Is it safe or wise to trust or follow our own ideas? People are always debating each other because they think each other wrong and want to prove themselves right, but how can anyone say they themselves are right or their ideas are wise/correct?
How can you trust logic when you’re the one to judge what is logical… How can one trust the source but also be the source at the same time…
A good analogy is the bible, it’s the source of a story, but that same source/story cannot prove itself true right?
We tend to forget our instincts. We can over think. We doubt because we know we make mistakes.
Also, what might be right for you will not necessarily be right for me. I do not want a world where we all think the same, know the same, feel the same. All that one person is does not mean you should be that.
We learn from difference or we should. We should accept difference not argue wrongness of it.
If you read original works from the Jewish texts (modern Jewish texts have been changed as well as the Christian texts) you will maybe see something new to you. Acceptable to you. Or not.
Religions change over generations as do ethics, morals and knowledge. Sometimes it is good, sometimes not and sometimes there is no real effect until it gets added to another change or is forgotten.
Back to instincts: trust them , for the most part instincts see more than what our conciousness sees.
If our ideas are abstract or far removed from what we can sense in the here and now, then the best guide we have to testing their veracity is the scientific method. Unfortunately, we are separated from the scientific method by a wall of bureaucracy called the scientific community. If one wants to utilize the scientific method to verify one’s own ideas, one has to do the experiments himself.
“You” are not the one to judge what is logical. Others have already worked that stuff out. It’s safe to test your ideas, which is not the same as testing your logic. The Bible appears to be a lousy analogy. It’s not a logical argument for anything, it’s a collection of stories.
To answer what might be your main question, it’s wise to trust tested ideas. You can test basic ideas against real world results. If there are no real world results to be had, don’t worry too much about those ideas - they must not be very important. You can test these ideas also by arguing for them. Learn basic logic if you don’t know it.
If you don’t trust any of your ideas, you will probably soon die. But there’s always a risk/reward ration to keep in mind.
Most important is not to be a helpless little girl about these things. Gib has said much the same thing, in fewer words than me, which is not difficult.
No one has a monopoly on wisdom and so even if one truly thinks that they are always right they will not actually be so
I accept every thing I hold to be true to only be provisional even though I try to formulate as accurate a world view as I
can. I find as I get older I am more interested in how others think regardless of how different this is to my own thinking
In this age of arrested adolescence, people (most especially the infected males - literally medically infected) don’t listen before they speak, don’t look before they leap, don’t learn before the preach. They PRESUME and thus speak of naive, almost certainly immature ideas that have been long since seen as those of naive children.
I found myself guilty of that many times. Later I found a way to utilize it and then dismiss it. Now I merely watch others who have not found their way out of that addictive dilemma of impatience and bull-pen of blind belligerence.
Ancient wisdom reveals that young men tend toward knowing that they know long before they know (the “Bull” in mythology). And during that time, the world around them has to suffer their hubris and ego. Women (fortunately for the world in general) tend to be far more willing to listen (not that they can put the entire picture together) before they become belligerent, if ever.
The saddest thing is that such traits go all the way to the top of society. And that tends to more justify the young men’s willingness to preach out of ignorance. Thus one cannot say that he who doesn’t follow his father is bad, nor that he is good. It isn’t a “Black or White” issue.
The issue is, as with almost everything, the one thing the homosapian brain just can’t handle very well - HOW MUCH.
I agree with Science being the method to test ideas, I also agree that Science is separated, it has become dogmatic in a sense which James said a while ago.
A lot of the science community do the opposite of what Science is. If someone has a new idea you look into it, not just say “oh you’re wrong… Sorry” before even looking.
let’s look at this first part: is it safe to trust or follow one’s own ideas? Even if it is not, which is obviously sometimes the case, for all of us, and often the case, for many people, what is the option? How can we work with the idea that it is not safe to trust our ideas, given that this idea will be ours if we believe it?
So if one is going to live other than in a purely reactionary unthinking way, one must trust to some degree our ideas and to some degree follow them. So the questions become, for me at least, when do we trust them, how much, how much, in what areas, how can we minimize errors or perhaps catastrophic errors since learning comes often via errors, how can we improve the quality of our ideas and so on. A blanket distrust might be useful for some thought experiment, but it forms no basis for a life.
What I like about the OP is the humility. Most people, especially, rational modern supposedly science adhering intellectual or pseudo versoins of these, think that because they use logic (or think they do) and do not notice their assumptions and use of intuition, they have achieved a kind of objective mental machine, when in fact their biases are coming into play at all levels.
presenting one’s ideas, here, for example, need not mean one completely trusts the ideas. One can be developing, challenging, trying to strenghten them and so on. Presumably if one cannot do these things it might be useful to trust some of the ideas less. I think it is generally useful to present the idea as if one believes, it, period, at least in the beginning, since this creates clarity and tension with those who disagree right off the bat.
It seems like you want a kind of perfect test or feedback system to make sure ideas are true. The problem with that is that you are always going to be involved in that test. You are always going to have to be the one who decides that the other person’s proof is correct, that what seemed not to work yesterday is based on good memory on your part. We wake up in the morning taking many many things for granted that are relevent to that trust. Memory, perceptions, experiences, our sense of how well we analyzed in the past, our intuitions about experts and how often they might be wrong or partially wrong, our sense of when to check, how to check and many other judgments that are potentially fallible. We cannot eraditate this fallibility since the eradication must come in and be a part of us and this will again be potentially affected by our fallibility.
I may be wrong here but one way I think may be in paying attention to your opening line - So, if one is going to live other than in a purely reactionary unthinking way
If we allow ourselves to take the time to see when we are doing the above, that might be the first step in examining and judging our ideas honestly.
Is it possible that when we fear our ideas may not be correct and.or we are hugging them to us too closely, that is when they may not be correct and when we need to proceed in a scientific manner.
Also, truth of any kind does need, like Jung said, the concert of many voices. If there is only that one voice being heard, our own, how can we improve the quality of our ideas and also improve the quality of another’s idea.
Distrust toward what we think or what others think?
Is a blanket distrust “no” trust at all? Can one proceed from that? Doesn’t there have to be some form of faith involved in what we “see”? I’m not speaking religion here. Having an open mind doesn’t mean emptying it out totally. We have to have some cornerstone…
I think, there has to be a causality between trust and faith, with at one time one and then the other preceding, but generally, you have to trust before you can have faith. The trust is premordial, starting even in the uterus, based on feelings there-in. But not
remembering that, the cycle starts again, and the faith concept becomes the religious creatiness of a blind faith in the creator. So it depends.
The trust, leaps then, to faith, the concept, and the reactionary shift becomes absolutely certain, because of this lack of connective, appearent concept. So in the beginning…etc, - has to be reified, written down , and made into an absolute believe, to replace the missing connection.
Even if you do follow someone else’s “idea” does it not become your idea? Can’t you take something and make it your own?
Now on the bible - that doesn’t seem like an “idea” but a whole lot of ideas. Some of which do not make much sense. Some of which do. Some of which probably aren’t true. Some of which might have some truth to them. No need to take it all or naught.
If only it was that simple. Perhaps for some people it is when they have ‘a healthy doubt’ about one of their ideas that they in fact are NOT looking at it closely enough. They may think they are not hugging it closely, but in fact they are. We are quite diverse in the ways we can fool ourselves. It would be nice if I could say, well, I am not so attached to this idea, I have questioned it now and then with careful attention so it doesn’t fit in Arcturus’ schema for when there are likely problems, but that rule will not always work. In fact for some people the rule fails completely because their sense of when the do not hug something closely is off and further their doubting is nto coupled to a good investigation, though they think it is.
I am not sure what the idea is here.
I was thinking of something like Descartes and his radical doubt. I was trying to say that it may be useful on occasion to doubt what one thinks, to the bone, but you can’t live like that.
I’m not so much worried about the scientific community conducting experiments on behalf of every crackpot who has a theory as conducting the experiments is up to said crackpot. What worries me is how indistinguishable the relation between the scientific community and its followers from that of any religious order and its followers. In one case, you have a group of devotees with all their faith invested in men with white robes and egg shaped hats with crosses on them and in a particular sacred book, and in the other case you have a group of devotees with all their faith invested in men with white lab coats and in particular text books and journals. Each one features a whole body of ideas that find their origins in authoritative sources, whether that’s people or books, and none of which is based on first hand experience. I see nothing that’s changed over several millennia except for the particular religion that happens to be current, and that itself isn’t much of a change because religions come and go like fads.
Well how can we know when we have questioned our own ideas enough? What if we put tons of time into questioning something that is true but missed the answer by a hair before giving up. Now that idea is lost again for who knows how long and the person would not even know it. I suppose science and logic can show most things but even then there are still doubts or things missing. How much knowledge could be near discovered yet lost in history?
Is logic some sort of key to ideas? How can we trust whoever came to the idea of using logic/reason for ideas. How can reason work when most people have pride, ego, gullibility, etc in the way.
Every key, measurement, system, or method of determining things are made by humans, so then why or how can we trust or believe them if we don’t even know if we can trust ourselves or our own ideas?
It depends on what area of existence we’re talking about. In the material world we can get results from trial and error which may take time and effort towards a goal. If, however, you’re looking for say the meaning or purpose of existence, you will not be able to find it. Certain things have their own natural functioning regardless of what one thinks.
