Filters

"The map is not the territory." - Alfred Korzybski

We perceive the world via our senses: the external makes an impression on us. This impression is not neutral and fresh, but heavily filtered and distorted via our biases. We - or more precisely, processes within our minds - silently attach propositions immediately on the impression, and we typically assent to these propositions. Critical thinking is the routinized mechanism of teasing out this filtered and categorized and assented to framework, a bag of tricks used habitually to improve our filters, to question them, to suspend our assent and an attempt to make informed assent. Rhetoric and propaganda is the attempt to use the filters and implications to get an audience to assent to the entire bundle, both the impression and a parasitic framework which is a Trojan horse.

Our minds make up a map of the world, one that is reduced in content but, hopefully, reflective of the significant features of the world. Filtering suggests it is hard to make a good map.

To see the effect of a filter pay attention the next time you learn something new, X, it becomes a new pattern, a new filter and you will start to see item X in the world around you, whereas previously you had filtered it out. Learning new ideas and patterns enables you to make sense of the impressions of the world using your new filter. Everyone is familiar with this, many call this "coincidences" - to the careful they see this as illuminating how our minds work, and a warning, to the less careful they see conspiracy theories and evidence of the supernatural, profound evidence. We can also consider illusions - these are well known examples where our minds profoundly layer something onto an impression which we know is not true, and yet we still perceive incorrectly; to a great extent everything is an illusion, a combination of a true impression and an additional assumed and added framework. By understanding an illusion we can remove assent - facts we can demonstrate to be true will change our assent - although we cannot stop slathering the added framework as it is automatic and uncontrolled. In fact, the existance of illusions is the most clear means of teaching the neccessity for critical thinking.

We can see people as givers of assent - if you are careful you will critically give, or suspend, assent to the impressions and their associated implied (by our minds) propositions, baggage, and implications. If you are not careful you will not examine what the underlying impression is, and take the whole package as true. You will not take the effort to attempt to discriminate what is true, and what is an assumption that we slathered on top.

The agnostic is one who only provides his assent to implications that at strong - what Stoics would call kataleptic impressions - something where the implications are basically not falsifiable. Your feelings of pain, consciousness, existance of external reality - kataleptic. A Bayesian would assign very little uncertainty to kataleptic impressions. Both a Stoic and a Bayesian treat the world differently than most - they work to give assent only to what is concrete and knowable, and treat most of what we "know" as more ephemeral and work to suspend assent.

Lowdown:
- what we see is: illusion = filter(impression), the illusion suggests implications, critical thinking is trying to determine if we should assent to the implications.
- Work to be an agnostic. Focus on the "hard core" and don't cling to the ephemeral. Belief is an uncritical opinion, a freely given assent to an impression, and is irrational and often false.
- Agnostic ~ Stoic ~ Bayesian ~ Critical thinker != the "natural" man.
- Stoic psychology of mind: input - filter(impression), output - assent, or suspension of assent, to the implications we bundle to impressions. To compare peoples minds, compare their assent to impressions; to compare their character, compare how they assent.
- There is nothing new under the sun: NLP seems to be Stoic personality theory, rediscovered and with some more medical information behind it and focusing on the tactics and tricks versus the overarching strategy

Critical Thought

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweet and blood; who strives valiantly ... who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worth cause; who at best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worse, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who have ... known neither victory or defeat." - Theodore Roosevelt

To a high degree our educational system is one founded on criticism and critical thought. There are many positive aspects to this - learning to be a critical thinker prevents one from being a fool and wasting ones precious time (read: life) pursuing ideas that are flawed, being critical allows one to quickly break down a situation to get the feel of it, and criticism is easy and fun. But criticism is also dangerous - the ease, fun, and ego boost that occurs can be a trap preventing one from going further. Critical thought should be used to get you in the game and to improve your game, it is not the game itself. Do you want to be the fat guy on the couch who plays no sports that screams at the TV, yelling that the coach is a moron, that player X is weak, etc. or do you want to be a player? Criticism can be a trap - and one that can capture many intelligent people (many academics are the equivalent of the fat man yelling at the TV - creation of value is the game, not the criticism of others. Criticism without action and creation is simply whining.).

Criticism as an end in itself is pseudo-intellectualism - it is only one tool in your journey and is easy. It is not "stupid action man versus smart thinking man" - it is creating versus consuming. Either you are actively living life, creating wealth and value (friends, memories, joy, artifacts, etc.), or not. The more you engage and create, the better off you are.

Learn how to be critical and critical thought - but learn this to guide your actions, not as an excuse for taking no action. When in doubt you should look to see if something is simple or if it is easy - you want to do simple things, not easy things. Criticism is easy, relative to action (which requires risk, courage, sustained efforts, etc.), which suggests that it is not a sufficient mode to confront life with.