Wisdom: Part 2

Why do so many people lack wisdom? this is a question for anyone that might want to fit the answer to "Why do philosophy?" onto the general question: "What is wrong with the world?

So, whenever you say everyone is stupid, you are basically saying that people lack wisdom. It's not that people don't try to say things, and it's not that they aren't confident when they say it - there's plenty of that going around. The problem is that when they say it, it doesn't seem true when you apply it to the real world. When you want to get better and your doctor tells you to take one type of drug and then the following week you're more sick … well, that's a problem with wisdom.

What is interesting and what must be remembered is that this example above is not a lack of rote knowledge. The doctor probably has plenty of that. To make it through med school one has to be bombarded by rote information. In fact, doctors are like machines that spit out rote data. The problem is that they usually are nothing more.

And that's our main issue here? What is the point of philosophy? Identifying and practicing the addition of process knowledge onto rote knowledge. There, I said it.

So why do they all lack wisdom? It's not that hard. As we've said over and over, they don't look for process knowledge because they don't know it's there. They are mostly convinced that rote knowledge is all you need. And remember, they don't call it rote knowledge. They don't know the difference. They merely memorize and trust as much info as they can find and then they call themselves smart. Then they misdiagnose your medical condition and you die. Oops.

What is it then? What really is this process information that everyone lacks? I've been trying to write about it for a year now. It's not that easy to explain, especially to people that can't distinguish it from rote. And that's you. And, as my mentor Socrates would say, it has to be practiced and not "learned." I cannot give the answer to the question: What is process? You have to see it for yourself.

Does that mean it's individualized? Yes and no. You may form your own ways of understanding, but true process knowledge is objective. Both its status and its content are in the real world, are separate from your wishes and desires, and, most importantly, requires an objective real world in which to operate. This makes it objective. This is why Reid's realism plays such an integral part. Reid understood this and though he lived in a different time he was busy merging science and philosophy in a way that we could not today. To Reid science was young and it was branching off from philosophy and, to be honest, it hadn't left its place as "philosophy" for very long.

What then is process? It starts with a commonsense approach to reason. The first step is understanding (not just saying) that we live in a real world. That objects in this world are mostly what we see them as. When I write "see" of course I don't just mean visual. They are real and mostly as we apprehend them. This includes other people and other minds.

To understand realism one must start with theories on induction. Why is it that repetition and multiplicity gives us confident pathways to truth? Why were the skeptics wrong about induction when they said it can't prove anything but itself? The first step is to reinvent what it means, on a philosophy level, to say that something is true.

But honestly, the first epistemological step is to rule #1: If you are not a philosopher, don't do philosophy. This is akin to: If you are not a brain surgeon, don't cut open someone's skull. This doesn't mean don't start learning. It means when you are learning realize you are a student, not a teacher. Or, as Socrates used to say: Shut the fuck up.