Does baked-in bias (ideology) always win?

[coberst]

Does baked-in bias (ideology) always win?

Let’s examine one of the most perplexing and potentially dangerous problems that the world now faces.

Nuclear proliferation is high on the priority list facing Obama. The problem the haves (those who now have nuclear weapons) have is preventing the have-nots from becoming a member of the haves.

It is apparent to me that any fair-minded individual must recognize as fact that every nation will logically seek to obtain nuclear weapons and that every nation that has such weapons already, will seek to deter such a happening.

Fair-mindedness is the corner-stone of CT (Critical Thinking). Without fair-mindedness there is no Critical Thinking.

To be fair-minded one must be vigilant (consciousness plus intention) of the need to treat all viewpoints alike. This demands that we adhere to intellectual standards such as accuracy and sound reasoning, which are unaffected by self-interest.

A contrast with fair-mindedness is intellectual self-centeredness.

Fair-mindedness is a challenging task that demands a family of character traits: intellectual humility, courage, empathy, honesty, perseverance, and a confidence in the value of reason.

Our culture places maximum value not on fair-mindedness but upon self-interest, and maximizing production, and consumption.

Intellectual humility begins with the recognition that absolute certainty regarding any matter of fact is beyond human capacity. There exists no mind-independent reality that we have the capacity to know. We can know only that which is “colored” by our experiences and historical perspective.

Our common sense views, coupled with philosophical tradition and religious dogma, all teach us that such is not the case, that we can find absolute certainty. This cultural tradition works aggressively against our goal of intellectual humility thus demanding that we must become more intellectually sophisticated in order to gain the level of intellectual humility required.

Intellectual courage is a difficult assignment. We all tend to place great value on our own opinion, which is more often than not just something that we grabbed as it flew by. But this is even more of a problem when we are “wedded” to something that we have a strong commitment to, for what ever reason. Our political affiliation is one example.

Intellectual courage is especially difficult, and even dangerous to our well being when we hold ideas that society considers them to be dangerous; even though we are confident that they are rationally grounded. Society often punishes severely all forms of nonconformity; the execution of Socrates by the citizens of Athens might serve as a good example.

By developing this character trait of intellectual courage we will often be ostracized from a group or even a large community. Such an experience will give us incentive to recognize that most people live their lives in such a manner as to be secure in the middle of the approval of those about us.

Intellectual courage ain’t for sissies!

Intellectual empathy is a consciousness that one must engage the imagination in an effort to intellectually place your self into the shoes of another so as to comprehend that other person as well as possible. To accomplish this transaction we must try to learn as much as possible about the other person’s situation so as to reconstruct that person’s assumptions, premises, and ideas.

It appears to me that civilization is presently constructed on the firm foundation of baked-in bias, that is to say that religion forms the foundation of today’s civilization. If this is correct one might ask the question ‘can we construct a world on a foundation of reason when we begin with a world where the understanding of and confidence in reason is seldom observed’?

Many of these ideas were gleaned from the book Critical Thinking: Tools for Taking Charge of Your Professional and Personal Life by Richard Paul and Linda Elder

 

[Athenian200]

Intellectual empathy is a consciousness that one must engage the imagination in an effort to intellectually place your self into the shoes of another so as to comprehend that other person as well as possible. To accomplish this transaction we must try to learn as much as possible about the other person’s situation so as to reconstruct that person’s assumptions, premises, and ideas.

Empathy is intellectual now? If you say so.

Anyway, thanks for helping my case that Ti/Fe should be treated as two sides of the same coin.

 

[Totenkindly]

Empathy is intellectual now? If you say so.

My personal definitions tend to be:

sympathy: A feeling of pathos through the concrete senses, without a conscious intellectual component. It's more like being a string that vibrates automatically because another string is vibrating on the same frequency.

empathy: projecting into the other's shoes via the intellectual or intuitive senses. There's an active engagement there, a forced connection via modeling the target inside oneself and then projecting oneself into the model.

Anyway, thanks for helping my case that Ti/Fe should be treated as two sides of the same coin.

Both are judging processes, not perceiving processes. So they're related that way, just with different valuesets.

 

[Athenian200]

My personal definitions tend to be:

sympathy: A feeling of pathos through the concrete senses, without a conscious intellectual component. It's more like being a string that vibrates automatically because another string is vibrating on the same frequency.

empathy: projecting into the other's shoes via the intellectual or intuitive senses. There's an active engagement there, a forced connection via modeling the target inside oneself and then projecting oneself into the model.

Well... yes. Technically those would be my definitions as well. But "Intellectual Empathy" just sounds weird for some reason. Intellectuals already lay claim to far too many cognitive faculties. This just seems to be overreaching a bit.

Both are judging processes, not perceiving processes. So they're related that way, just with different valuesets.

Yeah, that's what I thought. Ti's value set (in general) seems related to defining the internal structure of something, while Fe's is about creating interpersonal harmony. Right?

 

[coberst]

Empathy is intellectual now? If you say so.

Anyway, thanks for helping my case that Ti/Fe should be treated as two sides of the same coin.

Letting your dog out side when necessary demonstrates our ability to empathesize with other creatures.

There are various definitions of empathy given by various individuals but almost all of them point to the same meaning. Empathy is defined as the ability to understand the feelings, thoughts, and beliefs of another person. Empathy is often characterized as the ability to “walk in the shoes of another”, i.e. to acquire an emotional resonance with another.

In his classic work about modern art, “Abstraction and Empathy”, Wilhelm Worringer provides us with a theory of empathy derived from Theodor Lipps that can be usefully applied to objects of art as well as all objects including persons.

“The presupposition of the act of empathy is the general apperceptive activity. Every sensuous object, in so far as it exists for me, is always the product of two components, that which is sensuously given and of my apperceptive activity.”

Apperception—the process of understanding something perceived in terms of previous experience.

What does in so far as it exists for me mean. I would say that something exists for me when I comprehend that something. Comprehension is a hierarchical concept and can be usefully considered as in the shape of a pyramid. At the base of the comprehension pyramid is awareness that is followed by consciousness. We are aware of many things but we are conscious of much less. Consciousness is awareness plus our focused attention.

Continuing with the pyramid analogy, knowing follows consciousness and understanding is at the pinnacle of the pyramid. We know less than we are conscious of and we understand less than we know. Understanding is about meaning whereas knowing is about knowledge. To move from knowing something to a point when that something is meaningful to me, i.e. understood by me, is a big step for man and a giant step for mankind.

My very best friend is meaningful to me and my very worst enemy must, for security reasons, also be meaningful to me. The American failures in Vietnam and Iraq are greatly the result of the fact that our government and our citizens never understood these ‘foreigners’. We failed at the very important relationship—we did not empathesize with the people and thus failed to understand our enemy. It is quite possible that if we had understood them we would never have gone to war with them.

 

[Thalassa]

I recently read somewhere that our political leanings could actually be the result of something in our genes. Even if that's not true, can we actually socialize fully-grown adults out of societal values absorbed by their in-groups since earliest childhood?

 

[Thalassa]

I'm sorry that should be "absorbed from in-groups" not by.

 

[coberst]

I recently read somewhere that our political leanings could actually be the result of something in our genes. Even if that's not true, can we actually socialize fully-grown adults out of societal values absorbed by their in-groups since earliest childhood?

Absolutely!!