Saturday, 26 March 2011

Meta-waffling

I was thinking about thinking while in the shower this morning. Specifically 'magical thinking'.
Most sceptics dismiss magical thinking as a part of our evolutionary heritage which is no longer useful to us and leads to errors and superstition.
So, I thought, yes maybe that is the case, but outside of science & research maybe there is a place for it in art, or of our subjective experience, so long as we remember what it is and how it works.
After all, you wouldn't want someone engaged in designing a computer program, circuit board, or drug to fight cancer to engage in magical thinking, would you? Well... once I thought of that I thought of Einstein, whose first notions behind Relativity came from daydreaming about riding along on a light wave. There are many other breakthroughs in many sciences which came not from logical deduction or reasoning, but from intuitive leaps.
Maybe there is a place in our all of our modes of thought & activity in which magical thinking, intuition and irrationality can lead us to new ideas, new modes of thought and new understanding of our experiential worlds.

2 comments:

  1. Magical thinking lead us on the path toward enlightenment and evolution in the FIRST place, to dispense with it as a source of inspiration would be an act of hubris. EVERYTHING came from shaman initially. A good modern scientist is as much a shaman as he is an engineer.

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  2. Good show, Paul. Please feel free to comment on anything I've posted. Doesn't look like anyone else is gonna!

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