Upon seeing someone you work with do something inexplicable have you ever had the thought, “I think that person must be broken somehow. Otherwise, how could they be like they are?”
My friend likes to remind her husband, “I know you don’t agree but really, I mean really, I am not a broken you that needs to be fixed.”
A real conversation I overheard between two business associates reminding me of this...
Viewing entries tagged Theory
Why won't illogical thinking and superstitious thinking won't go away? -- it serves us better than scientists realize. People get value from it. More personal value perhaps than they get from science and logical thinking.
The logical positivist idea that cause and effect are primary does not align very well in the human domain of every day experience. This is due to the complex (at the edge of chaos) nature of the dynamic systems that are our body-minds and our cultures.
According to traditional science, variables should be isolated so that you can tell what is causing what effects. But this is impractical in the complex domains. There is rarely a single cause for anything. Most causes are multiple and circular rather than linear. That is, independent agents with many many potential variables are acting from separate locations and contexts with different independent goals such that cause and effect never happens the same way twice.
Rather certain patterns (what chaos theory calls "strange attractors") emerge out of massive collections of behaviors at a lower logical level where the agents are all acting to preserve their requisite homeostasis and attain the resources they need to fulfill their own wants and satisfy their own needs. So similar patterns arise in an apparently stable configuration, but this stability is dependent upon complex feedback loops in the logical level keeping the whole higher level structure in homeostasis.
Therefore it is not possible to point to a particular cause but only a collective tendency.
Nevertheless, if this arising homeostasis is sufficiently stable, new logical levels can be built upon its dependable stability.
The social sciences have missed this structural understanding and thus base their theories upon an epistemology of linear cause and effect that is only possible in the extremely stable domains of chemistry and physics.
We need a different epistemological basis to understand the domains of biology and psychology. One based in circular cybernetic cause and effect, homeostasis - balancing feedback, accelerating feedback, strange attractors, power curves, f curves, etc.
Then we can realize that people live in a homeostatic map of their experience not in experience itself. Their psychology is based upon continual cycles of predicting what causes will create what effects and updating their maps based upon sensory based interactions with the results of their actions in the world driven by needs and desires.
Because we live in our maps not in a logical positivist reality and because those maps are dynamic, we intuitively recognize that scientific logical thinking is not good enough. We must self reflect in order to learn. We are instinctually driven to learn because it provides survival value. We can accomplish more the more skills we have and the more knowledge we understand.
When people use tarot or the i-ching or go to a psychic or palm reader for advice or turn to religion for solace and understanding, scientist are dismayed because they are putting their faith in "superstitious" thinking. In reality, people are intuitively recognizing that linear cause-effect does not actually work in the domain of the mind. They have a need for news of difference in order to self-reflect and grow themselves. Oracles and religion provide a practical way to meet this need and allow the person to explore and uncover new "truths" about themselves and their experience.
Logical positivist scientists need to update their understanding of the world to recognize the truth that we can never really know "The Truth," because we all operate in maps of reality rather than reality itself and these maps are generated from non-linear processes that don't allow for linear cause and effect explanations.