Great piece! "...a broader capacity for epistemic agility, contextual discernment, and knowing which questions need to be asked." I think also that rare / novel ideas are likelier to arise from the cross-pollination of wildly divergent disciplines- another reason why being a generalist is fruitful.
Re 'leading from confusion', may I suggest sending out something ahead of time to registered participants to afford some mulling over time ahead of sessions?
Doesn't every human being, regardless of rank and status, make it up as we go along with the consensus-reality feeling that the sounds & symbols of language are a true grasp of the reality of the world around us and our own reality? As McGilchrist writes in TMWT:
"Perception is not the same as attention, and not at all the same as thinking. But the world we choose to attend to, indeed choose whether and how to attend to, is nothing without perception. ‘We live in two worlds, the world of sight and the world of thought’, wrote Friedrich Max Müller, one of the most celebrated philologists of the nineteenth century, ‘and, strange as it may sound, nothing that we think, nothing that we name, nothing that we find in our dictionary, can ever be seen or heard, or perceived'", The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World (p. 165).
Does this passage from Iain's chapter on perception give us cause to try to understand how impoverished our sense of reality is by the communication medium of language, with all its sight-oriented sense-of-reality, surface-impression, word-labels? What do you actually 'see' when looking at this photo of yourself Johnathan? Do you see the territory or the map? Does your autopilot rush in with all those familiar descriptive words, that for the sake of behavioral efficiency 'fuse' description with definition?
And is it true that you could use any other words you care to imagine to describe what you see in the photo, without altering the 'reality' of what your eyes are seeing? Is this why Plato called out humanity's epistemic (relating to knowledge and its validation) 'delusion' when he wrote, "All this time we have been repeating the words 'know,' 'understand.' Yet we do not know what knowledge is."
Are we all raised to speak and write 'knowingly' about the 'reality' of our experience and never give a thought the cognitive behavioral therapy of the Socratic method so skillfully disguised in Plato's dialogues. Is it time to realize how we are 'winging it,' because we are speaking and writing about the 'reality' of language, as an instrument of 'thought,' with the primary purpose of self-affectation?
Hence, although Iain wrote about the primacy of affect in The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, he neglected to illuminate the motivational and non-conscious power of innate affect, in order to maintain his 'winging it' focus on one biological organ of our body's evolutionary design.
Pity you didn't read and reread Plato as a means of contemplation about humanity's epistemic delusion, and wonder why he backed up his knowledge challenge with, "I feared to see myself at last altogether, nothing but words."
Do you confuse 'who' you see in the photo, with 'what' you see, Johnathan? Does your autobiographical memory sense-of-self, falsely 'represent,' to use a favorite McGilchrist term, your reality? And is the world in this world, the reality-wise world, beyond our suspicious mind's?
loved reading this! ❤️
"There is another world, and it is in this world." - yes!
Great piece! "...a broader capacity for epistemic agility, contextual discernment, and knowing which questions need to be asked." I think also that rare / novel ideas are likelier to arise from the cross-pollination of wildly divergent disciplines- another reason why being a generalist is fruitful.
Thank you. This was very comforting to read.
Re 'leading from confusion', may I suggest sending out something ahead of time to registered participants to afford some mulling over time ahead of sessions?
Great list. Thanks.
Will there be a recording of the session I'll be sadly away
Wow - Humility and yet total self absorption!
Doesn't every human being, regardless of rank and status, make it up as we go along with the consensus-reality feeling that the sounds & symbols of language are a true grasp of the reality of the world around us and our own reality? As McGilchrist writes in TMWT:
"Perception is not the same as attention, and not at all the same as thinking. But the world we choose to attend to, indeed choose whether and how to attend to, is nothing without perception. ‘We live in two worlds, the world of sight and the world of thought’, wrote Friedrich Max Müller, one of the most celebrated philologists of the nineteenth century, ‘and, strange as it may sound, nothing that we think, nothing that we name, nothing that we find in our dictionary, can ever be seen or heard, or perceived'", The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World (p. 165).
Does this passage from Iain's chapter on perception give us cause to try to understand how impoverished our sense of reality is by the communication medium of language, with all its sight-oriented sense-of-reality, surface-impression, word-labels? What do you actually 'see' when looking at this photo of yourself Johnathan? Do you see the territory or the map? Does your autopilot rush in with all those familiar descriptive words, that for the sake of behavioral efficiency 'fuse' description with definition?
And is it true that you could use any other words you care to imagine to describe what you see in the photo, without altering the 'reality' of what your eyes are seeing? Is this why Plato called out humanity's epistemic (relating to knowledge and its validation) 'delusion' when he wrote, "All this time we have been repeating the words 'know,' 'understand.' Yet we do not know what knowledge is."
Are we all raised to speak and write 'knowingly' about the 'reality' of our experience and never give a thought the cognitive behavioral therapy of the Socratic method so skillfully disguised in Plato's dialogues. Is it time to realize how we are 'winging it,' because we are speaking and writing about the 'reality' of language, as an instrument of 'thought,' with the primary purpose of self-affectation?
Hence, although Iain wrote about the primacy of affect in The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, he neglected to illuminate the motivational and non-conscious power of innate affect, in order to maintain his 'winging it' focus on one biological organ of our body's evolutionary design.
Pity you didn't read and reread Plato as a means of contemplation about humanity's epistemic delusion, and wonder why he backed up his knowledge challenge with, "I feared to see myself at last altogether, nothing but words."
Do you confuse 'who' you see in the photo, with 'what' you see, Johnathan? Does your autobiographical memory sense-of-self, falsely 'represent,' to use a favorite McGilchrist term, your reality? And is the world in this world, the reality-wise world, beyond our suspicious mind's?