https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=WpVVcVRkLok
I teach a couple of courses that talk significantly about wisdom. One of them is a course on higher cognitive processes. So I’m going to try and collapse all of that information into a ten minute talk about the nature of wisdom. So wisdom involves some transformation of our cognition that affords an improvement of our lives. It helps to reduce foolishness and helps to afford flourishing. It frees us from ways in which our cognition is working against itself and frees us to improve the way our cognition can work with itself. That means that wisdom has to do with some central or fundamental function of our cognition. One of the things that I’ve argued in my work elsewhere is one of the central functions of our cognition, what really affords our ability to learn and to solve problems is our ability to realize relevance. To zero in on relevant information and ignore irrelevant information. This seems to be what is really constitutive of us being intelligent agents. So intelligence is basically your capacity for learning. Relevance realization can be thought initially as just our ability to zero in on information, find patterns and thereby learn about the world. But the problem is that relevance realization process has to be self-correcting. It has to be self-transcending because the patterns we find can often prevent us from solving the problems we face. So here’s a classic example of this. It’s called the nine dot problem. It’s a very famous problem, very studied in psychology. So here’s the problem. You have to join all nine dots with four straight lines and you have to start the previous line, sorry, you have to start the next line from the terminus of the previous line. So what many people do is they immediately project a pattern onto here. That’s their intelligence at work. They project a square and they think that what I have to do is create a closed figure. And so they try and solve the nine dots. They draw four lines. Oh, I missed the center. They do the center. Oh, this isn’t working. And then it turns out to be very difficult. So here’s one solution to the nine dot problem. One, two, three, four, right? Lines. Now, what’s important there is when you do this, many people say you cheated or that’s not fair. You went outside the box. But exactly that’s the issue. I at no point said square or box. That was a pattern that your intelligence imposed on there. That was the way you realized relevance. You said this is relevant and all this space outside isn’t relevant. But it turns out the space outside is relevant. And your relevance realization, what your intelligence has to do is transcend itself and correct itself. It has to feed back on itself. And so what you have to do is not only learn, find pattern, you have to pay attention to how you’re finding patterns. You have to do not only learning, you have to do learning to learn. What that means is one of the things your intelligence can do is actually feed back on itself and do learning to learn. Now when you can do that, when you’re learning to learn helps you overcome how you’ve mis-framed a problem. We call that insight. And what I want to suggest to you is that insight is one of the central functions of wisdom. Look, if I say Bob doesn’t have a lot of knowledge, but he’s very wise, people say yeah, that’s okay, that makes sense. Or if you say, you know, Bob is very creative, but he’s not very wise, people go yeah, that’s okay. And if I say to you, Bob is very wise, but he’s not very insightful, people go no, that doesn’t work, that doesn’t make any sense. So insight is a central capacity to being wise. Now the thing about insight in wisdom is we’re not just talking about improving how to solve a particular problem, we’re talking about again this comprehensive improvement of our cognition, of our intelligence, because we’re trying to afford reducing foolishness. Flawlessness is being trapped by our own cognition, like you’re trapped in the nine dot problem. Flourishing is when you do this, right, when intelligence feeds on itself and we do learning to learn, where you afford your mind to be able to work better than it was working before. But we want to do this comprehensively. Now what I want to suggest to you is that when intelligence is insightfully feeding back on itself so that we get learning to learn, that’s actually what rationality is. Intelligence is using your intelligence to solve the problem through learning to learn of how to better use and develop your intelligence. That’s what rationality is. And rationality I think is therefore a key element of what it is to be wise. Now the problem that many people have when they hear the word rationality is they misunderstand it. They think it’s illogical, kind of the Spock or data thing from the Star Trek popular culture thing. But I want to suggest to you that it’s much more sophisticated than that. So just like the way intelligence can feed back on itself to make us rational, what I want to suggest to you is the way rationality can feed back on itself, transcend itself, correct itself, overcome its self-limitation, afford itself improvement, that’s what we mean by wisdom. Now in order to talk about that we have to talk about the three types of knowing, the three kinds of patterns that our intelligence projects into the world. Now the one we’re very familiar with are patterns that we express in propositions, like I know that that Australia is a continent. I know that Australia is a country. I know that Australia is a continent and a country. And there what we need is we need to improve our inferential abilities. The problem with our inferential abilities is they’re often beset by biases. We jump to conclusions, we don’t pay attention to possibilities, we don’t properly consider the relevant information that is going into our inference. But what we need to do is develop a set of skills called by Jonathan Barron, active open mindedness, where we learn to find these biases and we learn to correct them. So what’s an example of a bias? Often when people are using inference they only pay attention to information that confirms their belief. They don’t pay good attention, they don’t find relevant enough the information that could disconfirm their belief. They have what’s called a confirmation bias. In active open mindedness you learn to become aware and sensitive to confirmation bias and to actively counteract it. But that’s not our only form of knowing, that’s not our only form of learning, that’s not the only kind of pattern. There’s also knowing how to do something, knowing how to walk, knowing how to catch a ball, knowing how to follow a conversation, knowing how to tell a joke. These are not matters of inference, these are matters of attention. I have to pay attention in the right way, I have to track courses of events, I have to know how. This isn’t about propositions that express beliefs, this is about skills that enable me to interact with the world well. So now I need a learning to learn strategy for this procedural paying of attention. I have to train skills of attention, I have to have the practice of paying attention to how I pay attention. That’s exactly what mindfulness is. So mindfulness training is again this kind of recursion. I learn to pay attention to how I’m paying attention and in that way I can improve my cognitive skills. But there’s a third kind of knowing, and I owe this to my friend Greg Kisoros, there’s a perspectival knowing. This is knowing that something is the case, this is knowing how to do something, this is knowing what it’s like to be something, to take a particular role. So Leo Ferrara and I have done work trying to integrate this all together and the idea is in perspectival knowing I’m bringing together my procedural know-how and my propositional grasp of facts and I’m integrating them together so that I know what kind of role to take in a situation. I’m learning how to take perspectives, I’m learning how to assume roles. But I need that process also to be trained. There’s a rationality for that. Well how do we train our ability to take perspectives? Why is that crucial to rationality? One of the besetting things that makes us irrational is a failure to take alternative perspectives. We are often too egocentric in our processing. And what we need to do is overcome our egocentrism by taking broader and better perspectives in our own, learning how to internalize them, learning how to imitate them. That’s a process that Vygotsky, the psychologist called internalization. Now one of the things we can do, and this is one of the ideas that comes from the ancient world and the study of wisdom, is we can set up this idea. As the child is to the adult, the adult is to the sage. What children do in order to become less egocentric is they practice internalizing the perspective of adults because that helps them to overcome their bias, their egocentrism. It helps them to acquire skills and interests they won’t initially have from their own egocentric perspective. But our development isn’t done. We can also take that attitude of imitation and internalization towards figures that have better, broader, less biased perspectives than ours. So these are the figures of course that are recognized by history. Jesus, the Buddha, Mohammed, Lao Tse, Kung Fu Tse. These are the sages. We can practice internalizing the sage as a way of bringing rationality into our perspectival knowing. And then what we can do is we can use these various forms of rationality to act as checks and balances on each other. The procedural, right, mindfulness, the propositional act of open-mindedness, and the perspectival internalizing the sage can all interact with each other. They can all self-correct and self-transcend each other. So what we can do is these various forms of rationality can form a self-organizing system so that our rationality is constantly self-correcting, constantly self-transcending. That’s how wisdom, right, can be the way rationality, just like an insight, is a self-correcting, self-transcending process. So what we get with wisdom is that our rationality is rationally transcending itself. Wisdom is rationally self-transcending rationality. And wisdom matters because the more we can free ourselves from the way the mind is hampering itself, the way the mind is foolish, the more we can afford flourishing, the more we can free our mind to take on broader perspectives, to remove bias, to be more insightful, the more we can bring to bear the cognitive tools we need to improve our lives and address some of the problems that are facing the world, the problems that need more wisdom.