While I was reading the book Natural Cognitive Theology, I expressed that the study of the individual should not be taken casually but seriously, should not be taken as a peripheral element within the context of society but as a core element that can drive us "in" or "out" of the road on our journey on advancing our current civilization.
After finishing reading the book of Natural Cognitive Theology, I wanted to give a final wrap up of what I additionally learned and also resembling the very close similarities to the books that talk about "thinking about thinking" (meta-thinking), such as black box thinking, executive paradox, revolutionary feedback, clean thinking, and so on. However, I also want to focus in here the driving forces of our behavior, which consist of 2 attributes: motivation and value.
Motivation creates value and value drives our action. Values is a thing I suppose everybody should already know. Values are the most deep rooted things in our inner self explained in several psychological books. It is that when a topic resembles more closely to our values, the more passionate our actions become. On the contrary, input from our environment that has no relevance or association to our values becomes a drain to process in our mind. It is more apparently that we do not have a free will and react based on our values. Just try to see what activities you do on your free time outside of your work and try to categorize them. Just check if there is a pattern in the activities you do and check on the time intervals on when they happen. Some of the activities you do in your free time are independent, but some are based on the dependency of others. When I mean "others", it can be the places you go, the people you hang, that they would not happen, because they only are triggered most strongly when your presence is surrounded or expect the presence to be surrounded if that entity we talk is a living and intelligent thing. I have to mention, when we refer to entities, any atomic level of the entity still becomes a valid point. For instance, the entity does not require to be an individual. It can represent a group influencing another group, such as between companies, organizations, and countries. Those can be illustrated as what does one company does with acquiring another company, what happens when one government puts specific measures on an organization, what happens when one country puts measures on another country, and so on. On the contrary, the choices we do independently is usually because we think our choices is right and thus we do them. That because is due to a motivation, that motivation either be of empty or lack of content or with content, as we will describe later on. The important thing to ask is: "We have free will, don't we?". Yes, apparently, we do, but it can only come through major events when your own self have 2 conflicting motivations, and it is usually always in the following use case: "Your existing motivation that is driven by the values you already have and your new motivation that is driven to different values than the ones you currently have". If you try to look at your past history, where there values that show different actions that drive you completely different to the values that you have and act now? The breaking point in between those two most likely is due to our free will, two motivations embarked, leading the new one being stronger than the existing one. If the motivations is not strong enough, then don't expect any new transition. Otherwise, most of our life is locked by our values and the term "options" only comes if we find something else more motivating than what we already do. The point is those motivations (I would also refer those as active mental networks if I kept the terms close to the theory of mental symmetry) are very rare to occur to the average person in their daily life, and if they do appear, in most cases, they are not strong enough to overlap of our existing motivations, making our life for most of us individuals to work most of our activity of our life to the same existing values for a series of years. That is why society is very easy predictable in most cases. We know that a behavior of "most people" (pay attention here that I don't focus to one individual here) will not change overnight so we can have high strong confidence on the evidence we grab from the user behavior will still retain a consistent pattern for an extended period of time. Now add some handicaps to your desire wanting the user to use X product, then the only thing you have to do is either creating an environment that makes it dependent to be triggered to do that activity or boost more content that supports the motivation of that individual from other threats that can be de-motivated, and you have more higher chances (more stronger confidence) than before that the people will still keep consistent that pattern. As in statistics, the value that we want (i.e. be healthy) is predetermined by our choices (i.e. are we eating healthy? do we avoid smoking or drinking alcohol?). Thus, in order to reach such value where we are the most healthy, we look at all of our options, and we see which choices makes us the closest to our value. The theory of mental symmetry describes this concept as divine sovereignty, such as the light does a refraction within the medium of the water in order to reach to the least time. That is a platonic form which in real life we can never reach, but when we try to make decisions, we always try to check all possibilities (when in reality, we cannot have all possibilities) and pick the best output for our value we are motivated for.
Now let us examine how motivation is created. Motivation can be created either with content or without content. The interesting thing is "content". When we do science in the objective world, our motivation to solve our problems was always based by content. We try to find patterns that create a platonic forms (such as math) and then we create use cases or examples that fit a specific category for a platonic form (that is what science does and we call them as exemplars - hence, it is important your content to have relative works out of it). Those two fill the content of making our objective world with layers and layers of abstractions that become reliable because our previous layers of abstractions were able to hold as a foundation for the next layer of abstractions to stand above, like constructing a building with a lot of floors. It is all about understanding how things work. However, that was not the case for a lot of years before in our history. The thing is it is bad to do stuff without first understanding how things works in a platonic form in our head first. That is, if we are more away from our platonic form, then our works, whatever will be, will not align with how things work externally precisely. Our values will be partially filled due to motivations of platonic forms that didn't study the matter of the world precisely enough to understand it well. On the other hand, hanging too much on platonic forms and showing no works out of it will not liberate us to create beauty to the external world and create more layers on top of it. As actions represent the values that we hold, we keep that motivation being the living thing and pushing others to follow as an example while any other motivation becomes a thing that remains dormant. That is what a lot of years before the renaissance times life was like. The motivation of science was always there, but not so strong as a living thing that will capture the whole world to appreciate its true value. There was once time, as the book of Natural Cognitive Theology describes, Alexandria hugest library, becoming one of the wonders that could lift the world at that time in the same premises like the renaissance times did, but unfortunately it did not, as the major motivations of society these days was tribes conquering other tribes, like the game of Warcraft, not having a true understanding at that time that there were other values that if everybody was motivated, would have made a world better with less resources to waste and become scarce abundant not only on the average daily needs the individual required at that time, but to exponentially grow the activities that they could manipulate and communicate with society, such as we do in today's age with technology and science.
Such motivation we have today to make our objective world a better place. Let us look at the example of the airline industry. The airline industry created a platonic form to have the least accidents as possible. A flying airplane is a very complicated machine and is under pressure by different environments high up through the air, requiring pilots to be very careful on their flying patterns, for any mistake could become a full casualty. When the airline industry started, crashes were very common and the process to avoid flight accidents at its inception stages didn't have the adequate impact to reach close to the platonic target to reach little to no airplane accidents at that time. However, given the airplane industry had a scientific attitude, embraced transparency and avoided mental networks of culture and authority to interfere and tamper with filling the actual content of the data, they were able to create a system where all pilots had to learn in order to become effective on the objective platonic form of having the least airplane accidents as possible. We see the airplane industry practiced the same traits of attitude like the great library of Alexandria. At that time, Alexandria tried to not be under the influence of pantheism and other authority figures. All cultures focused solely on that time on integrating the concept of god as how things work, making that era as one of the biggest concentration of scientific achievements. Similarly, the airplane industry, created a lot of reforms to its system of how it handles things: Pilots publicly reporting all the accidents and flights that had high risk so everybody could gain access and learn. Private investigators that could check the incident carefully. Adding procedure and rules as part of the norms for staff and pilots to follow in order to minimize behavior that could yield high risk of airplane accidents. We can see that if we retain a platonic form that defines on how things work instead of people's desire on how things we wish to be, then the content that we fill on each exemplar that we do (in here, our reaction on every airplane accident that happens), our reality becomes closer and more closer to the platonic form that we want to achieve. There is still a problem with the example of the airplane industry, where the type of righteousness we have here, which by definition means a platonic form matching with the reality of the world, is only contained within the norms of the airplane industry and in most cases not contained within the people. That is, it would be more interesting if instead the norm being the living thing to motivate people to do what is right, for people itself to motivate people what is right. That is, if people look at those concepts of rules and procedures beyond just a norm to follow, but instead to the underlying structure why these norms where created in the first place, then people would be more pro-active and more motivated to do more than what those norms and procedures state in order to get more closer to the target the platonic form wants us to reach. I do not state that people are not motivated in the airplane industry, for the actions of publicly reporting airplane accidents and high risk incidents, as well the interest of understanding how things work, as long those foundations are driven for most people working in the aviation industry, then the platonic form and our reality will not stray away over time. When there is a mismatch with the motivation of individuals and the norms, then there will be a strong willingness for individuals to influence the norms of the platonic form to not follow the procedure of how things work to a procedure that mitigates or adjusts things to be less of an issue to examine the contents of the incident. That can be attributed to the healthcare industry, where in many cases, they have a lot of liability and accident costs, where the norms don't justify of the original platonic forms hospitals intended to do " to save every human possible life as possible ". Accidents happen and we cannot do much about it, but what we can do is what "we could do in the future" for this accident does not happen again, as after all, platonic forms mission always strives on "what could be" as opposed to sticking or covering up what already happened so we follow the utilitarian principle of making the most people happy and reduce the least conflict.
This attitude that a lot of healthcare industries have is an example of doing decisions by not filling content and contemplating that we are still doing the right thing, a shortcut of the mind that drives motivation of a platonic form that ignores reality. This can be illustrated by one narrative a teacher on theology discussed that when he visits a church, to paraphrase with my own words, the atmosphere of the environment becomes so captivating that it influences the mind. I am not intending to say that being emotional captivated by a thing is wrong, especially when we have a lot of problems that need content to be analyzed, as they can be stressful, and having a "small rest" is essential if you are too much out of your comfort zone, but making our whole lifestyle being captivated emotionally like the healthcare industry does is like we are avoiding content, avoiding reality, making the platonic forms that were originally intended by the founders to stray away to what we actually do. Other examples that I can illustrate is when you are under pressure or somebody places authority on you, you are more prone to disable perceiving and making sense of things on your environment, because you become overwhelmed with emotions, and usually most of our choices in reality that end up bad is usually due to that. Again, I have to illustrate that platonic forms are of the essence of "what could be". I think neurologists know that much more better than I do. One neuroscientist teacher could state "why don't we think of how to fix things ahead of time instead of patching things up". And the main point the reason of the cause of that is because we don't have a progressive action on filling up content on a platonic form that leads to little to no mistakes and we leave up instead to be forced up to "learn from content" when reality and the platonic forms we held are so stray away that it is inevitable to still defend ourselves and say "well, it is a small mistake" as opposed to the counter evidence that we cannot emotionally avoid.
In summary, we saw that lot of organizations follow the platonic form of how the objective world works, but some, such as the healthcare industry did not, and are starting to force to learn from others the correct practices. But let us turn around and see how we looked at "how things work in the objective world". Before the renaissance age, most individuals looked things in a superficial way of how things work, attributed to pantheism or gods where its transcendence is something where man cannot understand. People placed strong value on a god with no content, but those bets, at least on the objective world, turned out to be wrong. Man can understand how the objective world works by creating a platonic form (math) that can match with reality with exemplars (science) that create layers of abstraction within the objective world that benefits humans to amplify the ability to manipulate and access resources (technology). As if I practiced theology, if god exists, then that god I believe must make sense and can be grasped in a similar vein as an object that lives in a computer program can grasp how the source code of the program behaves in the world. However, this behavior of transcendence with no content has not been faded out away, it is a shortcut humans can take as the epitome of their motivation that drive their values, and similar conflicts will exist like past tribes tried to contest science as sort of witchcraft or some sorts of curse in order for such subject to not contest the rulers of the party that controlled the world.
What I am bringing up to the conclusion is that we are starting to see a conflict again of the same issue again, but now on the subjective part, that is, whether we as individuals can be understood in the same way we apply math and science in the objective world. Nobody tries to achieve that because it is a very sensitive topic, as it impacts our own ego. However, when people think that they do have freedom when there are no rules to be contested against them like science does to the objective world, it is actually an illusion, as there is always some order placed either by government or corporation or society that drives humanity to work in a certain direction if it does not have a direction of its own self that benefits human society. Again, I have to emphasize, the platonic form society intends to do is whatever benefits human society to progress itself where no crime exists, less misunderstandings exist, people doing what they passionately love and contribute the maximum productivity, and many more. Yet those platonic forms are ideal, they are very hard to grasp if people are not motivated to achieve exemplars to those platonic forms, yet impossible to achieve any of it if the platonic form does not constitute of "how individuals work". Yes, I am intending to say that we should focus and learn more "how individuals work", and if all things considered, humans should not be an exemption of an entity that does not have a system on how its behavior is guided. Neurology, psychology, and other findings are closer to unravel more on how the individual works, and the times will come near, where we have to identify our actions in a mathematical and scientific way instead of being guided only by culture and norms, which is only an effect, and not a cause, on how our behavior originates. However, norms are important. It represents where our current state in our society is, it represents our current motivation. Based on those norms, they need to be tested for each activity that we are motivated, whether when it is tested against the waters or not, whether it is beneficial to society or not. As we looked at the example of the healthcare industry, those norms and cultures that were manifested were not potent and had to be discarded. However, they cannot be discarded without replacing a motivation with a better motivation, as our free will is usually guided that way. In order for a new better motivation to replace an existing motivation, that better motivation has to be created under platonic forms, under "how individuals work" in the first place. It is very not apparently something we don't understand how individuals work, it is more that we don't want to admit that individuals can be understood on how individual works. We do not want to admit that if we understood how individual works, then we could create better effective systems in place, like the aviation industry does. We do not want to admit that the aviation industry main factor for having an almost clean record of airplane crashes was due to understanding how things work not only objectively, but also by how people behave. We are embracing the same attitude of authority of Julias Cesar where we don't see the importance of trail pathways that contribute to understanding how things work in individuals, as in the same way Caesar didn't see the great importance was to keep intact the great library of Alexandria in Egypt. When such pathways like I and others do to envelop an opportunity for making our society a better place as all cultures idealize but instead here with content like science does and in the end we fail, they would see our history of today and see how the negligence and ignorance of other people covered us in the dust and see us missing an opportunity on how better and earlier our civilization would have grown to a culture where those platonic forms and reality become closer instead of separated as they always currently are. Instead many are taking the world as for granted and nothing that we can do about, creating subjects such as "economic irrationality of human behavior", and so on.
I don't think we are over yet on making a perfect world. We need improvements, especially on our attitude, to observe the world not only on how the objective world works, but how us as individuals work. Those will give us the energy to create systems that the individual is motivated to bring personal value to the world instead of the government forcing it, individuals to buy and sell values that are attributed and integrated to the personal development instead of only on improving our objective empirical world as opposed non profit organizations and governments subsidizing to such acts where corporations in most cases are fully negligent about it, making social responsibility a second priority. The mechanics that we still have will be in place. The important element is that we put the scope of people included in the system on how things work and attribute positive and negative value out of it, such as in the same way we measure between systems of healthcare and airplane industries. This in token requires a great heart as it requires to go out of our comfort zone. Strong attention should be paid that this is no different than having an obsession like entrepreneurs (also called as "inventors" in the theory of mental symmetry) do. It is expected that many people will follow the status quo and expect a lot of rejection from them or not having a complete full picture or they may be in alignment, but don't have strong motivation of grasping and taking action of the full picture. That which requires great heart also requires great rest, as entrepreneurs know that they have to have a balance with their life and that they cannot do everything by themselves. Instead, it is only to expect others to follow, to have hope that the whole world will unveil this same message that understanding with content will get us closer to the truth, which the limits become unstoppable when we hold to such platonic form, as it aligns with reality. See the impact of math and science to the objective world compared to the pantheism attributing the objective world being attributed to the suns and the solar system. Many will not be able to "not follow Caesar" and "work in the great library of Alexandria". It is a thing that the heart has to go out of its comfort zone and it is a thing that most people do not want to dare to.
Many people think that content as "how individuals work" do not exist, but they are blind, as there have been several and critical books that discuss how individual works in essential detail. After reading a part of the book of Mental Symmetry by Lorin Friesen, I tried to back up the facts of the books by reading other books that discuss about thinking about thinking. I found a lot of books that resembled very close similarities to the theory of Mental Symmetry, such as Executive Paradox by David G Jensen, and a lot of the illustrations above besides the book of Natural Cognitive Theology in this article come from Black Box Thinking by Matthew Syed. There where other books that talked about thinking about thinking, but within a tree of a forest instead of the complete forest: Those books that articulated parts of understanding people, such as Feedback Revolution by Peter Mclaughlin, as well parts of understanding metaphors, such as Clean Language by Wendy Sullivan and Judy Rees. Natural Cognitive Theology all correlate those 4 books in a greater big picture and places theology back to its true colors, like in the times of the great library of Alexandria and renaissance times, on understanding how the individual works as opposed to the traditional practices of theology we see today where they try to derive some understanding only by looking how cultures and norms of different religions behave. Natural Cognitive Theology tries to state that theology ulterior mission is to try to understand how things work on the individual level and then create its own versions of science and technology for the subjective part. Neurology (a lot of neurological findings describe accurately the cognitive styles of theory of mental symmetry), Psychology (Like Piaget childhood development), Philosophy (Like Thomas Kuhn Scientific Revolutions), and the 4 books that I just mentioned that discuss thinking about thinking are little helpers to unveil that path of personal understanding to such fruition. It is such content and more content that will unify people and improve our quality of our communication. It is like one of my teachers in neurosciences have partially said "Why do we have two different political parties? one on the left and on the right? They all share the same mind, they should be integrated instead." The book Natural Cognitive Theology by Lorin Friesen is not a book that looks things through making individuals being overwhelmed by emotions to understand the meaning of life like many other books do. It tries to fill in content instead of making a statement out of no content. It does things at a rational scientific level, which I think, scientists or mathematicians who believe only on math and science on the objective world, will be in faint love with this book as it looks all things from a rational perspective in the same veins of the subject of math and science, but in a subjective level, instead of an objective level. If you are keen to learn more about:
- History:great library of Alexandria, the after effects of world war 1, the renaissance times
- Psychology: Piaget childhood development
- Philosophy: Thomas Kuhn Scientific Revolutions, Plato, Swendenborg
Technical thought or marginal gains only focuses on a specific domain and tries to improve that domain as much as possible by playing by the "rules of the game". Technical thought can be considered as being driven by an existing motivation and trying to achieve the most value out of the motivation. Mental symmetry describes that example as the game of chess where the domain is already limited by a set of rules, making it easy for the mind to excel within that domain after understanding all the rules within that set. That is how artificial intelligence was able to win a game in chess, to consider all combinations, and pick the most optimal path. In the same sense, in Black Box thinking, we have the example of the hot dog guy that won the hot dog contest by breaking the highest record two-fold. What the individual did was observe what things he could and could not do with the frame of the rules of that domain allowed and took advantage of doing things differently to bring the maximum value out of that domain.
In contrast, when focusing on only one domain, it doesn't bring the essence of innovation. That is what innovation comes in or normal thought by the theory of mental symmetry. What normal thought does is to create a new form of motivation to replace an existing motivation by filling content based on how things work. It creates a new mental map for a new motivation to thrive in. In such case, instead of focusing on a motivation to create the maximum value, it tries instead to create the mental map that will replace an existing motivation with another motivation by using the essence of normal thought. That is how dyson created the idea of cyclones in vacuum cleaners that disrupted the traditional vacuum cleaners that used paper bags. Instead of playing the rules of the game, in this case, you are trying to figure what are the new rules of the game (filling up the content), new rules of the games that were already there, but not discovered, because we were too narrow minded on the existing rules of the games due to the existing cultures and norms we are attributed to play along with.
I think there are so much more that I can discuss, but I think those are the main important points. If you are interested to learn more, just check the various free resources of the website of www.mentalsymmetry.com in the downloads and forum sections and check the book Natural Cognitive Theology, as it will make you see theology from a different perspective than what we usually ordinary do. In addition, I also need to mention that like how science and math are very hard subjects to learn, so mental symmetry is on the same level a very hard thing to learn as well too, and unlike math and science are subjects that society motivates us to learn, learning about our own self is something that people treat it an apophatic way or too deep that people think it does not bring any value to our world (as like when abstract math was looked in the same veins in the past too).