People are Mysteries, not Puzzles

This is the sort of thing that is obvious once you think about it, something we all know, but we tend to forget as problems crop up in our relationships with our fellow humans. More information about what isn’t working might not help, the proper way to deal with each other is still “conjecture and criticism”. This is why it is valuable to keep communications alive in all your relationships, coupled with the idea that you can question anything and you might just be able to build understanding. Not solve the mystery, just work towards being less wrong. 

Keep in mind this is about strengthening relationships between two or more people who have compatible goals and ideals. People who don’t have common goals, or even a common understanding of the world will need at a minimum a desire to understand each other.

People are not a means to an end, they are ends in themselves, this is the cause of the mystery. If all you needed to understand someone was to know everything about them, then they would have to be static puzzles with a finite number of pieces, instead of the dynamic mysteries we really are.

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Just fooling around with blogging pictures.

:-Dan

Another Dan quote:

“I think we should stop treating ["God works in mysterious ways"] as any kind of wisdom and recognize it as the transparently defensive propaganda that it is. A positive response might be, "Oh good! I love a mystery. Let's see if we can solve this one, too. Do you have any ideas?”
― Daniel C. Dennett, Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking 

 

Problem Solving and Memory

One of Nietzsche's Maxims has been in my notebook for a long while:

"Many a man fails to become a thinker for the sole reason that his memory is too good."

It is one of those sayings that means different things depending on recent history and what you are pondering at the moment (I think I originally captured this quote as a defense for a friend's poor long suffering husband's oft maligned memory).

For years (decades?) I have been accumulating plans and ideas for class on problem solving I will most likely never teach (I think it is the decades part that is most telling). As I accumulated articles on Scientific Method and lists of logical fallacies I gradually realized that all this thinking is not the way 99% of the problems in the world are solved. Most problems are solved by people with good memories. They don't need to think their way through a problem, they just remember how it was solved last time. And with the books and internet to give us access to what other people remember solving, bigger problems can be solved (there is another way for that thought to go, something about we don't have to think as much, but I like the bigger problems angle).

I don't think this is particularly profound, but it does point the way for future planning. Teach more of HOW to think and let the student decide WHAT to think about.

I'm starting to understand that I can think with my fingers, and the pressure of finishing up an entry can help crystallize an idea, but all that does not make it a gem.....

:-Dan