critical thinking.

Philosophy differs from science in its scope. Science is an epistemic enterprise which operates on a narrow view of knowledge, i.e. scientific knowledge claims are in principle restricted to that which is observable/measurable, testable/falsifiable, able to be demonstrated in repeated experiments, etc.

I’m not so sure about equating critical thinking with wisdom. I personally tend to think of wisdom as knowing how to make sense out of something, i.e. the ability to put something into context. There’s the old adage (Socrates?) about only saying something not only if it is true, but if it is also good and useful.

There is a difference between how we use the words intelligent, intellectual, and wise. The meanings of these words aren’t identical. I associate “critical thinking” with “intellectual”. But perhaps my conception of what critical thinking is, is narrower than yours.

I think I qualify as one of the people here who love to pull that shit.

Not quite in the same way as the video describes though, I don’t see any objective grounds for either open-mindedness or closed-mindedness being better than the other - each has its pros and cons. The video doesn’t quite represent what it advocates as well as what it counters.

Being scientific is open-minded - show a scientific thinker some evidence against what they understand and they’ll change their understanding accordingly. What is not captured in the video is that the process by which evidence is translated into scientific understanding is a fixed method, a closed-mindedness for the purposes of achieving enhanced open-mindedness. This is limited open mindedness - not in content but in method, it’s conditional open mindedness within constraints - another kind of closed-mindedness. So the reality is not quite as clear cut as the video suggests.

Philosophy is a love of wisdom. It implies nothing about how you arrive at wisdom, only that your search or acquiring of it comes from love. There is no such thing as a fixed philosophical method.

Back to basics: we have evidence.

The way in which we interpret that evidence is up to you. The scientific way is USEFUL, not “true”. If you assume what you must assume in order to be a devout scientist, you must believe in causality. If evidence consistently shows one thing to happen before another, it’s useful to think of them as connected despite there being only observed effects - with no causes in sight unless you conditionally redefine an effect as a cause, or unless you attribute properties or come up with names for invisible forces that are only “evident” in their effects.

Pseudo-science doesn’t satisfy USE in quite the same way, it appeals to a kind of emotional reflex that many seem to possess. It’s a solution to a different thing entirely, and only invalid if you assume from the start that the USE of science is the correct and true use.

Philosophy CAN be used to see both sides of the story, it can focus on just one side, it can do whatever as long as wisdom comes out the end and love inspired you to arrive there.

The issue is that philosophy gets old, former wisdom gets absorbed by common sense, the OCD dogma and love of ritual (method) in the masses funnels things to a new type of closed-mindedness. Alternatives get lost, but philosophers can either explore them or stick with the status quo no matter how old, tired and repetitive their pursuit becomes.

What I see on this forum, and in philosophy in general, is people pulling the same old shit by reinforcing the old, bored and repetitive assumptions.

All our thoughts [info, ideas etc] are supernatural [I.e. not material], unless we consider that to be natural, then nature is supernatural.

…difference is that there is supernatural and then there is stupidnatural, one is derived from reason and the other lacks it.

I agree with you, Silhouette. I don’t agree with,

That may be true for some scientific/critical thinkers, but not always for scientists themselves. There are a lot of instances of quarrels among scientists–especially when/if the science involves an interpretation of the past–one group will say certain events were caused by X, Y and Z while another group will say the events were caused by A, B and C. Both groups can produce ‘proof’ of their interpretations–but that’s what it all is–interpretation. Scientists are only human, after all. They can be just as stubborn as the next guy.

Then there are the people who maintain their views because of something they’ve read or seen on TV or have been taught at some time or another. They may be very intelligent, but do they ever seriously question what someone else has interpreted using the scientific method? We’re all guilty of that. We start out with an idea and set about ‘proving’ it–or trying to disprove it, if the idea is/was someone else’s.

Just recently, NASA ‘proved’ two aspects of Einstein’s Theory of Gravity which is a part of his Theory of Relativity:

See May 8, 2011 – ANU News

This is ‘proof by demonstration,’–one of the methods used in engineering qualification testing.

I’m going off into several different directions, aren’t I? What I think I’m trying to say is “Proof is in the eye of the beholder, based on test results.”–or something like that.

You’re absolutely right, I stand corrected - certain scientists themselves can still be closed-minded despite their subscription to the scientific method - on top of scientific method being a limited open/closed-mindedness already in terms of method rather than content.

Increasingly in science, scientists specialise and quarrel endlessly about which approach yields the better results, and they seem to always - eventually - realise that they are each just as valuable.

I am aware that I am equating critical thinking with scientific thinking - this is because the author of the video appears to equate them too.

A deconstruction of the video:

Point 1. Defining a closed definition of what “open-mindedness” is hypocrisy.
Point 2. The particular example of his neighbour is not universal to all those with super-natural beliefs.
“Invalid causal connections” implies a fixed definition of what valid is - in the video’s case, based (as I said in my last post) on a type of USE rather than necessarily “truth”.
Point 3. To say “lack of explanation → supernatural powers” = “lack of natural explanation → consider supernatural explanation” (not necessarily demand it).
Therefore it is not a contradiction to say “I can’t explain something naturally therefore I can explain it supernaturally.”
Unexplained naturally =/= unexplainable nor unexplained supernaturally (with or without being open to other interpretations).
Point 4. Telling someone they can’t explain things is not limited to those with supernatural beliefs unlike portrayed in the video.
Point 5. Conditionally accepting new ideas is a limited open/closed-mindedness in method, regardless of (potentially) being open-minded to the content of new explanations.
Point 6. Accepting unqualified help can be from those without scientific qualifications too - unlike portrayed in the video.
Point 7. Alfie is interpreting the same evidence as Beth, with just as much of a definition as her. Each serves a different valid purpose.
Point 8. More anecdotes of closed-minded people who happen to be open to supernatural claims rather than limited to natural claims only.
Point 9. Open-mindedness = “agree with me” for the author too.
Point 10. Black face on the left can accept as valid rather than true, and white face on the right can be skeptical of science without saying it is untrue.
“Irony” 1: They are “guilty” of open-minded scepticism and refusing the limitedly open-mind of the fixed sciencitic method. (Not an irony).
“Irony” 2: They are sceptical of (not only) a domain that (claims to) emphasise (limited) scepticism = sceptical of limited scepticism. (Not an irony).
Point 11. Courts of law are rigidly natural. Being closed-minded to the supernatural is USEFUL in such a situation.
Point 12. Being either open- or closed-minded or limitedly closed/open-minded can damage your wealth and health. True =/= useful (useful for what?).
Point 13. Leaving things up to chance is not a bad thing. You are much more able to consider and accept new things the less inhibiting pride you have in your fixed methods.
Point 14: Being demanding is not limited to believers in the supernatural. In fact it is what this video is doing itself, being itself “controlling, arrogant and presumptious”.
Point 15: The author of the video needs the advice he is dispensing far more than many of the people he is criticising.

I watched the video and found it sterile and limited. This does not mean I support supernatural phenomena. I support, instead the reasons belief in such phenomena permeate popular opinions.
Sterile–in that it does not consider the “irrational” or precognitive aspects of creativity.
Limited–for the same reason.
My cat survives well without the cognitive type of thinking that involves a magnified sense of self as the protagonist of interior narratives.
It is illogical to state that a belief in the existence of more than we presently know amounts to belief in supernatural fantasies. We progress in knowing from the known into the unknown. The unknowable makes no sense.
Although cognition in the way we employ it is considered our human adaptational trump card, it is far from what exists in the whole deck.
Silhouette got it right!

I’m not finished with this thread yet. Will go back and watch the video soon to see what all the fuss is about. It turns out, however, that the main idea of this thread is not the video but what I wrote after it:

Will comment/reorient soon.