Recently, I have been thinking about a question: Are the things I perceive the things themselves? Expanding on this topic leads to many similar questions, ultimately pointing to whether I can see the true nature of the world.
Human beings have made countless explorations in understanding the world and have achieved many results. My question has been pondered by countless people over thousands of years. However, this does not prevent me from thinking about it again. Undoubtedly, we can learn countless experiences from past individuals, but for each individual, learning from others' experiences is just the beginning. We need to explore these experiences ourselves and form our own understanding. Only then do those experiences truly connect with each individual.
As someone once said, each of us is a footnote to the thoughts of our predecessors. This is not pessimistic, but rather it shows that we are constantly developing and advancing based on the foundation of our predecessors' thoughts. By combining our own understanding with the knowledge we have acquired, the knowledge we learn will transcend material attributes and become part of our thought system. With the continuous internalization of various knowledge, they will stimulate and collide with each other, forming a whole like a living organism flowing within us. I call this wisdom.
Before attempting to further understand the existence of wisdom at the conscious level, it may be necessary to clarify some issues before the formation of wisdom:
Subjective and Objective#
All the information we encounter comes from two aspects: the external world and our inner self. The pathways for receiving information were already told to us by the Buddha thousands of years ago: the eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, and mind. Through these pathways, we obtain stimuli and develop our understanding of the external world. But do we really obtain information about the existence of external objects? Have we been deceived by the biological reactions upon which our survival depends? How do we verify the authenticity of this knowledge? Or, to put it more precisely, does our final understanding of objects actually exist?
My current thinking is that we can approach this question from two levels. First, we can examine whether the process of obtaining information about objects provides us with objective information. Second, we need to clarify whether the results obtained by our brains after processing this information are reliable.
Obtaining External Information#
In the process of biological evolution, organisms have developed many functional parts to adapt to the ever-changing environment. Through these parts and organs, organisms can instantly obtain information within their living area, enabling them to react and survive in competition and change.
Because these organs enable organisms to survive, organisms have a high dependence on these important organs for obtaining information. As a result, a so-called "standard for testing truth" emerged: seeing is believing. This approach was indeed useful in the past, but in my opinion, it has two obvious flaws when it comes to obtaining information:
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Firstly, our eyes and other organs cannot obtain all the information about external objects. Let's take the eyes as an example. We know that all objects are energy aggregates composed of atoms, but the eyes cannot recognize the energy state of the objects they see. In order to survive, our eyes have evolved to describe the energy of objects using scalar quantities, such as size, color, and texture. From this analysis, we can see that what the eyes see is often not the true state of the objects, but a simplified version of the information. However, even more frustratingly, the simplified information we obtain is also incomplete:
(1) In terms of color, our eyes can only distinguish colors within the range of red to purple, and we cannot recognize ultraviolet and infrared parts.
(2) In terms of size measurement, the eyes cannot provide useful measurement data and often rely on comparing with standard objects. Additionally, the eyes are particularly susceptible to visual errors caused by changes in lighting.
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Secondly, this way of perception only focuses on the present moment and lacks extension. The information we obtain is only verifiable in the present and does not extend in time and space. The existence and influence of things are manifested in continuous time and space. This way of focusing only on present verification is like slicing things, resulting in information that is almost worthless.
With the enlightenment of thought, much knowledge is not concrete and tangible, but rather exists at a conscious level. In the continuous progress and development of the era, the basic characteristics of things that we obtain are no longer sufficient for us to have a deep understanding of them. We need to process the information obtained by our organs and this work is mainly done by the brain.
Brain Processing Information#
The brain's cognition of external information is a subjective cognition. In other words, our understanding of external objects is the result of the information obtained by our organs being processed by our own cognitive models. For all individuals, the information obtained from the external world is almost the same, but due to the different cognitive models in each person's brain, different people can come up with completely different results when facing the same external objects. The problem lies in the brain's processing of information, which directly calls upon existing cognitive models to trim the information input from the external world. The result will confirm the model if there is a corresponding cognitive model.
At this point, we can see that not only can we not obtain all the information about external objects, but we also cannot process the information we have obtained very well. All our understanding of the external world is a reflection of our own cognition, which means we can never obtain objective information. All information is subjective. So what is the so-called objective analysis of something in society? It is actually the subjective analysis of the analyzer. However, these subjective contents are collective cognition, so I am willing to call it limited objectivity.
Rationality and Sensibility#
Since we cannot obtain a comprehensive understanding of things and cannot obtain objective knowledge, does that mean we can only fall into the embarrassment of ignorance?
Of course not. The wonder of the world lies precisely in its dramatic nature. Since we cannot obtain more from the outside, all we can do is start from ourselves and strive to obtain more useful knowledge from limited information. We need to organize the scattered information into a network, where information will be continuously processed, resulting in some guiding and cross-temporal and spatial key information. I understand this network as the sensibility and rationality of living organisms.
First-order Sensibility#
In the process of biological evolution, organisms naturally developed the most primitive emotional system, which allows them to perceive the external world and react to it. I refer to this stage as first-order sensibility. In first-order sensibility, the factors contained in the organism's own genes play a major role. The purpose of this stage is mainly to protect oneself and ensure survival. Therefore, sensibility at this stage does not consider truth or falsehood.
Rationality#
With the development of human beings and the progress of the times, people who used to settle in one place began to move around. Coupled with changes in production and lifestyle, various factors led to the production of more and more information. Relying solely on seeing is believing and similar methods can no longer help our ancestors find key information from the complex and diverse information. In order to survive better, human beings began to seek relationships between different pieces of information and analyze, deduce, and summarize this information in their brains. This process is what I call rationality. In the rational stage, by logically analyzing and deducing the relationships between things, the key information obtained has a significant advantage: it has a certain degree of representativeness, enough to break the shackles of time and space. At this point, we can finally focus not only on the present but also on the future. By basing our analysis on rational processing of known information, we can provide possible solutions to future events.
Second-order Sensibility#
However, the limitations of rationality are also evident. When we try to understand future things based on knowledge obtained by analyzing and reasoning from past information, if something appears in the future that has not occurred in the past, the cognitive system derived from previous rational analysis will fail. Faced with this situation, the brain, through countless failures, has evolved second-order sensibility, a higher-order sensibility that emerges based on the continuous accumulation of rationality. It is a keen intuition.
At this stage, our understanding and perception of things come from the information obtained by our organs from the external world. This information is then processed by the brain through rational analysis and processing, allowing us to see more information from the perspective of second-order sensibility. From the perspective of systems theory, second-order sensibility corresponds to an elevation of one level within the system. It allows us to have a multidimensional understanding and perception of the original content, and these perceptions are the key to guiding us in facing uncertain future events. In modern enterprises, this process is called "crossing discontinuity."
Rationality and sensibility are not mutually exclusive but rather intertwined and symbiotic. Some people only have first-order sensibility, some have rationality, and some have second-order sensibility. The growth of this cognitive network for processing information is not innate. Even first-order sensibility can be shaped by nurture. This brings us back to the initial topic: wisdom.
How to Prepare the Environment for the Generation of Wisdom?#
We constantly come into contact with various external objects and learn more knowledge to strengthen ourselves. However, simply learning scattered information points does not have much effect. Only by constantly honing and improving our first-order sensibility and the levels of rationality can we reach a certain stage where second-order sensibility emerges. I understand the dynamic balance formed by the combination of first-order sensibility, rationality, and second-order sensibility as wisdom.
In my opinion, the main methods for cultivating wisdom are as follows:
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Learning knowledge points is just the beginning; the focus is on creating a knowledge processing network and continuously iterating it. Many people seem to know a lot of knowledge points. Perhaps in the past, such people were considered impressive. However, with the highly developed information technology today, there is no need to memorize those information points that can be found immediately through search engines. Instead, we need to build our own system for processing various information during the learning process. The simplest method is to ask more questions.
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The way of obtaining information is not the focus; an open system is important. Whether you read books, participate in discussions, write, attend classes, etc., these methods are just ways to obtain information. The important thing is to maintain the openness of our own knowledge system and avoid setting limitations. In terms of the framework of information, there is a huge difference when it comes to various subdivisions of knowledge, but at the level of information framework, the difference is limited. From the perspective of wisdom, they are all the same. This difference may be better illustrated by examples in religious practice. There are countless ways of practice, but after reaching a certain level, they all lead to the same pure land.
The growth of wisdom is a process of continuous correction, iteration, and evolution. In many cases, what we firmly believe in this stage will have a completely different appearance in the next stage. However, do not forget that the existence of the previous stage lays the foundation for the next stage. This is not causality but rather iteration and upward spiraling.
Life is the most precious thing we possess, and it is the only constant existence. Everything else can be changed through our own changes. First, we must believe that we can change something, and then we can cultivate wisdom. If cognition is a chess game, some people think about how to win, some people want to stay on the chessboard, and some people constantly expand the boundaries of the chessboard.
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