[bobcousins]

I have thought about critical thinking quite a bit and have come to the conclusion that it is largely a myth. The brain is a neural network, which essentially works by association. It can perform symbolic processing, but this is not its underlying mode.

Logic is powerful, but limited. Apart from limits due to Godels Theorem, you have to start with some axioms. You can't do all your own fundamental research, so you have to rely on someone else to do it. A lot of academic discourse in non-science fields (and even in some science fields) becomes an elaborate appeal to authority. "Freud said this..", "Ah yes, but Russell said...".

If you analyse the ways experts work, they have internalised a myraid of special case rules - in popular terms this is 'gut feeling'. However, when you ask them about their reasoning, they will give the 'standard' rules that they have been taught, or even now teach their students. You can't access directly what goes on in the neural network, so people apply post-hoc rationalisations.

I would argue that the scientific method is the superior method of determining truth, because it compensates for this. Even Einstein started with a crazy hunch, what made him a genius was the fact he could demonstrate it mathematically, and that the wider scientific communiity confirmed it by observation.

I am sure that people who are advanced in the field either have developed or are naturally gifted with the ability to sort out the wheat from the chaff. Yet they are still fallible, and prone to all the human weaknesses such as pride and stubbornness. Their skill is often not transferable to another field. This leads me to think that the acquisition of specific facts and the ability to manipulate them are actually the same thing as they are implemented by the neural network, which together produce skill in a particular field. This makes it difficult (but not impossible) to separate out the processing part and apply it independently to a different field.

[RacerJace]

Wow that's pretty deep bob..

Here's one of my favorites...
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', ' ')Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration --
that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively.
There is no such thing as death,
life is only a dream,
and we are the imagination of ourselves.
Here's Tom with the weather

Bill Hicks 1961 - 1994

[dbarberic]

This topic requires to much thinking.... it hurts my brain.

[tinosor_b]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Doly', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('bart', '
')3. Read good books: philosophy, history, literature, science.

[loveandrage]

"No fear. No distraction. The ability to let that which does not matter, truly slide."

[rogerhb]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('bobcousins', 'I') have thought about critical thinking quite a bit and have come to the conclusion that it is largely a myth. The brain is a neural network, which essentially works by association. It can perform symbolic processing, but this is not its underlying mode.

[gg3]

Bobcousins is basically right on target, plus or minus an error that Rogerhb amplified somewhat.

First of all, one of the main points in the article that led off this topic is that the scientific method is the most reliable means that humans have ever developed for producing accurate knowledge.

In essence, scientific method comes down to: observe, hypothesize, test, publish, repeat/refine. The key point is testing (i.e. everything else hinges on the testing stage), but here one needs specialized knowledge: how to operationalize variables, and how to determine significance (or lack thereof) of relationships.

The linked article uses the term "critical thinking" for something that encompasses scientific method plus a number of other skills; these plus some others comprise what I call "general method," as in, "general method for obtaining and using knowledge."

---

I basically agree with what Bobcousins said, but here's where I differ (and believe his posting goes into error mode):

"You can't access directly what goes on in the neural network."

Yes, you can (access directly).

And Rogerhb, "To think critically you have to concentrate on a problem dispassionately and avoid emotion, pre-conceived ideas or leaping to conclusions."

No, you shouldn't (avoid emotion etc.).

First of all, emotional state data *is* the primary feedback system in the neural network. By this I don't mean the obvious observables such as "happy/sad/angry/inspired," etc., but the more subtle variations that most humans aren't trained to recognize. By analogy, non-artists aren't trained to recognize subtle differences in color: those colors are objectively real in the sense that they represent different wavelengths of light; most people aren't trained to make the subtler distinctions.

To the best of our knowledge, emotions are highly correlated with (one is tempted to say "identical with" but that would be exceeding the data) various chemicals such as neuropeptides in the brain. These chemicals have effects on the flow of signals between neurons, thus they influence cognitive processing of information.

Every feedback system is an output looped back to an input; so to the extent that you can detect the output, you have additional information about the system. Perhaps not *complete* information, but *more* information than you would otherwise have. Thus, emotions enable you to access directly what is going on in the network; and thus, emotions shouldn't be "avoided" any more than any other source of data should be avoided. This paragraph sums up my criticism of Bob and Roger.

In a practical sense...

If you practice concentrative and mindfulness meditation, you gain access to a higher-resolution degree of perception of the workings of your own brain/mind. This is not new-age bullsh--, this is simply a matter of training yourself to observe how your own brain/mind works, in much the same way that artistic or musical training refine one's perceptual ability to distinguish colors or pitches and rhythms.

If you understand how your subtler emotional state systems work, you gain a better understanding of the feedback system that shapes your cognitive outputs.

Note, in most humans, "emotion leads and reason follows," by which I mean, a person has an emotional response to a data-set, and then uses reason to explain the connections among the elements from premises to conclusions. In the best cases, emotion is being utilised to arrive at a hypothesis and then reason cross-checks the result and applies corrections as needed. In the worst cases, which happen to occur most often and for the majority of the species, an emotional conclusion is "rationalized" by whatever means are needed; for example bigotry justified by some rationalization about the individuals who are targets of the hatred, etc.

Similiarly, "intuition," often dismissed a-priori, is nothing more than massively parallel processing that occurs outside of conscious awareness. Hameroff's & Penrose's theory of consciousness ("orchestrated objective-reduction", often abbreviated as "Orch-OR") includes the point that consciousness is discontinuous due to the way the nerve cells in the brain operate, but is perceived as continuous in much the same manner as a movie made up of discrete still pictures is perceived as continuous. (However, Hameroff & Penrose operationalize this nicely in terms of specific measurable neural events: their theory is not merely an analogy here, it includes detailed descriptions of how those neural events occur. Some of those descriptions have led to specific predictions, and some of those have been verified experimentally in neuroscience) So we can make the inference from Hameroff & Penrose that intuition may involve events that occur during the neural operations that are not represented in the flow of what we perceive as continuous consciousness.

And the point of the above paragraph is, intuition is not a flawed method of thinking that should be dismissed out of hand. As well, neither should emotion be dismissed out of hand. The truly objective way to deal with these and other nonrational or irrational thought processes is to take them as a source of data or meta-data. Instead of "I feel X about subject Q, therefore X is bias, therefore reject X in favor of not-X," do this: "I feel X about subject Q. Does this give me a basis to ask questions about Q that I wasn't asking before? Does this indicate a preference for one or another outcome with respect to Q? Do the implications of X indicate a basis for another testable hypothesis about Q?" And then of course you can ask, "If I feel X, and it leads in direction Y, then what would occur if I felt not-X or opposite-of-X? What direction would that point in, and what hypotheses would that suggest?"

One can do the same operations with respect to intuitive outputs, and outputs from other irrational or nonrational cognitive processes. Good scientists are not averse to doing this, and some of them do it quite deliberately. The key to maintaining a scientific attitude about all of this is to take the subjective data and meta-data as inputs to hypothesis-formation about whatever is the object under study.

---

The fact that scientific method produces accurate knowledge, does not guarantee wisdom. For this we have to include a diversified tool-set, which necessarily includes artistic, philosophical, religious, and other elements that may or may not operate within the scientific paradigm. However, none of these fields of the human creative endeavors, by itself, guarantees wisdom; rather, one must necessarily use more than one tool to build the greater whole. About this there are few convergent answers, but there are the ingredients for the evolution of wisdom on the part of individuals and societies. One knows the tree by its fruits.