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Mind, intellect and wisdom interpretation

Mind, intellect and wisdom interpretation

I wrote the previous post about wisdom  for a couple of reasons:

  1. As a strong supporter of 280 characters TW messages I do at the same time fight against self-evidence. Self-evidence is a direct result of “short reasoning”. Short reasoning is not a result of 280 characters paradigm, but a result of not having enough energy to digest complex language, complex logic and complex life. As Wittgenstein proved: short sentences when well thought, can express complexity. On the other side of the spectrum, one could find many examples of long, complex sentences that are one dimensional in fact. So the post that was rejected as obscure or even as a reflection of the author’s show off is, in fact, a text that mimicked language used not so long ago. My point is that you have to use complex language to represent complex reality on full. I do not want to claim that I succeeded, but at least I tried.
  2. The language itself is a beast. And if it is a foreign best, it makes even more fun. Why? Because of rhythm and music. As much as the mind has to be accompanied by power and beauty to reach the level of wisdom, so much rational level of language has to be accompanied by rhythm and music to achieve the full language value. And you do not have to be expert in language rationality to play with rhythm and melody. It was Dante as listened in Audible that provoked me to step into such an experiment. You do not have to understand each sentence of The Divine Comedy to understand it in full.

But then, I did convey a message and couple of supporting messages in a so much hated post. And here is the interpretation that lacks all beauty. Short and dull.

Philosophy, art of knowing nothing?

Philosophy is much older science of wisdom than approximately 2.400 years when rational sciences started to a spin-off. Unfortunately, spin-offs did not produce particular sciences that would address specific topics with the same holistic methodology as philosophy. Still, all sciences reduced methodology step by step in such a way that today a specialist in any particular science knows about holistic interferences less than any laymen. Pitfalls of such reductionism are quite evident not only in medicine but in law, neuroscience and physics as well. They are visible but rarely addressed.

On the other hand, it would be completely wrong to address the issue by regression. The answer does not lie in irrationality, in subjectivism, in flower-power movements, in “back to nature” ideologies, in “we hate capitalism and technology” leftist pleasantries. All those that follow such doctrines in fact regress man and humanities. Technology and all human achievements, including money, microchips and plastic are an integral part of existing Nature. Plastics are as much integral part of Nature as green algae.

The challenge thus is to integrate and transgress all rational particularities (of various sciences) on philosophical (holistic) premises. The challenge is therefore not to forget or to avoid all intellectual achievements of a man, but to integrate all of them at the same time through one perspective.

Is universal knowledge passe?

Some claim that Erasmus of Rotterdam was the last universalist in science. Other mention Henri Poincare as the last person that was proficient in all sciences existing at that time. Such claims are not only wrong but are even more devastating, for they imply that since Erasmus or Poincare, no one can understand the world holistically. Such a notion gave us all an excuse to lock ourselves in separated rooms. Since it was taken for granted that due to faster and faster development of all sciences and all particular know-hows, no single person will ever be able to understand everything. How could anyone in the year 2020 understand all results of particle physics, cosmology, chemistry, neuroscience, neurology, medicine, material sciences, archaeology, geology, oceanography, biology, mathematics, statistics, to name just a few of them?

Particular holism

But here precisely lies the trick. If you are focused on a tree only, you can never see that same tree as much taller than the rest of the forest. You have to understand that tree as a part of a forest to recognise a tree and to understand the forest. But you do not need to understand each of other zillion constituent parts of the forest to understand the complexity and interrelation of all “wood members” from hamsters to leaves. My claim is that even in times of Erasmus or Poincare, there were too many particularities existing for anyone to understand them all. But what he did was that he dared to jump over particularities; he dared to understand totality.

That is why I can claim that everything that exists can be squeezed into Plack time/length as the smallest imaginable entity in the Universe. No matter how fast knowledge will evolve, there will always be enough brainpower/brain-space to understand everything. That is why we are exactly in the middle of the Universe, no matter where we are. We have to try; even The Master, Albert Einstein, as much as he started to transgress physics by the end of his life, could not accept entanglement as something possible. But he won the challenge regardless of this particular fact that proved him wrong. Entanglement exists.

To try is enough. What we see now is that not many even try.

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