Conceptual Thinking Aids and Hinders Efficient Living: Awareness of the Paradox Is a Key to Wisdom

© 2010 Peter Free

 

07 July 2010

 

Concepts and conceptual thinking are useful and unhelpful at the same time

 

Conceptual thinking presents a paradox in that it is useful and dysfunctional at the same time.

 

American political thinking and competing world religiosities are accessible examples.

 

Less accessible, but more illuminating, is self-examination of how we think as individuals.

 

Positively, concepts are sound-bites used to order Reality in communicable ways

 

It is difficult to be rational, without reducing Reality (if such exists) to sound-bites called concepts.

 

It may be similarly difficult to lead a fulfilling life without having a concept-based paradigmatic moral framework of some kind.  The outline helps us (a) choose goals and (b) select and order personal actions and reactions to life.

 

Negatively, concepts camouflage Reality in unhelpful ways

 

Useful though concepts and paradigms are, they often get in the way of perceiving what really confronts us.

 

It is easy to see that concepts build frameworks that conveniently lop off a good deal of Reality.  Concepts are shortcuts.  In addition to lopping off bits of experience, they conveniently lump dissimilar phenomena.

 

As most craftspeople know, taking short-cuts usually degrades the quality of the product.

 

This is obvious, but we often forget that it is obvious ─ that means we cause ourselves and others trouble

 

Just because something is obvious, does not mean that it can’t slap you silly when you are not expecting it to.

 

The phenomenon is akin to leaving the garden rake on the ground with the tines up, and stepping on those on one’s hurried way to the outhouse at night.  The result is a painful rap from the rake handle and possibly undesirable change in one’s elimination plans.

 

A concept-sinner myself, I chose the rake and outhouse analogy because of its communicative worth as an analogue for what we do when formulating concepts.

 

Using occasional concepts to eliminate reality-obscuration is the unachievable purpose of Zen.  Zen keeps trying to express the inexpressible Whole.  It is only when we stop trying that we are not deluded.  But then we are no longer communicating with the humanity that is part of the Whole.  Go figure.

 

The conceptual (simultaneously in-and-out/good-and-bad) paradox encourages us to evaluate the unspoken assumptions we make

 

From the concept-equals-paradox conundrum, we can drag some practical guidance:

 

Know what we are conceptually lopping off and lumping in.

 

Compare our conceptual constructions with Reality’s often powerfully-delivered signs of greater complexity.

 

Be mentally and emotionally open to likelihood of error.

 

Easy as bad pie, but virtually nobody does it.  Even scientists have trouble applying this way of thinking outside their immediate domains.

 

We tend to fall short in the concept versus Reality congruence check

 

Using political parties and religions again, the errors of the opposing group are obvious.  Those we make are not because our assumptions are usually unanalyzed and untested.

 

We fall short because we like the security of simplicity and abhor the challenge of ambiguous complexity

 

Simple thinking in the face of ambiguous complexity is appealing.  Aphorisms give us the sense that we know where we are, what we stand on, and where we are going.  They give us apparent (but unreal) security.

 

The fact that what we think has no relationship to what is provably or probabilistically real does not seem to bother the overwhelming majority people.  Most of our bad ideas about Reality turn out to wound others, if they injure anyone at all.  That means that bad thinkers don’t get weeded out of the population pool.

 

Natural selection is probably not going to selectively refine our thinking

 

I see no evolutionary mechanism that would selectively refine the congruence between human thoughts about reality and Reality.

 

What is left to do?

 

Ultimately, refining the quality of our thinking is up to us as individuals.

 

It takes a millennial optimist to think that’s going to catch on.