Shikō e no do [思考への道] (or Mental Flexibility - Seishin-tekina jūnansei [精神的な柔軟性])
Commentary (Kaisetsu [解説])
Caveat: this post consists of a combination of direct quotes, modified quotes and personal commentary and I recommend reading the bibliography provided to include the book, “Thinking, Fast and Slow” by the same author.
We think, therefore we are … we tend to take a great deal for granted and in this category we assume we know how to think simply because our brains 🧠 “work.”
Cogito, ergo sum, (Latin: “I think, therefore I am) dictum coined by the French mathematician and philosopher René Descartes in his Discourse on Method (1637) as a first step in demonstrating the attainability of certain knowledge. It is the only statement to survive the test of his methodic doubt. - Britannica (https://tinyurl.com/4pup7ach)
Antoine Léonard Thomas, in a 1765 essay in honor of Descartes presented it as dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum ("I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am").
In a previous post I talk about a quote from Mr Einstein on the subject of education as it pertains to the “learning of facts” and “training our minds th think!”
Memorization is merely encoding “facts” to a memory space in our brains storage with an ability to “recall” said memory when we so desire. Memorizing is not understanding but we have been fooled into thinking it symbolizes someone of intellect. The thinking process is taking such data and analyzing, testing and trying to act on it in such a way we formulate possibilities that apply to life’s processes and that falls under, “understanding.”
Thinking: the process of thought; using intelligent thought; rational; reasoning; reflecting; opinion or judgment; the process of using one's mind to consider or reason about something: cogitabund “deep in thought; thoughtful” cogitent “thinking” cogitative “given to thought; meditative” cogitativity “cognitive power or action”
To think is the mental process that humans use to think, read, learn, remember, reason, pay attention, and, ultimately, comprehend information and turn it into knowledge. Human beings can then turn this knowledge into decisions and actions.
Martial Thinking
Budō [武道] Kangaegoto [考え事]
There are two systems of thinking 🤔, system one which is fast thinking and system two which is slow thinking.
Synthesize ideas from a wide variety of disciplines.
SYSTEM ONE:
- instinctual
- fast thinking
- automatic, and without any processing
- relies on short cuts
- intuitive system
- active and waiting to jump into operation
- tells us to run from danger
- gets an intuitive sense of things in seconds
- Relies on heuristics and biases
- learns from experiences
- makes correct intuitive judgments in situations where we lack information/data
- decisions that make a difference between life and death
- limited as it is reliant on shortcuts and therefore prone to errors
SYSTEM TWO:
- slow
- deliberate
- easily fatigued
- deliberate system
- needs deliberate activation (triggering)
- requires attention and effort
- not sustainable for long periods of time
- susceptible to burnouts
- used to calculate complex equations or to answer exam questions, etc.
- far more reliant than system one
System one is an effortlessly originating of impressions and feelings as our explicit source of explicit beliefs and deliberate choices of system two.
If there is something that is contradictory to what system one expects then system two is engaged.
The division of labor between systems one and two is highly efficient: it minimizes effort and optimizes performance.
Professions associated with high levels of system two functioning, such as law or academia, are vulnerable to system one errors.
Note: system two enhances system one, the two are a yin/yang concept of martial thinking training, practices and application enhancing a conscious thinking of one’s practical martial self-defenses.
A truly creative mind reacts to errors with curiosity rather than criticism.
One must create a framework to re-evaluate decisions and judgments encountered and offer insights as to why these choices were made.
The idea is to think more carefully about our own thinking. To develop “enhanced critical thinking” skills.
Illuminates and explores the influences on, ideas of, and impacts on … encourages critical thinking and fosters a better, deeper understanding of important ideas … identify elements of critical thinking and understand the ways in which six different skills combine to enable “effective thinking”. … fully understand problems - 3 skills to fully understand the problem and 3 skills to create a PACIER model of critical thinking …
ANALYSIS to understand how an argument is built; EVALUATION to explore the arguments strengths and weaknesses; INTERPRETATION to understand issues of meaning …
CREATIVE THINKING to come up with new ideas and fresh connections; PROBLEM SOLVING to produce strong solutions; REASONING to create strong arguments …
Ask yourself, “What do you think?” or “What is the first thing that came into your mind?” Not only are you learning, you are an active participant in the process, you will make the same errors, and this challenges you to reflect on your own thinking 🤔.
Group dynamics often make people change what they think to conform to the group even when what they think is correct and the group thinking is not.
People essentially, perform operations that are easiest and require the least effort, but when we use such shortcuts, errors can occur.
How we think matters, for instance, people will prefer to have a medical procedure with an 80% chance of survival than a 20% chance of death, even though these are exactly the same thing. People make decisions on perceived gains rather than potential losses.
Always question our own biases and errors, our faulty system one operations. People rely on biases, heuristics, etc., when making decisions.
There is equivalency between cognitive and physical effort.
Be unafraid to cross disciplinary boundaries and welcome input from other schools of thought. Take the ideas and synthesize them into your own theories.
Cathexis (mental energy [Seishin-tekina 精神的な/Chikara 力]): the investment of emotional significance in an activity, object, or idea; the charge of psychic energy so invested; concentration of psychic energy on a single goal.
Most, if not all, of people have overconfidence and incorrect assumptions influencing our minds when decision-making.
It is theorized that people have a two-system model of two selves, the remembering self and the experiencing self, which don’t have the same interests.
We all rely heavily on shortcuts in the form oh heuristics, biases, effects, illusions, and fallacies in order to make judgements and decisions.
People use cognitive shortcuts, biases, effects, illusions, fallacies, and heuristics, in order to make judgments and decisions. A heuristic is a “ rule of thumb.”
The “affect heuristic” is that people let their likes and dislikes determine their beliefs about in the world.
A bias is a tendency toward something due to prior knowledge. Confirmation bias describes how we are quicker to believe something that fits with knowledge we already have.
Exposure Effect: by simply exposing someone to something makes them more likely to favor it.
Halo Effect: judge actions of someone e like as correct and make excuses for mistakes.
Illusion of Skill: we judge a person’s skill when they have success in an activity, when actually the results of those decisions were down to luck and not expertise.
“Descartes has previously argued that the existence of his physical body can be doubted, the existence of his thinking cannot.” AND “The Cogito is grounded in the idea that we cannot try and think away what we are thinking right now in the present.” - Descartes
Note: thinking 🤔, is a present (now) moment process, it’s the only state of mind one can have in one’s reality. “I think (in this moment), therefore I am (also only in this present moment).”
Bibliography:
Allan, Jacqueline. “An Analysis of Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow” The Macat Library. February 2018
Train to Think 💭 🤔
Kangaeru kunren o suru [考える訓練をする]
Albert Einstein provided me a quote that inspired this posting, i.e., “ Education is not the learning of facts. It’s rather the training of the mind to THINK (capital my emphasis).”
Thinking 🧐 requires creativity, an understanding of things, and that so-called innate ability to THINK outside the proverbial box!
It’s the fostering of a mind-state that can pull a rabbit 🐇 out of one’s hat to create unique methods and methodologies in response to the unknown as it happens to a person.
To think is to take a variety of information and influences to creat and act in complex unknown stimuli especially when it involves conflict and/or violence.
It’s an ability to take in through our senses data that the mind analyzes and visualizes the infinite possibilities that one can pursue to accomplish “stuff.”
A process of the mind to consider and reason about something using thought and judgment to reach an understanding, a strategy of action, as well as the tactics to “get-r-done.”
It can also be stated, “thinking, or to think, is intake of stimulus for analysis and evaluation of ‘things’ in order to form a judgment that leads to understanding and actions appropriate to any given situation.”
Some call it, Critical Thinking, where one analyzes available facts, evidence, observations, and other stimuli to form a judgment by application of rational, skeptical, and unbiased analysis and evaluation.
Mental Flexibility: flexibility is an intrinsic property of a cognitive system often associated with the mental ability to adjust its activity and content, switch between different task rules and corresponding behavioral responses, maintain multiple concepts simultaneously and shift internal attention between them.
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