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eThoughts
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Free to not Think?
I recently received some information about an organization called the Freethinkers. The email I received was about the criteria for what to believe. The author wrote about the importance of falsifiability. No thought or concept is acceptable if it can’t be falsified. Hence, rigorous science is about the only thing that will generate knowledge.
All right, I’m steeped in behavioral science and I know something about this. Skipping past all the parts that are subject to criticism about science, determinism, empirical evidence, and cause and effect, the idea of falsifiability is an interesting one.
The general idea is that one takes a hypothesis and attempts to prove it wrong by scientific principles (objectivity and empirical evidence). If one cannot prove it wrong, then the hypothesis is accepted, for the time being anyway.
The same principle is supposedly applied in law. One cannot be both innocent and guilty of a particular crime. The law supposedly makes an assumption that one is innocent unless proven guilty. So, in order to prove innocence, we try to prove guilt (through empirical evidence). If we can’t prove the guilt, than innocence is accepted.
The problems are vast indeed, both legally and scientifically (especially when one heads off trying to prove a hypothesis instead of trying to prove its opposite). But the issue that most bothers me nowadays (again) is about thinking to begin with.
It seems like it's a world of words and the art of explanation reigns. That doesn’t make it a bad path by any means, but if we are always ensconced in explanations, logical or otherwise, it still is rather easy to get tangled up. In that regard, I cannot help but think of the physicist Niels Bohr's statement that a great truth is one whose opposite is also true. So, the principle of falsifiability (along with logic, replicability, honesty, sufficiency, and comprehensibility) is one of the gold standards of thinking and assessment, but what about not thinking, about shutting down the mental chatter, regardless of the veracity and efficacy of our cognitive abilities?
Free thinking is interesting all right, but thinking is our greatest addiction. Most addicts can quit their dependency for a day or two, but we can scarcely manage a minute or two without the roof-brain chatter, however cleverly we clothe it.
What's running the show? Bad thinking? Good thinking? Free thinking? Conditioned thinking? I suspect it's our addiction. What are the facts and empirical evidence? Well, let's think about that (hahaha). Let’s use falsifiability and check it out. Are we free to not think? I don't think so (yeah, hahaha, again). In the spirit of falsifiability, just go ahead and take a few minutes to not think.
Hard isn’t it? Something is always going on. I find that rather interesting. And when I am actually able to just be aware as opposed to be aware of something (my thought-stopping abilities are at about the preschool level), it seems like I’ve learned part of an important balance in knowing. Maybe one of our gold standards should include being still. Somehow I’d bet we’d step up an evolutionary step or two
I read something recently about the actor Michael Caine. He was talking about acting and what it can bring to one's life. He said that he was once having difficulty with a prop being in the way of a stage entrance (apparently a chair was jammed in a doorway). The director told him to use the difficulty. When Caine asked him what he meant, the director told him that if it was a comedy, trip over the chair, if it was a drama, pick it up and smash it.
Maybe our thoughts are jammed in the doorway. Let's see, if it's a comedy..., if it's a drama...
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