How do we think?
This is the question that philosopher Julian Baggini masterfully explores in his mind-expanding, beautifully written and researched book, How the World Thinks. Using an analogy reminiscent of Jonathan Haidt’s Moral Matrix, he articulates how much “assumptions about the nature of self, ethics, sources of knowledge, the goals of life, are deeply embedded in our cultures and frame our thinking without our being aware of them”:
Just as a riverbed builds up sediment comprised of that which washes through it, values and belief become ‘sedimented’ in cultures. In turn, those values and beliefs begin to sediment in the minds of people who inhabit those cultures from birth, so that we mistake the build-up for an immutable riverbed. Through these channels of the minds our thoughts and experiences flow, not noticing how they are being directed.
His motivation is to challenge the beliefs and ways of thinking that he takes – that we take – for granted, noting wisely that becoming less certain of the knowledge we think we have is always the first step towards greater understanding and away from dogma. In doing so, he warns against empathic shortcuts:
Getting to know others requires avoiding the twin dangers of overestimating either how much we have in common or how much divides us. Our shared humanity and the perennial problems of life mean that we can always learn from and identify with the thoughts and practices of others, no matter how alien they might at first appear. At the same time, differences in ways of thinking can be both deep and subtle. If we assume too readily that we can see things from others’ points of view we end up seeing them from merely a variation of our own.
Western philosophy – in which the idea of ‘science as the search for the truth irrespective of consequences’ finds its home – is one of the most extreme among world philosophies in claiming to be truly objective, transcending any particular time or place, independent of history or culture. This is the construct in which I was educated as a theoretical physicist. And yet I’ve often been uneasy with this, perhaps because of some Eastern philosophy sediment that lies deep in my riverbed, and also as I grappled later with the ethical issues facing scientists who choose to participate in endeavours such as The Manhattan Project.
Baggini urges us to accept that the view will always be from somewhere:
We can build a more complete picture of the world and a more objective understanding of it by taking multiple perspectives. […] Rather than trying to create a comprehensive, single map, we can view a terrain from various places: from within it, from the sky, from a distance and so on. Rather than a view from nowhere, we seek views from everywhere, or at least everywhere that is accessible.
Where are you currently standing, and what different views are you curious to explore?