Worldview: true and false
Chapter 1 - Worldview
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Welcome to the 'Worldview: true and false' page
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Like two little owls, we in our society are looking together for what is true or false.
Wisdom comes with experiences (and age).
However, we can confidently say that essentialism is wrong and constructivism is a correct representation of reality.
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Synthesis of the building blocs
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Self and reality
| Imagine a dramatically sped-up film of Earth’s history. In the beginning, there is no sign of life. Earth is covered by a vast, salty ocean, containing an array of elements and molecules. Zooming in on this primordial soup, we witness a chain of simple chemical reactions, some of which give rise to basic nucleotides. As time passes we witness more and more complex chemical processes, and emerging from this world in fits and starts are the first single-cell organisms. Over the aeons these organisms bubble into various kinds of tiny creatures, then there are fish, little mammals, bigger ones, untold species living and dying in a split second, until we get to something called Marjorie.
As anyone who has visited this mental space can attest, it becomes apparent that the notion of one’s self as a thing, distinct from everything else that exists, is simply an idea. The question that we explored together – ‘Who are you, really?’ – is hugely important, and it must be answered coherently if one is to find a way through this relational world. |
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| Eric Jannazzo - The question therapy doesn’t answer: who are we really, really? - Psyche - 15 JUNE 2022 |
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| Consider, then, that everything we see around us – rocks and planets, frogs and trees, your body and brain – is made up of nothing but protons, electrons and neutrons put together in very complex ways. In the case of your body, they make many kinds of cells; in turn, these cells make tissues, such as muscle and skin; these tissues make systems, such as the heart, lungs and brain; and these systems make the body as a whole. It might seem that everything that’s happening at the higher, ‘emergent’ levels should be uniquely determined by the physics operating beneath them.
At very small scales, quantum theory underlies what’s happening in the world. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle introduces an unavoidable fuzziness and an irreducible uncertainty in quantum outcomes. You might know the value of one variable, such as a particle’s momentum, but that means you can’t accurately detect another, such as its position. One of the most astounding discoveries of the previous century was that biological activity at the micro level is literally grounded in the physical shape of biological molecules, particularly DNA, RNA and proteins. The structure of these molecules is truly the secret of life, as Francis Crick and James Watson exclaimed when they discovered the double helix structure of DNA, helped by the work of Rosalind Franklin.However, it is the structure of other molecules – proteins and associated messenger molecules – that in fact makes things happen at the cellular level. This means that, to link physics and biology, we need to look at the theory that underlies molecular shape. And that theory is quantum chemistry, based in the fundamental equation of quantum physics: the Schrödinger equation. In quantum theory, the state of a system is described by what’s known as its wave function, which determines the probabilities of different outcomes when events take place. |
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| George Ellis - A crude understanding of physics sees determinism at work in the Universe. Luckily, molecular uncertainty ensures this isn’t so - Aeon - 09 June 2020 |
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Relational thinking and acting
| "What we learn from by studying the history of the creative imagination is that the individual mind lives within a collective intelligence largely expressed through material objects." |
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| SFI President David Krakauer |
Relational thinking directs us towards constructivism and away from essentialism.
- The trouble with essentialism is that growth is limited and ends with the concept of what we think is the subject's essence. This creates an enormous tension between the person and the call for responsibility and accountability we always hear in organisations. How can you be responsible for what lies behind your essence?
- Relational thinking, on the other hand, states that growth is possible, and you can be responsible for what you do at the level that you create your reality conscientiously.
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Self and entropy
| I’m caring for my 98-year-old mother Joyce, who’s had increasingly debilitating memory problems for many years. As she lost the internal structure of memory, the galleries of her mind became literal and external. First systematically, then chaotically. She experiences every change to her house as a change to her self.
In some ways we all do this. We scatter photos or significant objects about our space so that, as we move through it, we remember. We might think of this as a key example of what has been called, in philosophy, the extended mind hypothesis. To simplify an elaborate set of ideas: we think by means of our environments, and ‘external’ objects are part of our personalities. We see this all the time everywhere, I think, but particularly in situations where internal memory is disintegrating. Perhaps humans disintegrate from inside outward, until we are no longer distinct from our environments. Slowly, our memories and the world become the same, and we at once cease to exist and expand into everything. |
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| Crispin Sartwell - What my mother’s sticky notes show about the nature of the self - Psyche - 14 MARCH 2024 |
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| Content source |
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| Nathaniel J Blanco - Exploration, exploitation, and development: Developmental shifts in decision-making - Society for Research in Child Development - 05 February 2024 |
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Exploration - EXPLOITATION dilemma
The exploration-exploitation dilemma, also known as the explore-exploit tradeoff, is a fundamental concept in decision-making that arises in many domains. It is depicted as the balancing act between two opposing strategies.
- Exploration involves trying out new options that may lead to better outcomes in the future at the expense of an exploitation opportunity
- Exploitation involves choosing the best option based on current knowledge of the system (which may be incomplete or misleading)
Finding the optimal balance between these two strategies is a crucial challenge in many decision-making problems whose goal is to maximize long-term benefits.
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Self, fighting free energy
| You can close your eyes, cover your ears, hold your nose or seal your mouth, but you cannot cut yourself off from your bowels. Everything changes around you, but your internal organs are always there, always broadcasting signals to the brain, always playing their thorough bass in the grand music of life. The inner side of the body is the only object that you cannot stop receiving information about, the only object you always feel from the beginning to the end of your days. Thus, internal organs are a prime candidate as a basis for building and maintaining your sense of selfhood across time.
An important limitation of contemporary psychology and neuroscience is that scholars replaced the old Cartesian dualism – mind versus body – with a new dualism: brain versus body. |
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| Alessandro Monti - A stable sense of self is rooted in the lungs, heart and gut - Psyche - 6 DECEMBER 2021 |
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Decartes error
Nature appears to have built the apparatus of rationality not just on top of the apparatus of biological regulation, but also from it and with it. Failure to see this, is Descartes' error.
| Content source |
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| Descartes' Error : Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain - Antonio Damasio - Penguin - 2005 |
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We, the people with peculiar brains
- We predict so fast that we think our movements are reactions.
- We think we are born with many things we actually learn because our brain is a champion in rewiring itself.
- We have so many kinds of minds that we are convinced one single natural cause explains them all.
- We believe in our mental inventions to the extent that we think it is the natural world itself.
- Our brain is so complex that it creates the metaphors we live by but mistakes them for knowledge.
- My brain regulates at this very moment you read this, your brain in such a subtle way that you think you are independent of me at this moment.
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| Seven and a half lessons about the brain - Lisa Feldman Barrett - Picador - 2020 |
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| Decision-making requires balancing exploration with exploitation, yet children are highly exploratory, with exploration decreasing with development. Less is known about what drives these changes. Results indicate that mature reward-based choices emerge relatively late in development, with children tending to over-explore. Computational modeling suggests that this exploration is systematic rather than random, as children tend to avoid repeating choices made on the previous trial. This pattern of exploration decreased with development, whereas the tendency to exploit increased. |
| Content source |
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| Nathaniel J Blanco - Exploration, exploitation, and development: Developmental shifts in decision-making - Society for Research in Child Development - 05 February 2024 |
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EXPLORATION - exploitation dilemma
The exploration-exploitation dilemma, also known as the explore-exploit tradeoff, is a fundamental concept in decision-making that arises in many domains. It is depicted as the balancing act between two opposing strategies.
- Exploration involves trying out new options that may lead to better outcomes in the future at the expense of an exploitation opportunity
- Exploitation involves choosing the best option based on current knowledge of the system (which may be incomplete or misleading)
Finding the optimal balance between these two strategies is a crucial challenge in many decision-making problems whose goal is to maximize long-term benefits.
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Deep dive
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Intellectual humility
Individuals' beliefs play a critical role in acquiring knowledge. Research demonstrates that those who believe knowledge is certain are likely to draw definitive conclusions from ambiguous evidence incorrectly. That is, individuals tend to distort information to fit their prior beliefs, which can affect their interpretation of information and knowledge acquisition.
Intellectual humility is relevant to gaining new knowledge, as most definitions involve acknowledging one's limitations. Learning requires the humility to realize one has something to learn. It involves openness to new information that may improve people's current knowledge.
Intellectually humble individuals may gain more knowledge because they pay more attention to new information.
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Meta-knowledge
Intellectual humility may relate to how people judge what they do and do not know. Realizing what one doesn't know might increase one's desire to be more informed and encourage greater attention to new information and involves a non-threatening awareness of one's intellectual fallibility that stems from a healthy independence between one's intellect and ego.
Intellectual openness and open-minded thinking
We associate intellectual humility with more reflective thinking, the need for cognition, intellectual engagement, intellectual curiosity, intellectual openness, and open-minded thinking.
Undervaluing or ignoring alternative ideas to one's current thinking implicates several cognitive biases, including overconfidence, hindsight bias, and errors in belief updating. In contrast, intellectual openness and open-minded thinking involve flexible thinking, willingness to decontextualize, and the tendency to weigh new evidence against current beliefs.
More open-minded individuals seek more information and, to the extent that available information is predictive of future outcomes, are more accurate in their knowledge and judgments.
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Cooperative learning
Intellectual humility predicts greater tolerance, empathy, altruism, benevolence, and less power-seeking. Assertiveness taps into the tendency to defend one's ideas without imposing one's viewpoints on others.
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| Content source |
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| Links between intellectual humility and acquiring knowledge - Elizabeth J. Krumrei-Mancusoa -The Journal of Positive Psychology - 2019 |
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Truth
Our journey begins with the exploration of the intricate connection between beauty, value/justice, and relevance, each operating in its distinct domain.
Beauty, value/justice, and relevance are not just distinct concepts, but they also intersect and inform each other in myriad ways, adding depth to our understanding of truth.
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Beauty is often associated with aesthetic pleasure and the appreciation of form, harmony, and excellence. Beauty can be linked to truth in the sense that something perceived as beautiful reveals or illustrates a certain truth about the world. We experience what is beautiful, exciting, and valuable. Objective beauty is to the truth because something perceived as beautiful may reveal or illustrate the truth about the world.
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Values are principles or standards of behaviour that individuals or societies consider essential or desirable. Truth can be viewed as a fundamental value, as honesty and integrity ('just'-ice) are often upheld as virtuous traits. Values guide our actions and judgments, influencing what we perceive as meaningful or worthwhile. What is considered reasonable is usually based on norms and principles developed within a society or cultural context. There is a connection between truth and goodness because ethical beliefs are frequently shaped by what is considered valid.
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Relevance pertains to the significance or applicability of something to a particular context or situation. It involves identifying what is pertinent or meaningful in a given context. Something is relevant if it is directly related to what is being discussed or researched at that moment. There is a connection between truth and relevance because what is true is often relevant to understanding a particular situation or issue.
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| Read more about |
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| Being human & the brain |
| Values & ethics |
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