How Do Our Minds Work, Anyway?

In this blog, I want to ruminate around various speculations about how our minds work.  How we humans process information is of little concern to most people, with the result that the vast majority of individuals do not think about how they think, as they do not examine their beliefs.   Today, I want to examine past and current speculations on how our minds work, as well as what we have been and are being taught are ways we can learn to think clearly. 

It is generally believed that early peoples were, essentially, focused on and motivated by survival needs.  As a result they studied their environment and learned from their everyday experiences. In more modern times this way of gaining knowledge and thinking about reality came to be called, "empiricism" by early philosophers. "Philosophers,"  being what we now call those individuals who spent their energy thinking about things in general, and who made up the scientists of their time.  Only in relatively recent times has Science been separated from Philosophy.

One of the focuses of early philosophers was trying to develop clarity of thinking in their students through the teaching of their own formulations.  A few of the early philosopher teachers, such as Socrates, are only known about through the surviving writings of their followers.  The followers of earlier philosophers made up the first known schools of learning.  For the followers/students, this required an acceptance as true of what they were learning, and incorporating that information into their own framework of their thinking processes. 

Later systems developed which attempted to help individuals process information include Aristotle and a number of other systems of Logic and systems for ethical behavior.  Aristotle has been considered, "the first to have written systems by which to understand and criticize everything from pure logic to ethics, politics, literature, even science." (10 Greatest Philosophers in History)

Currently, the primary poles of ideas of ways humans think, or process information, are Empirical Thinking and Scientific Thinking.

Empirical Thinking  Empirical thinking is thinking originating or based on experience; "empiricism"--that all knowledge originates from experience--was attacked and debunked with the advent of scientific ways of gaining knowledge.  Currently, at the forefront of these attacks are the confirmed skeptics who sneer at people who believe that what they personally experience has validity.

Scientific Thinking   Scientific thinking is the system which replaced empiricism as a way of gaining knowledge.  Originally, scientific knowledge was gained through a systematic study of what was discovered in the natural world, such as birds, plants, etc.  Today, much of science has evolved into the process of experimentation with controls, (that which is not influenced by the factor of what is being studied through experimentation).  As a result the scientific method  now involves the breaking down of everything into small aspects, and then studying the aspects.  Rarely, if ever, is the whole of anything studied.  This underlying methodology of science is called, "reductionism"; the belief that it is possible to come to an understanding of the whole of anything, by studying its parts.  Studying the whole of things is left to philosophy and religion, both considered non-scientific and, therefore, not worthy of examination.

Unfortunately, much of what is currently considered to be scientific thinking is simply referring to past scientific writings, as authority and fact, and newer researchers going on to extrapolate from them to new knowledge based on the old.  In the last number of years a large amount of this former, fundamental research has been found to be pure fabrication, i.e., false.  This fact has not been widely publicized, however.  It has been recently admitted that much of what has been, and is now published, in major respected scientific journals, has been found to have been greatly influenced by those who have had a vested interest in the outcome.

As indicated above, the earliest schools were followers of individual Philosophers who had given thought to what they had observed and learned/gained in other ways, who had developed their own personal system, which they then passed on to those who were seeking knowledge. 

Today's schools, and colleges of basic and advanced learning are primarily repositories of information believed to be facts and techniques. That is, in addition to the basic skills required, such as reading, writing, arithmetic, languages, etc., Scientific Thinking is the overriding system that is taught in colleges and universities today.  It is, as a result, likely to be a major part of our Belief Systems if we have pursued any form of advanced education.

Since Aristotle, there have been more recent attempts to clarify how we humans process information, such as General Semantics, self-described as a non-Aristotelian approach to understand how people think, and the multiple errors in how people process incoming information.  I studied this system in the '60s and credit it with helping me to examine how I, and others, process information, at that time; I am still a supporter of it.  Unfortunately, General Semantics seems to have been killed off in the late '60s.  It did teach people how to think and process incoming information more clearly, after all.  (A good enough reason to kill it off in the minds of those who want to control what we think and believe.)

There was a magazine based on General Semantics called, "Etc."  You will recognize that I use, "etc., etc," in my writing; it means that there are other examples, of whatever it follows, not given.  In the General Semantics system of processing information it is recognized that nothing is simply either/or, this or that, up or down, right or wrong, black or white; everything we experience comes in shades from one extreme to the other.

A more recent attempt at bringing true rationality to thinking has been Richard Paul's "Critical Thinking" theories.  Richard Paul was a professor at Sonoma State College, in California, with which his Center for Critical Thinking was affiliated.  His system gained a large number of followers, especially in the field of Education.  I became interested in his system after hearing him speak to an audience of, mainly, teachers, and thought it would be something to pursue.

I, personally, contacted Professor Paul at Sonoma State, and attended, at his invitation, some of his classes and seminars. Unfortunately, by experiencing his teachings first hand, I found that, not unlike other systems, it incorporated several Belief Systems as "fact" and that one must accept these basic "facts" in order to think, "critically."  As a result, I did not continue to pursue this course of study, and have gone on to develop my own ideas as to how to begin to think outside of one's programming and indoctrination.

A quick check on the web reveals another system called, "+critical Thinking" based on the writing of Edward de Bono who promoted a system called Lateral Thinking.  "According to de Bono, lateral thinking deliberately distances itself from standard perceptions of creativity as either "vertical" logic (the classic method for problem solving: working out the solution step-by-step from the given data) or "horizontal" imagination (having a thousand ideas but being unconcerned with the detailed implementation of them)."  You can find more information about this system at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lateral_thinking.  I, personally, have not studied de Bono's work, but without an examination/understanding of what his Belief System was made up, in my opinion, this system is unlikely to clarify one's thinking by itself.

As to my own system, having done my best to uncover and inspect my former beliefs, I subsequently developed a systems approach to understanding human thinking and behavior.  Currently, my mind/thinking processes search what I am studying/reading/watching for what the underlying beliefs are of whatever it is.  I now do this automatically, and it is what I did listening to Professor Paul's lectures on Critical Thinking to determine the Belief Systems imbedded in Critical Thinking.  (The Critical Thinking System developed by Paul, was/is made up of his personal Belief System, which included: Scientific Thinking, Darwinian Evolution Theory, Piaget's theory of cognitive development, and Gurdjieff's Fourth Way.)

Instead of viewing what comes in as indisputable facts, because the source is supposed to be an authority, based upon an evidenced education or position in the world, I attempt to question all authority, no matter what it is, and hold nothing as, "proven fact," only as, at most, as-if-true.

Those Philosophers and others who have introduced various systems of clarifying thinking are to be commended for their efforts in this regard.  Nonetheless, the end result of having discarded the validity of learning from one's personal experiences, as a way of determining what is real/reality, Scientific Thinking has insured that what everyone has been indoctrinated to believe as facts, through the educational process, will continue to undermine the majority of individuals ability to think and reason clearly. 

With that review, I end this blog.

Shirley Gallup