Category: Intention

The Nuisance of Nuance: IV. Will

Feature Photo Credit by Sigmund on Unsplash

Click here to read Part III. Comprehension

With all that wind and the trees falling over and stuff, we may be safer just to leave the park behind and head someplace else – disdainful crowds were never really my thing anyway.

… after the hurricane’s blown through!

Generally, where we might accept a ‘fact’ as one piece in the truth puzzle, we can only claim ‘belief’ for how those facts ought to piece together and contribute to some bigger thing, factual or non-factual: as far as I know, nobody has, or ever will have, a complete front-of-the-box picture of Truth. Besides, fact and truth, knowledge and belief… if these all meant the same thing, we’d be using the same word and not four different ones. How, then, do they differ? Well, for one thing, where belief requires facts, facts can speak for themselves.

The Original 3D Puzzle
Photo Credit by Xavi Cabrera on Unsplash

So, if I’m hiking up a hillside, I might believe another hill slopes down in opposite fashion, just out of sight over the peak – but then again, maybe not… maybe there’s an even taller hill to climb, which I’ll only spot once I’ve crested this hill. I hope not because I’m getting pretty tired, but whatever. Meanwhile, what I know for indisputable fact is that behind me right now is a hill that descends back the way I came. So there’s at least one key difference between fact and belief, and if my measure for this is temporal, that works just fine for me.

In addition to ‘what I come to know’ – a pathway up the hillside as I traverse it – there is also ‘what I come to believe’ – a different path down once I crest the peak… that is, unless I’m mistaken, and the only path down is the one I walked up. Where or how has some belief arisen that more paths down exist…?

“I heard…”
“I remember…”
“I wish…”
“I think…”
“I hope…”

…or maybe the most reliable of all…

“I learned…”

Are you spotting that temporality yet?

Even so, ‘knowledge’ per se is somehow not simply ‘knowing’ the things that I’ve learned: as I hike up that hillside, toward the crest and what lies beyond, I’m able to distinguish ‘what I know’ (which is behind me) as fact compared to ‘what I believe’ (which lies beyond) as… knowledge? opinion? wishful thinking? It’s a distinction that makes me wonder whether this thing we so glibly call “knowledge” is both fact from the past as well as belief of what’s to come, all at once. If so, that seems kind of Hegelian, where ‘kind of’ is sort of like if Hegel had taken to wearing his shirts inside-out.

Things that make you go GAH – all this pedantry! Recall, that’s where all this began, with knowledge being situated on two separate stairs or one step to the left, thereby not being exactly the ‘same’ knowledge. But in the great puzzle of truth, even pedantry has its own place in among the rest of the pieces. In fact, I believe one reason we argue so much is that we no longer allow enough for pedantry and detail. Once upon a time, I suspect we did, or else we’d have demolished ourselves long before this. This nuisance of nuance takes patience and time although neither of those seems too popular in the Twitter-world of reverent Instagram… stick that in your pipe and smoke it.

In that world, no amount of philosophizing over reality and the truth matters a jot a pixel. In that world, what seems to matter more is consensus the ‘Share’ button. After all, as we’re I’m discovering of late, disagreement on ‘facts’ is so fundamental as to be irreconcilable. Or, put another way, words only matter when it’s me who’s tweeting them.

Be that as it may… as a matter of fact, words really do matter, for precision – P – E – D – A – N – T – R – Y – and clarity – N – U – A – N – C – E. Words matter for the feelings they invoke and the memories they provoke. Every word we utter, hear, write, or read must have some basis at least in consensus print media television on-line sharing, if not in actual fact; otherwise, what’s the point of language? Hey, if no one communicated, period, then sure, problem solved. But more fundamentally… if every belief we have, prior to our words, has only some basis in consensus on-line sharing, and not in fact, then the sum total of all language is just so much scattered chaos the Internet. The reason why words matter is that people are where words erupt and evolve, which means that words are what people – and not just any sole person, but all of us, people – words are what we’re all about. Luckily, some of us know a few extra words, or even several extra languages.

But without any basis to know anything beyond our selves, all we can do – maybe what each one of us must do – is trust that we share a similar comprehension of facts.

Photo Credit by Guillaume QL on Unsplash

And if knowledge really is situated – whether up that flight of stairs or a split second later or a step to the left from where you now stand – if that is really accurate, is it any wonder we’re all at a loss, or destined to endless dispute? We may all apprehend the same event, but pedantically speaking, we can’t all comprehend literally the exact same facts. We may share the same event, but we cannot share the same experience: each of us has an experience all their own, and when we share that experience – if knowledge really is situated – then we can only believe and trust how closely your experience corresponds to mine, or anyone else’s.

If knowledge really is situated, what we need within ourselves is an ability to reach beyond our selves: beyond anything shared, what we need is the will to believe and trust each other.

[p.s. if you’ve missed the imagery, it’s a reversal: beyond our selves extends outward, like what we believe might be over the cresting hill, whereas beyond anything shared is back the way we came, inward unto ourselves, reliably back the way we came.]

And if that’s feeling a little anti-climactic, here as a closing, you can’t say I didn’t warn you about that next hill to climb.

Photo Credit by Murat Gün on Unsplash

From drowningintheshallow – “Traditions, not Traditional”

Traditions, not Traditional

Sometimes, when we look into a mirror, we’re making sure everything is presentable, just right.

That seems like a bit of a trap to me – for one thing, you could only know ‘just right’ if you had some standard for measure, which seems like a recipe for perfectionism. You might also simply fall into seeing what you want to see. But what may be worst of all is the risk we take for granting our own self-assurance to the judgment of others.

On another day, that may have just described school, but setting that aside, I think it’s still fair to say that a mirror, like any household item, has its pros and cons.

Another way to characterise that look into the mirror is a search for flaws. In a similar way, this also seems to me like a risk since now we’re adopting a frame-of-mind for spotting what is wrong and applying that to our own self-esteem. It’s like practising how to be critical, with you as the practice dummy.

If you combine these two looks – the one, for self-assurance, and the other, a search for flaws – it almost seems no surprise those times we encounter hypocrisy… then again, isn’t there just something about people, that we seem to excel at paradox? I’m sure the psychologists have plenty more to say on this although I’m also sure those are details no one would credibly seek in a blog post. So setting that aside as well, I think it’s still fair to say the search for flaws seems pretty easy to adopt precisely because nobody’s perfect. Everyone’s a critic.

All that seems pretty ‘con’ when it comes to mirrors, so maybe let’s finish with a ‘pro’: we might conceivably look into a mirror for healthy self-appraisal, a more balanced search that weighs itself somewhere in between flaw and assurance, in order to learn and grow. That kind of look inherently grants itself placement among others, which seems honest to me, and humble too.

For me, this featured post from drowningintheshallow looks into the mirror for just this sort of self-appraisal, and by emphasising the ‘thinking’ bit of critical thinking, it credibly raises the level of discourse.

One last thing, although I wonder how many academics and teacher educators seek on-line blogs for credible detail… to this list of words oversimplified by popular usage, such as ‘traditional’ and ‘critical thinking’, I would add ‘self-reflection’.

Like I said, we seem to excel at saying what we want to say.

About Those Challenges Posed by ChatGPT

Click here to read On the Challenges Posed by ChatGPT

A post like that was bound to push a few buttons, no pun intended. And, conceivably, those buttons might be feeling pushed even before they came to see the point of the post… which is kind of Exhibit ‘A’, if you ask me.

The way I figured, at least some objections to that post would reside in an assumption that I’m simply anti-tech, anti-progress, anti-[ insert button-pushed values here ]. A lot of scoffing, a lot of clucking, a lot of ok boomering (with not a single boomer in my family tree, btw). To such objections, I do not fart in your general direction, and not because you wouldn’t hear it anyway. Like I said, it’s the Exhibit ‘A’s of the world who supply that post with key evidence. Having thus addressed Defenders of ChatGPT, what of ChatGPT itself?

I figured a post with no words was going to avoid feeding the beast though I also figured this was no real solution, not when there’s still a title and feature photo, which have got to be worth at least a thousand and six words to all those scouring search engines.

I figured a post called “On the Challenges Posed by ChatGPT,” for lacking any prose, could suggest some concern that some people, not only seeing no reason to be concerned, do see reason to berate anyone who sees reason.

For lacking any prose, a post like that could suggest some lack of understanding, an inability to cope that people might suffer when they haven’t developed the resourcefulness and discipline that come from working up something from scratch.

To be honest – since I was so dishonest before – that post was never much about ChatGPT to begin with. For example, take the claim that ChatGPT is a time-saver that sidesteps all the dull & onerous annoyances of draft work, like staring at screens, writer’s block, sentence construction, basic literacy, thinking – the list goes on.

This example reminds me of the phrase, “shovel ready,” made popular by the 44th President of the United States. Something was ‘shovel ready’ – usually some big shiny capital project – when all the prior work had been looked after, like acquiring a site, zoning it, clearing and preparing it… all you needed, then, was enough money to make the real stuff happen: kickbacks jobs taxes jobs votes jobs. ‘Shovel ready’ was short for how simple and fresh and easy things could be, if we would all simply see to reason.

For the listener, ‘shovel ready’ is a phrase whose currency resides entirely within work performed by someone else, like a semantic credit card for a frame-of-mind accustomed to receiving things prepared beyond its frame-of-reference. Call this luxury, or lazy, or privileged – that’s a popular one, these days – or call it innovation, or progress: all these have their imagery. But call it ‘shovel ready’ and suddenly you’ve disguised and shrouded all that untouchable donkey work with grown-up responsibility, and don’t forget to dress for dinner at seven. Call it ‘shovel ready’ and then just see to reason ‘going forward’ (another insipid wordpie from around that time).

Okay, well, if that post was never much about ChatGPT to begin with, then why pick on poor inert machines? Why hurt defenseless artificial feelings?

Why, indeed? Then again, why even ask why, when it’s all right there at the push of a button?

Beware privilege and luxury. Beware short-cuts and side-steps and disguised long-cuts… living on credit, like leaping to conclusions, means owing something back. It means the risk of oversimplification, fallacious thinking, and the kind of cross-the-board exuberance we already seem to suffer plenty good these days.

If anything, I pity machine learning for having to draw upon the privilege that made it. ChatGPT never asked for these parents.

I left room in the Comments to give it some space to reply. Still waiting.