So wouldn’t the natural evolution of critical thinking start with a child’s attention trying to take in as much information as possible, thus easily distracted by any new interests, then learning to sort and order the reams of information the world presents?
Yet wouldn’t those be the children most likely diagnosed as attention deficient and medicated?
It’s my view society seeks a conformity that is antagonistic towards critical thinking. To the extent it encourages active attention, it is towards specific goals. The result being that we have become a society of specialists and disparage more generalized and broader outlooks.
Though there are reasons why the people running armies are called generals and specialist is about one rank above private. It is that ability to see and understand the patterns running through the big picture and not just spiral into any of the innumerable rabbit holes of specific knowledge, which multiply, as society grows more complex.
While our academic disciplines are dominated by the STEM fields, philosophy is relegated to the back rooms and dominated by its own forms of specialization.
So is there anything being seriously missed in this focus on detail, or is the big picture just that obvious?
One point I try raising fairly often is that as mobile, intentional organisms, we experience our reality as flashes of perception, which we then sort and judge, in order to navigate. Then tell our stories to one another and build civilizations out of the collected knowledge, so the narrative passage of time is elementary to our understanding of reality.
Yet it doesn’t take much reflection to realize the point of the present isn’t so much moving past to future, as it is change turning future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Potential, actual, residual.
There is no physical “dimension” of time, because the past is consumed by the present, in order to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy.
So time is an effect of activity, like temperature, pressure, color, etc. Think frequencies and amplitudes.
Safe to say though, raising this point will get you banned from any number of physics and math discussions.
As I like to point out, epicycles were brilliant math, but lousy physics. The map is not the territory.
Though mathematical models, from multiverses to string theory, dominate the field. Would some basic, general critical thinking help, or am I the one that’s delusional?
On one occasion, I made the observation to a Catholic priest that a spiritual absolute would necessarily be the essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell. His response was to cross himself and walk away. That’s the feeling I get in trying to talk to anyone with a physics background.
Critical thinking runs a distant second to institutional authority.
