Is Rigor compatible with Intuition?

[semper occultus]

.....if anyone wants to translate this.....




http://www.alice.id.tue.nl/references/hameroff-penrose-1996.pdf

[Iamwhomiam]

I think it means they've located the root of all evil.

[Grizzly]

“Obviously, the faster we process information, the more rich and complex our models or glosses — our reality-tunnels — will become.”

~Bob Wilson

[American Dream]

Triple-Decker Weekly, 133

By IMP KERR

http://thenewinquiry.com/blogs/shines-l ... eekly-133/

[Elvis]

http://thenewinquiry.com/blogs/shines-like-gold/triple-decker-weekly-133/

Wow, tons of interesting stuff there, AD, thanks!

Interesting how the writer, coming from a technocratic sort of numbers-driven factual data orientation that demands quantification, talks about "how much we know." He's definitely concerned with knowledge, as opposed to knowing (using Guruilla's helpful distinction) -- and that's cool -- and cites so many studies (many interesting links!) full of quantifications and all kinds of data; "knowledge" has come to mean "all the known facts" -- all the experimental results, tests, measurements, statistics, surveys, interviews, theories, proofs and conclusions of all the science books, papers, journals and bulletins -- throw them all into a huge pile, and that's Knowledge. If it ain't in there, it ain't Knowledge. Just the published, peer-reviewed facts, ma'am.

Can people differentiate what they know from what they do not? Several lines of research suggest that people are not always accurate judges of their knowledge and often overestimate how much they know.

Notice how the writer then reduces knowing to the flimsier "feeling of knowing"? -- because when you're attempting to acquire Knowledge™, 'feelings' don't count! They're only feelings. Subjective experience doesn't count! Experiences are merely experiences. Feelings and experience don't count as Knowledge.

In the writer's framework, there is no woo; intuition is a thinking/reasoning process, but is disdained as "not very strenuous," the "least tiring, and basically given 'retard' status with a classification, "type 1 thinking."

As Nordic and others pointed out, many scientific conceptual breakthroughs are realized through dreams, synchronicities and other kinds of subjective, intuitive processes. But in the scientific method, subjectivity is banned and the first requirement is objectivity. You are inside your head; everything else -- the universe -- is outside. The world and the universe is the alien other, and to observe the world scientifically, you must assume a mindset that Theodore Roszak (who coined the word "counterculture") called objective consciousness. Roszak declared objective consciousness a myth: it doesn't exist, because subjective experience is the only kind of experience there is.

Roszak's worry, like William Blake's, is that single vision, i.e. objective consciousness -- Newton and Bacon's first command, the essential thought-mode of our techno-scientific age, and prized above all as the exclusive means to knowledge -- is a dangerous lens through which to see the world: it cuts out half the picture; alienates us from nature; depersonalizes us by reducing everything, including people, to numbers or machines; symbols, meanings, feelings, dreams, experiences, everything that makes life human, are all out the window.

When those essential human things like meanings, feelings, dreams and intuition are studied, they will, as always, be objectified, delineated, alienated, depersonalized and reduced, then formally written, up with all due caution, published in all the right places and finally thrown onto the Knowledge pile with the rest.

Some good news is, a few open-minded souls with all the right credentials are going off the reservation into some territory usually regarded as no-man's land...more about that another day.


And this link (of many) in the article is certainly germane: "a new paper in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology explores how feelings of expertise can lead us to be more dogmatic towards new ideas."

http://digest.bps.org.uk/2015/10/feeling-like-youre-expert-can-make-you.html

Feeling like you're an expert can make you closed-minded



What happens to us as we accrue knowledge and experience, as we become experts in a field? Competence follows. Effortlessness follows (pdf). But certain downsides can follow too. We reported recently on how experts are vulnerable to an overclaiming error – falsely feeling familiar with things that seem true of a domain but aren’t. Now a new paper in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology explores how feelings of expertise can lead us to be more dogmatic towards new ideas.

Victor Ottati at Loyola University and his colleagues manipulated their participants (US residents, average age in their 30s) to feel relative experts or novices in a chosen field, through easy questions like “Who is the current President of the United States?” or tough ones like “Who was Nixon's initial Vice-President?” and through providing feedback to enforce the participants’ feelings of knowledge or ignorance. Those participants manipulated to feel more expert subsequently acted less open-minded toward the same topic, as judged by their responses to items such as “I am open to considering other political viewpoints.”

People’s perceptions of their all-round expertise – provoked in the participants via an easy rather than a hard trivia quiz – also led them to display a close-mindedness in general, even though it was the participants who took the hard quiz who failed more, and reported feeling more insecure, irritable and negative – ingredients that are normally associated with close-mindedness. This isn’t to say that these emotional states didn’t have any effect, just that any effect was swamped by perceptions of expertise.

These findings are somewhat counterintuitive because there are good reasons to have expected the opposite results. Firstly, real-life experts take a long road that involves acquiring and synthesising new information, at times requiring them to flip their way of thinking about things – for instance, a chemist might recall how atoms operated one way in early grade science, only for later schooling to reveal a very different picture. As such, dogmatism is an obstacle to true expertise. Secondly, research on stress and emotion tells us that feeling relaxed and successful – as you might expect an expert to feel more than a novice – encourages open-mindedness.

But Ottati and his colleagues point out that open-mindedness doesn’t exist in a vacuum - it ebbs and flows according to the social situation. It’s not as acceptable to pooh-pooh the content of a university lecture the same way you might do the street demagogue’s patter. The researchers argued too that as well as the situation, your own social role matters, and the "expert" is a social role that gives you permission to opt-out of open-mindedness.

How do we know the closed-mindedness associated with feeling expert was driven by assumptions the participants were making about the social role of expert, and not the effect of some other psychological state? For example, an alternative explanation could be that the participants made to feel expert were overwhelmed by a sense of power, something past research has shown to make contributions from others appear less relevant. We know it must be about social role because the effect was maintained when participants didn’t themselves feel special at all. In another experiment, the researchers asked their participants whether it was justified for someone to ignore the political opinions of other people at a party, when the individual in question was more expert than, more novice than, or similar to the other guests. The hypothetical was framed in two ways: “you are at a party where…” or “John is at a party where…” – in both cases, the participants considered an expert was justified in acting dogmatic.

Taken altogether, how robust are these findings? On the main effect itself (linking feelings of expertise with close-mindedness), note that the sample sizes were quite small – there were only 30-60 participants per experiment. However the effect was uncovered using slightly different methods across six experiments, giving us faith that there’s something real here. However we need to be cautious in how we interpret these results. The study shows us the effect of the social role of expertise, manipulated independently from the true possession of expertise. In other words, the path of acquiring knowledge, and being wrong a lot along the way, may produce countervailing positive influences upon open-mindedness, something not examined in this study. This means we can conclude from this research a narrow but important point: that thinking of yourself as "being the expert" can be an obstacle to open-mindedness.

_________________________________ ResearchBlogging.org

Ottati, V., Price, E., Wilson, C., & Sumaktoyo, N. (2015). When self-perceptions of expertise increase closed-minded cognition: The earned dogmatism effect Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 61, 131-138 DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2015.08.003

[Elvis]

I was just thinking how silly this all is, and wondering why I'm apparently so concerned with it. We've probably all been over it a hundred times before, it's pretty elementary stuff.

But that's it -- it's elementary. And it's unresolved. I hate that!

And maybe it can never be truly resolved, but so far this been fruitful for me, thanks all.

[guruilla]

I wonder what Jan Irvin would have to say.

(Ref: to the notion that we are in danger of becoming too "objective" due to memetic engineering, since it can be argued, and I think Irvin does, that the reverse is the case, that we are being tricked into a fuzzy, woo-woo, relativistic modes of thinking that lack all rigor and are indifferent to hard facts or logic. Personally I think both are the case. First and second matrices, respectively.)

[tapitsbo]

Also: if magnets can do this much to our cranium as per AD's article, imagine what cosmic rays et al. are already doing day-to-day.

[Wombaticus Rex]

Also: if magnets can do this much to our cranium as per AD's article, imagine what cosmic rays et al. are already doing day-to-day.

Amen - never bought the "skeptic" argument that there's no medium for ESP, we're fucking swimming in it.

[Iamwhomiam]

^^^^ Amen!

More later.

Now I've gotta go and get my truck's tire back on its rim.

So I'm left wonderin' which one of you fukers dreamed up that scenaro to screw with my groovy reality.

Spooky action at a distance - the stuff mutually intriguing to physicists, Psi-icists, occultists and other practitioners of rituals.

[backtoiam]

Also: if magnets can do this much to our cranium as per AD's article, imagine what cosmic rays et al. are already doing day-to-day.

Amen - never bought the "skeptic" argument that there's no medium for ESP, we're fucking swimming in it.

You can say that again, and there ain't no getting out of the pool...

[Joao]

I wonder what Jan Irvin would have to say.

He'd probably foam at the mouth while calling us all assholes, fools, and dupes who are so unbelievably stupid and hypnotized as to not even know the trivium from the quadrivium.

[Iamwhomiam]

Yeah. I hate when that happens.

[guruilla]

That and Eat more red meat!

[Nordic]

Fwiw, as far as intuition goes, I felt something coming, a "disturbance in the force" or whatever you want to call it, a premonition ... Leading up to the Paris attacks.

However it didn't do me, or anyone else, any good because it felt very close and personal, and made me quite irrationally worried about various loved ones. My father, then my stepdaughter (very strongly, but maybe because she was born in Paris?) and then my wife (who lived there).

It was weird. Then it was over, and once again I realized that powerful intuition sometimes doesn't really do you a damned bit of good. Other times it can save your life.

Just thought I'd throw that out there.