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Saturday, July 30, 2011

Reactionary movements…..How to not deal with the gaps?………..

Industrialization revolution had several reactionary movements….. Marxism was a reactionary movement in economical fields….. Existentialism was a reactionary movement in Philosophy….Pragmatism and liberal education was reactionary movement in education…..Mushrooming of fitness centers, nutrition and calorie-consciousness was a reactionary movement in health….. Mushrooming of civil societies was a reactionary movement in governance….and so on……Some of these reactionary movements were failure and some were somewhat successful…I will make a brief analysis later in this Philoknol….But,
As I showed in previous paragraph that there were several reactionary movements to industrialization….and now we are going to Digitalization…..From our experiences of the reactionary movement to industrialization it is expected that there are reactionary movements to it…What are the reactionary movements to digitalization?.....
I will let you to ponder about it a little bit….Let me help in finding the general trends of the previous reactionary movements…. You will note that amazingly most of the reactionary movements are suggesting the same solution……
………I like to begin from the most familiar field…that is Marxism… Carl Marx correctly identified that industrialization will create an enormous surplus and these surpluses will enslave men by creating a black hole (monopoly) of surpluses that devour the real earning of poor and weak and will increase the gaps between social classes….which may create anxiety among masses that may led to revolution……
The identification was correct (even collapse of Soviet Union and conversion of China to more free market economy…..the prediction of Marx is valid…..see the news that these days buzzing around the web that Apple has more cash than US government)……but the solution was really strange…..and it was the main reason of the failure of this reactionary movement…….
…….The solution was to return to the primitive period….Communism...or all out Socialism…..the experiments proved to be failure as contexts were Primitive societies weren’t there for support…….
…….Existentialism was reactionary movements in Philosophy….. The industrialization eroded the values that were for centuries on society…. Religious, Cultural and traditional values were helpless…so they weren’t of any help to modern men….Religion, Cultures and traditional values stand on the notion of the “ESSENCE”…… By erosion of the values…the concept of the “essence” also eroded…. And Existentialism comes as a reaction to fill the vacuum…. Existentialism replaced “essence” by “existence”….by declaring, “Existence precedes essence”….. Look to few characteristics of Existentialism and you will realize that it is calling to Primitive state of men just as Marxism was calling towards Primitive Societies,
- Existentialism movement becomes strong and appealing when values are eroded…..
- Existentialism asks for relying on emotions rather than on logic…..
- It asks for philosophy to deal with experiential issues than issues related to knowledge…..
As culture, social values and norms are products of advanced societies….so existentialism looks to them as a source of problems of individuals and look to solution to rely on the primitive aspect of individuals as primitive were relying on, emotions and experiences………… Well…this solution just like Marxism’s solution is outdated as digitalization asks more on relying on imaginations and knowledge….
We can go to other reactionary movements in the same manner…. Here, however I want to emphasize on one main problem that we are facing in the Digital/information period,
Let’s see it this way…… The industrialization and rapid technological advancements…changed very fast the life styles…commonly… made life easier and slowed down the use of the physical movements at work places…it even slowed down the use of physical movements in household works….. On other hand the food choices become diversified and frequent…. The change in life styles due to technological advancements were rapid but the physiological adaptations were very slow….the results of these gaps come out as widespread modern diseases like obesity, diabetes, heart diseases, and cancers….
The solutions come from health experts in nutrition (calorie consciousness) and regular exercises…. So… the solutions are known and experts are frequent to compensate for slower physiological adaptations in response to fast changes in life styles………
Now…it is more than a decade that we are in the digitalization age or information big bang…. The information big bang….was a big jump from local cultures to global cultures…………….The globalization of the cultures was so rapid that people didn’t have time to adapt their psyches to it…. Simply, we are living in a global culture with local psychology….. the big gap between psyche and global cultures have resulted in massive psychological imbalance…… Just as modern diseases are the side effects of the industrialization so the widespread confusions, identity crises, massive hatreds and most important…. Individual disorientations as result of spontaneous exposures is the most visible one………… I think we are not yet fully aware of the impacts of the side effects and hence we don’t see any major reactionary movements to digitalization……………
We are just seeing the clashes of titans…..We saw the collapse of My Space to Facebook and now people are expecting to witness the meltdown of Facebook to Google Plus….. This seems a normal process but it has clues to solution….. One Giant website creates a monopoly by being creative and another one breaks its monopoly by creativity….. It seems that…in order to become compatible with global culture…we need to use our creativity and become an active contributor to global culture rather than being a passive consumer and victims of the gaps created by it………………….
Now….while we are expecting a reactionary movement to digitalization….we see the same sort of solution to “reasoning”…..Now, the voices are coming to redefine “reasoning’s purpose”…. For thousands of years, reasoning was the main mechanism of Philosophy…which has determined its purpose as a tool for pursuit of truth….. Now that digitalization and world wide web has increased the importance and appeal for ….“reasoning” ….. to help in judging and choosing the useful information in a period of big bang (massive chaos) of information….. the purpose of information is explained by evolutionary behaviorists…..that it evolved to win arguments….. This was true for primitive men…..who hadn’t have to deal with global cultures and digitalization and winning arguments definitely would increase their fitness…..but for modern men who are exposed to global culture…and massive floods of information…..the primitive purpose of reasoning…will fail…as it failed in Marxism and Existentialism………. We don’t have the choice of choosing between Primitive world and global world……………

Friday, July 29, 2011

Examined life; under fire of Evolutionary Behaviorists and Philosophers……



Philosophers are under fire of philosophers and Philosophy is under fire of the Evolutionary Behavioral Scientists these days……and it is what an examined life requires….. The concept of “examined life” is to be the subject and the same time…. tolerant to the positive criticisms and put “reasoning”...(though some may accept self-accountability as only means of an examined life) as judges…..
Since birth of Philosophy to our days….. it is believed that reasoning is a mean of questing for TRUTH….. but Behavioral Scientists….Dan Sperber and Hugo Mercier is trying to challenge this long accepted notion by providing an alternative evolutionary explanation…. Reasoning didn’t evolve to help human go in search of truth but it is evolved to win arguments…… Winning arguments have a competitive advantage…..that is the core of the Darwinian mechanism…survival of the fittest……In this sense reasoning, increase fitness by winning arguments and more interestingly…. irrationality is an adaptation to confuse others….. As “reasoning” is the core of the Philosophy…so evolutionary explanations of reasoning…… is falsifying….thousands of years of works and quests of the philosophers…who were claiming……search for truth…..is main purpose of their works…..
On the other hand…. James Miller, who teaches politics and liberal studies at New York School of Social research… wrote a book by name of……”Examined lives; from Socrates to Nietzsche”….in which he tells the stories of the 12 famous Philosophers including,….Socrates, Plato, Diogenes, Aristotle, Augustine, Montaigne, Descartes, Rousseau, Kant, Emerson, Nietzsche ……..Most of these biographical stories exposes the weaknesses of the Philosophers in leading their personal lives, dealing with situations and doing things that deny their own philosophies….. The concept of the examined life came from Socrates famous trial…. Socrates was trialed on the charges of corrupting the Athenian youths by his Philosophy….. Socrates chose death over refuting his Philosophy and famously declared that, “Unexamined life doesn’t worth living”….. Socrates became a symbol of questing for truth, standing for truth and living for truth…. Socrates led a profound Philosophical life that was/is the source of inspiration for thousands of years……and Philosophy became not an indispensible tool for learned men and women… James Miller wanted to show that examined lives are not really as profound as commonly believed……
Do “Philosophers” and “Philosophy” survive these criticisms?.... Well, that depends on the Philosophers and the “reasoning”……..the same entities that are examined :)….. It depends on Philosophers as “reasoning” is their mechanism of judging things (even themselves…..Well, Philosophers are best subjects for criticisms and examinations as they are willingly expose their lives for examinations….it requires courage and honesty….and those two characteristics are enough to have a life worth of living :)…and it depends on “reasoning”…because reasoning is an inherent characteristic of mind (due to order and consistency of natural phenomenon)….and without it…learning, understanding and communication become impossible for men….. (Looking for evolutionary explanations are a well developed way of reasoning…but it can’t be done without reasoning….as there is no solid evidence except clues based on reasoning (order and consistency/evolutionary mechanisms)….. (Well, one can take academic dishonesty, subjective journalism (giving selected background or contexts to distort the real causes of events, cheating and misinformation as evidences of evolution of reasoning for winning arguments but all these methods are considered and categorized as “irrational” in philosophical questing….


Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Whole brain thinking; Crossing the natural limits…..

Why Picasso is admired?....That is the most easiest question to answer…. As it is the most commonly known answer…. Picasso is admired because he broke the line… He was drawing the oval faces of men as square…. It was a rebellion against nature and a deep desire to have control over the fate of men….. At the beginning of previous century, when Darwin’s Evolutionary theory got the life injection from heredity science and it was determined that genes are the basic unit of evolution…..adding to that….that genes are the natural limits of organisms/men… provided an easy solution to fix the social and economical problems….simply there are poverty and crime because there are bad genes/incompatible genes….eradicate bad genes and the competitive genes will turn earth into Garden of Eden…. It was appealing to supremacists who were thinking of themselves…having supreme genes…so they launched the dark Eugenic movements….. to make their nations strong by having a pure breed of supreme genes………
Picasso’s greatness is not in adding a few high priced paintings and drawings…..but to reject the idea of the limits of nature…by breaking natural lines…. His works created an enthusiasm and strong belief….that human imagination and creativity have the power to break the natural limits/lines………
We all accept consciously or unconsciously natural limits for our lot of capabilities…. There is a limit for our typing speed….there is a limit for our bicycling speed…. There is limit for our running speed….there is limits for time in holding our breaths…. And so on…..When we practice…we improve in doing things but then we reach a limit …that we stop improving further….and practicing is of no more help…. This is what Joshua Foer likes to call….OK Plateau….
Why Plateau?....Because we climb up to reach the plateau and Plateau is level off surface….it is really a nice analogy…for climbing up and then reaching a plain where there is no more climbing…….Though there are OK Plateaus for our capabilities and yet….we see world records and the continuously watch or read the news of breaking the old records and the making of new world records……
Why, I have mentioned the name of Joshu Foer? I mentioned his name because he belongs to a group of people who call themselves as, “memory athletes” ….and try to develop new techniques to practice and break the natural limits…..They like Picasso…… challenge the nature…..and they like Picasso believe that it is the creativity that have the ability to challenge the limits set by nature……Joshu Foer has written a book in which he narrates the stories of mnemonists (memory athletes), their race for developing new techniques and the scientific studies that are the basis of their beliefs……. in relying on creativity to challenge the natural limits or cross the OK Plateau….. His book’s name is, ““ Moonwalking With Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything”…..
If you don’t have time for reading the whole book….again there is no worries…as he has an article in New York Times’ magazine through which you can have a very good introductory idea of who the “memory athletes” are?..... and what they do?....The title of his article is, “How I trained my brain and became a world-class memory athlete”………………
…..Few pieces of the article are really quotable, like, …. “Many competitive mnemonists argue that their skills are less a feat of memory than of creativity.”……” . In his 1869 book “Hereditary Genius,” Sir Francis Galton argued that a person could improve at mental and physical activities until he hit a wall, which “he cannot by any education or exertion overpass.” In other words, the best we can do is simply the best we can do. But Ericsson and his colleagues have found over and over again that with the right kind of effort, that’s rarely the case. They believe that Galton’s wall often has much less to do with our innate limits than with what we consider an acceptable level of performance. They’ve found that top achievers typically follow the same general pattern. They develop strategies for keeping out of the autonomous stage by doing three things: focusing on their technique, staying goal-oriented and getting immediate feedback on their performance.”……
These descriptions contradict with the common beliefs of gifted-memories….. The concept of the gifted memory comes from the common experiences of natural limits….however it is not hundred percent true…Sometimes our limitations are just our beliefs that have inserted in us by the society….At least my experience is telling me so…..Here I am telling….how a teacher has planted (though unconsciously) the belief that I have a weak memory….You may be interested in the story (or you may blame me ….of blaming my teacher for what I have never tried seriously to develop….if you think so….you are not alone as I am supporting you to a large extent :) ,,,,,,
…………I call my 3rd grade mathematics teacher as “murderer of my memory”…… He was a military veteran and was treating his 3rd grade students as militia men…. stressing on discipline, doing works on time with no room for questions….Upon mistakes, he was beating us with stick…..in the whole year, I couldn’t learn by heart the arithmetic chart....under fear of punishments and urgency of time limits….so I started believing that I have a weak memory that I am still struggling to get rid off….(In the whole class there was only one boy……… who was punished regularly the whole year and he never cried….to us he was like a hero…once I asked him, how he could bear the pains of punishments….he told me that he eats a lot of potatoes…and advised me to eat potatoes to withstand the pains…..Later on I changed school….and didn’t see him for almost one and half decade….one day, I saw him on the street…he was a giant fat man, with thick black beards….I was still a skinny boy compared to him…as I saw him, I remembered his advice for eating potatoes… I smiled and told him, “I am sorry……I failed to eat a lot of potatoes and didn’t become a big man like you”………….)
The reason that I brought up this story is to show how the ignorance of teachers about “how memory works” may harm young students…….Teaching teachers about the techniques and the science behind them….will help and encourage them to develop their own creative techniques and implant self confidence in their students to rely on their creativity and do not accept the natural limits…as justification for not trying and failures…………..
For crossing the OK plateau, mnemonists use mental visual or mental imagery ( what they call memory palaces) for storing numbers, names and any verbal things….. These techniques actually combine L-mode of thinking with R-mode of thinking….or use the power of whole cerebral brain….. It is where creativity meet with memory…..The techniques of mnemonists should not be limited in usage for memory competitions as they have great scopes and potentials in untapping creativity and improving skills in learning…..

Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Rene Descartes VS Ludwig Wittgenstein; …Where are the differences in modes of thinking?

It would be repetition to quote Descartes’ most famous conclusion, “I think therefore I am”….however, we can’t escape quoting it ……as it is the core of Descartian Philosophy….. Descartes, started questioning what we can know?….and negating one by one everything knowable…. and boiled down to “I think therefore I am”….concluding that…the only thing we can know with certainty…..is consciousness of self as source of thinking…. Well, it came from a time of philosophy….when the trend was to construct a philosophical system…..so Descartian method was to deconstruct the existing philosophical systems and reconstruct a new system based on the knowledge of a thinking mind…..
In previous century….Ludwig Wittgenstein tried to challenge the Descartian system by adapting an quite an opposite approach….starting from the culture (Culture is the collective consciousness in response to individualistic consciousness)….he thought that there is no genuine philosophical problem….the philosophical problems arise from miscommunications…… later on he abandoned this idea to construct another one that…there are philosophical problems but they come from interactions of different language games….. Whatever…….In nutshell, his approach was based on collective consciousness………….
Here, I am not going to compare and judge Descartian and Wittgensteinian Philosophical system (s?)…. I just want to show…from where came the differences of their approaches?
Some of you might have reached to the point before I mention them….Yes, because they are thinkers…so the sources of the differences must come from unequal usage of the specialized parts of brain….As we all know that cerebral part of brain got two hemispheres…..Left hemisphere (Which is verbal part of brain and think in steps…. e.g, mathematical problems are solved step by step Or writing an article which are stepwise, title, introduction, main body and conclusion…. And so on…..It is also famous as logical thinking)…… and Right Hemisphere (Which is nonverbal part of brain and thinks as a whole….e.g, looking a scenery…. when we see the scene as a whole…. we don’t see in steps…to see e.g, grasses first, then to tree, then mountain and then sky and then sun and then scattered clouds…. We see them as a whole….It is also famous as visual thinking part of brain or creative thinking part of brain)…. It is believed that because philosophers are logical thinkers so they have L -thinking mode (Rely on their left hemisphere of brain for thinking)….
I brought here the examples of Descartes and Wittgenstein as philosophers of two different approaches….Descartes is a reducationist in his approach and relies on himself as a unit of consciousness…. And Wittgenstein is wholist in his approach and relies on the culture as a unit of collective consciousness….. Reductionist approach is the characteristic of the Left-hemisphere or L –mode of thinking….and wholist approach is the characteristic of the Right hemisphere or R – mode of thinking…..
Some may argue that Philosophy can’t be done without step-wise thinking…..Well, that is true…but if we take philosophy as an article….thinking (L-mode of thinking) make the introduction and body of the article…..the title and conclusion come from judgments (R – mode of thinking) ……..
Now coming back to Descartes and Wittgenstein…..we can easily understand that Descartes has focused more on the introduction and body….but Wittgenstein on title and conclusion…so we see the dominance of the L-mode of thinking in Descartian approach….and R- mode of thinking in Wittgensteinian approach…..
Having the knowledge of the L –mode of thinking and R –mode of thinking….and the examples are in the works of the previous philosophers/thinkers to illustrate them…..we need a new approach in philosophy and thinking mode…..I expect that the new approach would begin with an encyclopedic thinking to become refine later from its findings……………….
Perhaps what we call a new approach in philosophy is the rediscovery of the 5000 years old, Chinese Philosophy of Yin-Yang….or what is commonly known as duality….. In common expression people call the “judgments” as thinking by heart or the decision of the heart…. In is mostly stressed in East…. Though heart is an internal organ (and is involuntary) but it lays in left-side of body….perhaps as Right hemisphere controls left-side of the body….we feel that judgments come from heart…anyway, whether we say judgments come from right-hemisphere or heart is almost the same…..
In a simple way….it is needed that students are taught…how to use both hemispheres of the brain….and teach techniques that integrate both….Mnemonists are developing such techniques….I will write about them in another article….
Besides, I think that we live in time of mushrooming of inter-disciplinary fields …..and time is ripe for combining techniques and knowledge in thinking/mind sciences, physical trainings and nutrition….By integrating the techniques and knowledge of these fields….we can create an awesome tool for physical and mental developments and wellbeing :)…….

Friday, July 22, 2011

In pursuit of a vague concept….sometimes vagueness is bliss…………….


Pursuit of happiness is a satisfying notion for the common people but to the eyes of the philosophers…it is a vague notion…. More clear ideas are “pursuit of truth” that philosophers are engaged in….”pursuits of reality” which scientists are following…. “Pursuit of power” which politicians are engaged in… and “Pursuits of money/success” which businessmen are following….. Pursuits of happiness make all pursuits acceptable…….. and a lot of the people hide behind this beautiful notion …….to cover their pursuits…… that they don’t like to become public or public see them as they are…….. e.g, politicians are sensitive in saying they are in power…..instead they like to say that they are in office for public service…..
Even the concept of happiness itself is a vague concept….Let’s illustrate it this way……People like that their happiness should be synonym with good…. But does really happiness is a synonym to good?…or in other words….Is happiness the same as good? ….. If you are socially active and live among common people… you may have heard that….”Don’t act like a nice guy”….what does it mean?”…. It simply means that by being nice you will accumulate only failures, disappointments and sorrows….all opposite to happiness…. So even among common people who prefer experience over logical analysis or logical constructs….this concept is very clear that Happiness is not the same as good……….
Despite being an vague concept…..”The pursuit of happiness” is a powerful concept that parallel cultures and people happily take it as an alternative to their native cultures which create a barrier in an adopted homeland where people have come from different cultures…..One of my friends asked me, “why do you think we are failed yet in developing a pluralistic society where people could openly accept the existence of each other’s cultures and opinions wholeheartedly?”….My reply was, “because we are failed to bring a concept that parallel the native cultures…so people could find a platform, a foundation that is common to all and all cultures could be accommodated easily”….. I gave the reference of the “pursuit of happiness”….though it is a vague concept ….but its vagueness makes all to own it and doesn’t allow a group of people to specify it for themselves and hence discriminate against others on its basis……

Thursday, July 21, 2011

Wittgenstein’s failure VS Buddha’s triumph; The main cause…….


“Language is our world and the limit of the language is the limit of our world”….. Wittgenstein… Believing that most problems of the Philosophy are the result of the miscommunication of language…Wittgenstein thought it is his duty as a logician to do logical analysis of language…. So he tried all his adult life with a crusader’s spirit to fixe (or at least expose) the weaknesses of language…. “Clear communication”….he thought would automatically eliminate most of the philosophical problems…..That’s cool…. But today we see that language is still a happy mess….
I think Wittgenstein wasn’t agreeing the way Buddha come up and taught clear communication…. He must have heard that Buddhas’ clear communication was a clear scheme….that was not stressing on the language but on thinking processes….. I will make this point clear later….At the moment… I just want to say that the mistake and the cause of the failure of Wittgenstein’s logic was wrong diagnosis of problem… He saw the problem in the language while Buddha saw the problem in the thinking process……
So we see Wittgenstein didn’t come up with a scheme for clarification of language…. And he couldn’t present a practical tool of any utility for the people…. On other hand Buddha saw the problems in people’s thinking processes….especially of an untrained mind and found the causes as desires, expectations and perfectionism….that like rivers are flowing incessantly and are unlimited…. He came up in four staged schemes of the….. Observing human conditions…..their diagnosis…. then Prognosis and with….a cure…… It is famously known as Four Noble Truths……..
For those who are not familiar with the Four Noble Truths of the Buddha…. I am giving a brief description taken from pages 30-31 of “The Dhammapada” translated by Eknath Easwaran……
“….. The First Truth, brothers, is the fact of suffering. All desire happiness, sukha; what is good, pleasant, right, permanent, joyful, harmonious, satisfying, at ease. Yet all find that life brings duhkha, just the opposite; frustration, dissatisfaction, incompleteness, suffering, sorrow. Life is change, and change can never satisfy desire. Therefore everything that changes brings suffering.
The Second Truth is the cause of suffering. It is not life that brings sorrow, but the demands we make on life. The cause of duhkha is selfish desire; trishna, the thirst to have what one wants and to get one’s own way. Thinking life can make them happy by bringing what they want, people run after satisfaction of their desires. But they get only unhappiness, because selfishness can only bring sorrow.
“There is no fire like selfish desire, brothers. Not a hundred years of experience can extinguish it, for the more feed it, the more it burns. It demands what experience cannot give; permanent pleasure unmixed with anything unpleasant. But there is no end to such desires; that is the nature of mind. Suffering because life cannot satisfy selfish desire is like suffering because a banana tree will not bear mangoes.
There is a Third Truth, brothers. Any ailment that can be understood can be cured, and suffering that has a cause has also an end. When the fires of selfishness have been extinguished, when the mind is free of selfish desire, what remains is the state of wakefulness, of peace, of joy, of perfect health, called ‘that which is extinguished’; nirvana.
The Fourth Truth, brothers, is that selfishness can be extinguished by following an eightfold path; right understanding, right purpose, right speech, right conduct, right occupation, right effort, right attention, and right meditation. If dharma is a wheel, these eight are its spokes.”……………
Though it is continued into explanation of each spoke of the wheel of dharma but my aim here is not to explain the teachings of Buddha but to compare the approaches…..The reason that I am comparing both approaches is the expose the reasons of the failure of modern philosophy which have created a lapse of more than three quarter of a century in philosophy and other disciplines… Modern philosophers is out of touch with their time because they were obsessed with logic and so called “RATIONALITY”…… and they thought that, the roots of problems is lying in language……. without realizing that language is the ……“experimental field for human creativity”…..
We have already seen that, by coming of text messaging, emails and Social Medias, people have created global expressions for gestures, feelings and actions… For sure one can’t draw logical basis for these expressions…. I think it would go out of the scope of this article if I try to explain….why logicians and Philosophers of language have totally ignored the fact that human brain got two hemispheres……. and the logical thinking is the product of the left hemisphere and language is the product of the both hemispheres… symbols come from right hemisphere of brain…
Mistakes happen and they can be compensated but there is no compensation for arrogance… I tried a humble effort to compare thousands of old approach of Buddha that is still triumphant for their right diagnosis (though we may not agree with the approach as a whole)…. The title of this Philoknol may look very rude for some… but it is how philosophy works………so no waorries ;)

Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Map of reality…..Check, if yours is upgradable….


What we own are the maps of reality not the reality….
It is said that Hegel was an encyclopedic writer…as well as an encyclopedic reader….. Yet, I like his few philosophical conclusions like….. The ideas evolve by a cycle of ….thesis…antithesis…synthesis…. Truth without content is nothing (gives no information)…. Mind is an abstract of natural world….. Thought is an objective reality…..
Despite being an encyclopedic thinker…Hegel had a clear and coherent set of thinking rules by which he was measuring reality….. And it is what distinct a philosopher from rest as well as from other philosophers…. In fact, the only intentional individualists are philosophers…it doesn’t matter what their constructed ideologies are….They develop their own set of rules…….These set of rules are what we call “map of reality” as philosophers go with these maps in hunts for reality (truth?) (Just as shown in “Pirates of Caribbean”…that pirates’ most valuable assets are maps and compass by which they go to treasures) ….
Of course it is not only Philosophers who have maps…Buddhist monks’ (I will prefer to call thinkers as some people use their meditation techniques but aren’t Buddhist) records of thinking almost parallel those of philosophers in antiquity….as well as finding utility in directing the lives of the people…. Being open end in their thought process…Buddhist meditation techniques have evolved beyond a religion… into a tool of fitness and wellbeing….. It is what it shares with other disciplines…The core of all successful disciplines like Science, Philosophy and arts is being open end in their thinking processes……
By reading the description of a Saint in “The Dhammapada” you may agree with me that the core success of neutrality and widespread acceptance of Buddhist meditation as a tool of wellbeing in all parts of world irrespective of local religions…is lies in their open end thought processes that find their utility everywhere and all the times….. In Dhammapada the Saints are praised as …”Wisdom has stilled their minds, and their thoughts, words, and deeds are filled with peace. Freed from illusion and from personal ties, they have renounced the world of appearance to find reality. Thus they have reached highest”… although monks seek reality beyond appearance but by being involved in an open end thought process their techniques find utility for those who are in love with world of appearance but are suffering from it…..Open end thought processes help them wash their sufferings and reach a peace of mind at their disposal…………..
In above two paragraphs, I provided the examples a philosopher and Buddhist thinkers both of whom use their thinking power to unravel the reality…. The philosopher tries to find reality of appearance and master the nature… and Buddhist thinkers try to find the reality beyond appearance and attain ultimate peace….
So thinking processes are maps of reality….. Reality? Yes, it has unknown depths…the depths depend on the stamina and desire of seekers…to what level they dare to dive deep….
Why I chose Hegel among philosophers? …. I chose him because his thinking process is an open ending one and it is always upgradable…. Philosophers who have constructed closed end thought processes…. have frozen to a particular time….their ideas are not upgradable…. (Like those of existentialist thinkers…etc)
I chose Buddhist thinkers…. because unlike a lot of other school of thoughts… it has an open end thinking mechanism…people who are seeking wisdom or wellbeing find utility in it without agreeing with philosophy of Buddhism…it is more of thinking mechanism like Science… So it is also upgradable….
Hence the conclusion is that…… it doesn’t matter whether you are a philosopher, a thinker or simply one who is interested to have a map to navigate into reality…. Having an open end approach in thinking process will make you able to upgrade over time and …on other hand…by choosing or developing a closed end thinking method will freeze you in your own world view………….


Monday, July 18, 2011

Philosopher VS entrepreneur….

“A lot of people know more philosophy than they realize because it is all around them… It is basically in the culture in which they live and breathe”… Professor Mark Rowland…..It is what a philosopher says about philosophy…..On other hand, Dr. David Cleevely, a technology entrepreneur (You can listen to him at following link; http://sms.csx.cam.ac.uk/media/1122496 )in response to question that…Are entrepreneurs risk takers?.....replies….”They are not risk takers. But actually they have a very serious personality defect…Being an entrepreneur I can confess to it….It is that, they have completely overwhelmingly sense that they can influence events…so it is as if they are presented with a dice…and they always believe they are gonna throw a six simply because of the power of their will…everybody else can see that six can only come up 1 in 6 times…The entrepreneurs think it is going to come up every time they throw the dice…..”
So you can see by yourself very clearly that an entrepreneur doesn’t agree with a philosopher… Entrepreneurs are led by their beliefs in their will power rather than the philosophies filled in the air around them in which they breathe…. The reason that entrepreneurs think very differently from philosophers is that….Philosophers think about reality and try to understand and explain them while entrepreneurs create reality…. Entrepreneurs divide the world into red-ocean (Cutthroat ocean or present reality….in which everybody competes for resources, chances and success…here competition is very tough) and blue-ocean (a reality that has not yet created or come into being…here, there is no competition and the chance for growth is enormous)……. So entrepreneurs are more inclined to create new realities….
It seems that entrepreneurs got the lead…they create and philosophers follow them to understand… Well, not all philosophers agree with that job… They sell thinking hats (You may have heard about Six thinking hats of Dr. Edward De Bono…..if you haven’t yet…you can have a quick look in Wikipedia…http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Thinking_Hats)….to help them in parallel thinking…. Don’t think that they got only thinking hat for sell…There are other items like Dr. de Bono’s Lateral thinking…. And a long list of different other thinking methodologies like,
Reflective thinking method
Critical thinking method
Creative thinking method
Positive thinking method
Reverse thinking method
Lean thinking method
And so on………….Whatever…. the reality is that, in today’s world…. only ideas matter that sell well…either presented by a philosopher or an entrepreneur….