Is your Intellect Pre-Enlightenment or Post-Enlightenment? (page 3)

Married to the Mob

intellect has always been there, what your are refering to is the filter/choke you applied to it.

Terry, you seem determined to pound everyone into one of a couple of boxes of your making. If we are not modern, intellectual and non-religious, then we must be knuckle dragging, uneducated neanderthals, enslaved by religious dogma. I think you fancy yourself as thinking outside the box, when in fact, you're just renting space in a bigger box. And you pride yourself on seeing shades of grey in your dichromatic world.

Human beings don't work that way. We have complex inexplicable modes of behavior. How do you rationally explain Beethoven's creation of the 9th symphony when he was deaf? Why do people fall in love? Why do people spend a life time working on (and succeeding at) projects others think are impossible?

Not a bit of it.

One wonders which toe of yours was trod upon.

I personally don't care what you've chosen to believe. The point of my topic is that whatever it is should withstand constant scrutiny. If we can't be skeptical about what we are certain of we are in danger of automatically filtering out anything which could notify us we are wrong.

Think of 9/11. We have an infrastructure of counter-terrorism in place which IGNORED pertinent information about the attacks. That information was seen as NOISE and not information worthy of analysis. Why? The heuristic in place was not plastic enough. It was/is rigid.

We cannot survive in an ever changing enviornment with RIGID constructs in place.

Beethoven was able to compse the 9th Symphony while deaf because he knew how music is composed. I can write a piece of music without hearing it easily enough because I know what works.

People fall in love because what they value becomes available to them triggering an effort to achieve, obtain and possess the embodiment.

Working on a project that others find fault with is hardly an impediment to an ambitious individual who values personal vision over consensus.

Terry

There are many people like Terry.

They need to judge.

They need to find fault.

They need to hide their feelings of inferiority with "education".

They do these things to keep from seeing what THEY have become.

Night Owl

So, Night Owl, having said all that.....I missed where you self-identified according to the Topic subject.

Which are you?

Thanks!

JeffT

One wonders which toe of yours was trod upon.

None, since I don't see myself as fitting anywhere on your constructed dichotomy.

I personally don't care what you've chosen to believe.

You certainly spend a lot of time posting about what you think other people believe.

The point of my topic is that whatever it is should withstand constant scrutiny.

And yet you don't seem to like it when the scrutiny gets too close to you.

For the record, I take a good long look at myself nearly every day. Just in the last year I've given up on organized religion completely, and I am once again rethinking my politics (No don't get all excited, whatever happens I'm not going to be a liberal again.)