Tuesday, May 16, 2006

Intuitive Understanding

I found this interesting pdf from Bruce Schneier's blog entry entitled Reconceptualizing National Intelligence. The following text caught my eye:

"...the disconnect between the emphasis on current reporting or providing situational awareness, which must be evidence-based, and the policymaker's need for anticipatory judgements, which by nature, trade the confidence derived from hard evidence for an intuitive, or gestalt, understanding of the whole derived from inference."

Is this what is happening to someone when they search their soul? I was looking for hard evidence to support my World view, but now I am not sure I have a "World view". I am past the evidence gathering stage, or am I? I find myself relying on an intuitive, or gestalt, understanding of the whole derived from inference rather than any "evidence" ( Is this a lie? ). It feels "right".
Comments:
Sometimes I feel I should just sit and stay, and I will be everywhere, and nowhere.
 
I would say that the gestalt that you are relying on, is not a permanent and fixed one, but a constantly changing (not necessarily evolving, because there can be leaps and skips) reformulation, taking place in split seconds of the moment. Then you would be 'intuitively' being, existentially so, and you would have no 'constant and definable' world view.

I just did an interview for a university course and they judged my world view as 'pantheistic, theistic existentialism'. Huh? Who knows.
 
Yes you are correct as far as I can follow your logic. I guess I made implicit assumptions that that is the case, but did not state them formally.

Unless "they" are a thesis committee, their opinion really doesn't matter. And even if they are, you have to live with yourself and your World view. Since the brain is plastic and ever changing, the gestalt would also be ever changing as well just from that fact. Immerse a being with a brain like ours in a dynamic environment, and you force the inputs to that brain to change as well, so the gestalt would change due just to changing inputs. Such will happen in the course of study as well, unless the curriculum forces the gestalt to be unimaginative and uniform as is so often the case. (Education stifling imagination as Einstein remarked.)
 
Post a Comment



<< Home

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?