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Address challenges with French Enlightenment mindsight, equal poise, metis, sympathy, blending
- 1. How can we best address today’s challenges?
- 11. Mindsight: The human capacity to perceive the mind of the self and others.
- 12. Equal Poise: The awareness & ability to know ones own biases.
- 13. Metis: The ability to pick out patterns in an environment.
- 14. Sympathy: Understanding between people; common feeling
- 15. Blending: The ability to take 2 unrelated concepts & put them together.
Editor's Notes
- Do you think of yourself as a separate, unique individual making choices of your own free will?
- Do you believe you use reason to carefully calculate your next move?
- If so, you are probably a child of the French Enlightenment, believing reason to be the highest faculty.
- Reason was to suppress passion and challenge ideas grounded in faith and tradition.
- Reason allows us to advance knowledge through the scientific method. Reason was valued above all else, especially….
- Emotion! Emotion was, and still is, seen as weakness and something to be resisted. All bets are placed on reason as the best way to address societal challenges and make progress. However….
- Reason is primarily the faculty of the conscious mind.
- And as we now know our unconscious mind does most of the work. While our mind can take in millions of pieces of information a minute, we are only consciously aware of about 40. Meaning we perceive more than we are conscious of & this affects our choices and actions.
- Emotions (not Reason) are at the center of our thinking and lay the foundation for reason by telling us what to value. Understanding and educating your emotions is at the heart of wisdom. Cultivating the following skills, based in emotion, will make us better agents for change in today’s world.
- Mindsight. Through practiced focused attention we can learn to track / observe the inner workings of our own minds, providing valuable insight into how our emotions influence our behavior. Mindsight is also what gives us the ability to feel / experience what another is feeling, as often happens when we get wrapped up in a good movie.
- Equal poise: by knowing your own biases, you can remain open-minded in the face of uncertainty, adjust the strength of the your convictions to the strength of the evidence for those convictions. And maintain curiosity.
- Also called street smarts. It’s that gut feeling you get that tells you to avoid a certain street. Trust these gut feelings.
- Sympathy. We generally think of sympathy as being able to understand another’s feelings, especially in hard times. However, sympathy is also what gives us the ability to work in groups. Groups are smarter than individuals, and because 90% of our communication is non-verbal, face-to-face groups are much smarter than groups that communicate electronically. A groups’ effectiveness is determined by how well they communicate, & how often they take turns in conversation.
- And finally blending, this unique human ability to take 2 unrelated concepts and merge them, is one of the primary sources of innovation.