Fifth Letter to Isla
Dear Isla:
In my last letter to you, I put forth a concept of God and reality that emphasized the primacy of the human intellect and its constructs. In this, my fifth letter to you, I will explore the nature of the human intellect and what it means to be an intellectual.
In Principia Mathematica, Bertrand Russell poses the question that is central to understanding the nature of the human intellect: "What things are there in the universe whose existence is known to us owing to our being acquainted with them?" (By acquainted, Russell means anything we have experienced directly that is real rather than imagined - a definition that includes such things as reading fiction, since the authors' thoughts expressed in the writing are real even though the events and characters are not.) Russell's answer to the question is that each of us can know only three things through acquaintance: knowledge derived from awareness of self, knowledge derived from the data provided by our senses, and knowledge derived from inference.
Inference? "And just how does a very young and still illiterate child acquire the skills of inductive and deductive reasoning?" you may well ask. The answer is the child is born with them. For example, having once placed its tiny hand on a hot cooking pot and experienced pain, even a young child will thereafter approach any object it suspects of being a cooking pot with caution because it infers that the pot may be painful to touch. As the child's mind develops, it unconsciously adds sense-data, such as observed location, to the inference equation, e.g., cooking pots seen to be stored in cupboards are probably not painful to touch. The point is that the human intellect is a natural inference machine and, given the opportunity, reasoning from knowledge of self and knowledge of sense data is what it does best.
Although reasoning from knowledge is the subject of this letter, you should understand that reasoning is not the only function of the human intellect. The human intellect is also capable of imagination and emotion, which are the sources of music, art, and poetry.
The first thing to know about the human intellect is that intelligence (the ability to reason) is not a commodity. It is not some kind of "stuff" that you are born with more a less of than someone else. Talent, the part of the human intellect dealing with creation using imagination and emotion rather than reasoning, is thought to be a commodity. Intelligence, however, is thought to be an operational consideration. That is a person's reasoning power depends primarily upon how well the mind functions. It is true, therefore, that minds of some individuals work better than most others, and the minds of some individuals do not seem to work very well at all. However, for most us who are neither a genus nor a moron, mental achievement seems to be more a matter of how we use our minds than the congenital intellectual ability we were born with.
What I am saying is that most people rarely, if ever, give their mind an opportunity to do its best work. They go through their daily life treating their mind as they do their motor car. That is, they buy a motor car with a top speed of 120 mph, but spend 99 percent of the time driving below 60 mph - less than half the speed the car is capable of - and never drive anywhere near its top speed. And so with their minds. They appear to go through life using only a fraction of the inference power available from their intellect. From this observation, I conclude that although we all think, some of us are more oriented toward thinking about our thinking than others and have, therefore, an intellectual nature. To borrow an expression from the philosopher Socrates, a true intellectual is someone "whose soul engages in an endless conversation with itself" - someone who lives in their mind and who converses more with themselves than anyone else.
I urge you, Isla, to be a true intellectual; to live in your mind. How do you do this? Well as you go about each day, think about each piece of sense data you receive along the way and what it means; then evaluate the inferences you derive from them. Adopting a style of living in which you are constantly searching for meaning and understanding of what is happening to you and around you will cause you to use more of our inference "horsepower" than those whose mental style is to remain largely unaware of their surroundings and then avoid thinking about the sense data that does get through to their consciousness.
Why should this be true? Is the mind like a muscle, the more you exercise it, the more effective it becomes? No not really. It seems that the mind works best when it is focused. As one scholar has observed, "Purpose is what organizes the diverse means of the mind to creative ends." In other words, if you adopt a mental life style in which you first observe then draw inferences from most of what your senses are signaling is happening around you, as it is happening, you will provide a fundamental purpose to direct you mind toward its best work. The good news is that you can train your mind to observe and evaluate to the point where it occurs continuously and unconsciously. I know because I did exactly that.
When I was a boy and first read Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, I decided that I would try to be like Sherlock Holmes. I would observe everything and draw inferences from the clues I observed. It took awhile just to become aware of everything that was going on around me; it took even longer to be able to really see what I was observing and hearing. But I kept at it until I began to become good at it and could use it to show off. Once my family was in a car driven by my Uncle when he stopped at a unguarded railway crossing to make certain no train was approaching. From the back seat, I suggested that there hadn't been a train in weeks and that he could go ahead and cross. My mother, a bit put out with my precocious behavior in telling an adult what to do, said that I could not possibly know that no train had been through in weeks. I pointed out that the rails were rusty and weeds were growing up between the tracks - facts no one else had noticed.
Last evening, some fifty years later, during the ABC network news show on the TV, I was watching a story about an American Jewish organization that was caught illegally spying on American Arab leaders. During an interview with one of the Arab leaders, the reporter asked the leader why he thought the Jewish organization felt the need to spy on him. The man said he supposed it was because they thought he is anti-Semitic when in fact he is not. The instant he said that, I knew the man was being disingenuous. That he was hiding the truth behind a false impression of giving an honest answer. Like the Jews, the Arabs are a Semite people. Of course he is not anti-Semitic. The question he avoided answering was is he anti-Jewish? No one at ABC news caught the error because in America the terms "anti-Semitic" and "anti-Jewish" are synonymous in common usage - as the Arab leader undoubtedly knew - and because the reporter was not really hearing and evaluating the actual meaning of the words used by the leader in his response.
The point of these rather windy personal stories is to impress upon you that to be acquainted with the knowledge derived from your senses, you must first be aware of what is actually going on around you. To do that, you must experience the details of your surroundings not merely the generalities. Playing the "Sherlock Holmes game" is one way to train yourself to become aware of the details of what you are experiencing.
Finally, we come to the central issues: What is the purpose of the reasoning powers of the intellect why must we be aware of the details of our experiences to realize this purpose?
The purpose of the reasoning powers of the intellect is to separate fact from fantasy and truth from falsehood in order to create knowledge of what to do - to decide on what action is appropriate to take. However, reasoning from inference is tricky and prone to error due to assumption of a false premise. Thus, recollection of the details of our experiences (knowledge derived from sense data) is the only basis we have for deciding on appropriate action. For example, the probable function of a nail can be inferred from careful observation of its form. It is flat on one end and pointed on the other. Obviously, the pointed end is intended to be put against a yielding substance and the flat end is then hit with a hard object, driving the nail into the substance. All good reasoning. The problem is that such reasoning is equally valid for a bullet, which is shaped very much like a fat nail, but which ought not be struck on the flat end with a hard object. It is only through experience that we learn the difference between the "nails and bullets" of our life. Sound reasoning requires sound empirical knowledge which can be gained only through experience.
The classic example of the limitations of inference is the chicken and the farmer. A very smart chicken observes the farmer’s behavior toward the chickens. Each day the farmer feeds the chickens, changes their drinking water, places fresh straw in their nests, and cleans the floor of the chicken house. From these nurturing activities. the very-smart chicken infers that the farmer loves her. Each morning the observed data confirms the smart-chicken’s inference. Right up to the morning when the farmer chops her head off and has her cooked for Sunday dinner.
The point is that when reasoning from inference, always stop and check your premise by asking yourself: Is it love or are you simply being fattened for the pot?
As I have said, the purpose of our reasoning power is to decide on appropriate action. But mere decision making is not enough. In order to benefit ourselves and others, we must actually undertake the action decided upon. Our private world created by our intellect is of no value until the knowledge and decisions reached in our mind are communicated to others through action. Whoever of us sees a clearer truth, a better way, is burdened to communicate their thoughts to others in attempt to affect a change in the status quo. To be an intellectual is to participate in the endless conversation we call civilization that has been going on since humans first learned to speak. I urge you to become a person who writes e-mails to politicians and editors, who maintains a Web Log (Blog). A person who makes her views known to all.
One final thought. As you develop your observation and evaluation skills you will find fault and error with the reasoning of the people you encounter during your day. Be forgiving and discreet in your judgment of others, and remember you also are making errors in your reasoning. We all do so unknowingly. The human tendency for error is the fundamental basis for Christian forgiveness. Develop a sense of proportion; learn when an error must be commented upon and when it can be left uncorrected. You will find that individuals will accept criticism of their reasoning more readily when in private conversation than when in a group.
More importantly, learn to attack a person’s ideas without attacking the person. All that is usually required is to begin your criticism by pointing out the positive aspects of the idea before attacking the negative aspects. People tend to accept your criticism of their ideas if they believe their ideas were fairly considered.
Your Loving Godfather,
In my last letter to you, I put forth a concept of God and reality that emphasized the primacy of the human intellect and its constructs. In this, my fifth letter to you, I will explore the nature of the human intellect and what it means to be an intellectual.
In Principia Mathematica, Bertrand Russell poses the question that is central to understanding the nature of the human intellect: "What things are there in the universe whose existence is known to us owing to our being acquainted with them?" (By acquainted, Russell means anything we have experienced directly that is real rather than imagined - a definition that includes such things as reading fiction, since the authors' thoughts expressed in the writing are real even though the events and characters are not.) Russell's answer to the question is that each of us can know only three things through acquaintance: knowledge derived from awareness of self, knowledge derived from the data provided by our senses, and knowledge derived from inference.
Inference? "And just how does a very young and still illiterate child acquire the skills of inductive and deductive reasoning?" you may well ask. The answer is the child is born with them. For example, having once placed its tiny hand on a hot cooking pot and experienced pain, even a young child will thereafter approach any object it suspects of being a cooking pot with caution because it infers that the pot may be painful to touch. As the child's mind develops, it unconsciously adds sense-data, such as observed location, to the inference equation, e.g., cooking pots seen to be stored in cupboards are probably not painful to touch. The point is that the human intellect is a natural inference machine and, given the opportunity, reasoning from knowledge of self and knowledge of sense data is what it does best.
Although reasoning from knowledge is the subject of this letter, you should understand that reasoning is not the only function of the human intellect. The human intellect is also capable of imagination and emotion, which are the sources of music, art, and poetry.
The first thing to know about the human intellect is that intelligence (the ability to reason) is not a commodity. It is not some kind of "stuff" that you are born with more a less of than someone else. Talent, the part of the human intellect dealing with creation using imagination and emotion rather than reasoning, is thought to be a commodity. Intelligence, however, is thought to be an operational consideration. That is a person's reasoning power depends primarily upon how well the mind functions. It is true, therefore, that minds of some individuals work better than most others, and the minds of some individuals do not seem to work very well at all. However, for most us who are neither a genus nor a moron, mental achievement seems to be more a matter of how we use our minds than the congenital intellectual ability we were born with.
What I am saying is that most people rarely, if ever, give their mind an opportunity to do its best work. They go through their daily life treating their mind as they do their motor car. That is, they buy a motor car with a top speed of 120 mph, but spend 99 percent of the time driving below 60 mph - less than half the speed the car is capable of - and never drive anywhere near its top speed. And so with their minds. They appear to go through life using only a fraction of the inference power available from their intellect. From this observation, I conclude that although we all think, some of us are more oriented toward thinking about our thinking than others and have, therefore, an intellectual nature. To borrow an expression from the philosopher Socrates, a true intellectual is someone "whose soul engages in an endless conversation with itself" - someone who lives in their mind and who converses more with themselves than anyone else.
I urge you, Isla, to be a true intellectual; to live in your mind. How do you do this? Well as you go about each day, think about each piece of sense data you receive along the way and what it means; then evaluate the inferences you derive from them. Adopting a style of living in which you are constantly searching for meaning and understanding of what is happening to you and around you will cause you to use more of our inference "horsepower" than those whose mental style is to remain largely unaware of their surroundings and then avoid thinking about the sense data that does get through to their consciousness.
Why should this be true? Is the mind like a muscle, the more you exercise it, the more effective it becomes? No not really. It seems that the mind works best when it is focused. As one scholar has observed, "Purpose is what organizes the diverse means of the mind to creative ends." In other words, if you adopt a mental life style in which you first observe then draw inferences from most of what your senses are signaling is happening around you, as it is happening, you will provide a fundamental purpose to direct you mind toward its best work. The good news is that you can train your mind to observe and evaluate to the point where it occurs continuously and unconsciously. I know because I did exactly that.
When I was a boy and first read Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, I decided that I would try to be like Sherlock Holmes. I would observe everything and draw inferences from the clues I observed. It took awhile just to become aware of everything that was going on around me; it took even longer to be able to really see what I was observing and hearing. But I kept at it until I began to become good at it and could use it to show off. Once my family was in a car driven by my Uncle when he stopped at a unguarded railway crossing to make certain no train was approaching. From the back seat, I suggested that there hadn't been a train in weeks and that he could go ahead and cross. My mother, a bit put out with my precocious behavior in telling an adult what to do, said that I could not possibly know that no train had been through in weeks. I pointed out that the rails were rusty and weeds were growing up between the tracks - facts no one else had noticed.
Last evening, some fifty years later, during the ABC network news show on the TV, I was watching a story about an American Jewish organization that was caught illegally spying on American Arab leaders. During an interview with one of the Arab leaders, the reporter asked the leader why he thought the Jewish organization felt the need to spy on him. The man said he supposed it was because they thought he is anti-Semitic when in fact he is not. The instant he said that, I knew the man was being disingenuous. That he was hiding the truth behind a false impression of giving an honest answer. Like the Jews, the Arabs are a Semite people. Of course he is not anti-Semitic. The question he avoided answering was is he anti-Jewish? No one at ABC news caught the error because in America the terms "anti-Semitic" and "anti-Jewish" are synonymous in common usage - as the Arab leader undoubtedly knew - and because the reporter was not really hearing and evaluating the actual meaning of the words used by the leader in his response.
The point of these rather windy personal stories is to impress upon you that to be acquainted with the knowledge derived from your senses, you must first be aware of what is actually going on around you. To do that, you must experience the details of your surroundings not merely the generalities. Playing the "Sherlock Holmes game" is one way to train yourself to become aware of the details of what you are experiencing.
Finally, we come to the central issues: What is the purpose of the reasoning powers of the intellect why must we be aware of the details of our experiences to realize this purpose?
The purpose of the reasoning powers of the intellect is to separate fact from fantasy and truth from falsehood in order to create knowledge of what to do - to decide on what action is appropriate to take. However, reasoning from inference is tricky and prone to error due to assumption of a false premise. Thus, recollection of the details of our experiences (knowledge derived from sense data) is the only basis we have for deciding on appropriate action. For example, the probable function of a nail can be inferred from careful observation of its form. It is flat on one end and pointed on the other. Obviously, the pointed end is intended to be put against a yielding substance and the flat end is then hit with a hard object, driving the nail into the substance. All good reasoning. The problem is that such reasoning is equally valid for a bullet, which is shaped very much like a fat nail, but which ought not be struck on the flat end with a hard object. It is only through experience that we learn the difference between the "nails and bullets" of our life. Sound reasoning requires sound empirical knowledge which can be gained only through experience.
The classic example of the limitations of inference is the chicken and the farmer. A very smart chicken observes the farmer’s behavior toward the chickens. Each day the farmer feeds the chickens, changes their drinking water, places fresh straw in their nests, and cleans the floor of the chicken house. From these nurturing activities. the very-smart chicken infers that the farmer loves her. Each morning the observed data confirms the smart-chicken’s inference. Right up to the morning when the farmer chops her head off and has her cooked for Sunday dinner.
The point is that when reasoning from inference, always stop and check your premise by asking yourself: Is it love or are you simply being fattened for the pot?
As I have said, the purpose of our reasoning power is to decide on appropriate action. But mere decision making is not enough. In order to benefit ourselves and others, we must actually undertake the action decided upon. Our private world created by our intellect is of no value until the knowledge and decisions reached in our mind are communicated to others through action. Whoever of us sees a clearer truth, a better way, is burdened to communicate their thoughts to others in attempt to affect a change in the status quo. To be an intellectual is to participate in the endless conversation we call civilization that has been going on since humans first learned to speak. I urge you to become a person who writes e-mails to politicians and editors, who maintains a Web Log (Blog). A person who makes her views known to all.
One final thought. As you develop your observation and evaluation skills you will find fault and error with the reasoning of the people you encounter during your day. Be forgiving and discreet in your judgment of others, and remember you also are making errors in your reasoning. We all do so unknowingly. The human tendency for error is the fundamental basis for Christian forgiveness. Develop a sense of proportion; learn when an error must be commented upon and when it can be left uncorrected. You will find that individuals will accept criticism of their reasoning more readily when in private conversation than when in a group.
More importantly, learn to attack a person’s ideas without attacking the person. All that is usually required is to begin your criticism by pointing out the positive aspects of the idea before attacking the negative aspects. People tend to accept your criticism of their ideas if they believe their ideas were fairly considered.
Your Loving Godfather,
posted by Bob Baker at 2:56 AM
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