This is the third installment in what looks to be five installments in the series on sapience. Part 1, Sapience Introduction provided a basic overview of sapience and its relationship to our general and scientific understanding of wisdom. In part 2, Sapience - Relationship with Cleverness and Affect, I tried to establish a context for what sapience does in terms of the brain and mind model.
Now in part 3, The Components of Sapience Explained, I expand the four basic components of sapience in terms mostly of their relevance to mental processes and to wisdom as it may be realized.
Sapience is comprised of four basic functions: judgment, moral sentiment, systems perspective (in thinking), and strategic perspective. The last three work to support the first, judgment, so as to produce more holistic and morally-based decisions in complex, uncertain (usually social) problem domains where long-term consequences of current decisions must be anticipated. In other words, wisdom.
I have changed the citation approach from my first installment. I hope this won't cause problems. Also I need to mention that the citations and references given are all from books on the subjects and I have not cited primary literature. This is an integrative work where some somewhat disparate subjects are being brought together in order to synthesize a new framework. That is in order to build a model of what is going on in the human mind in a way that generates testable hypotheses for specialists to explore. I find that well chosen books by stellar researchers, who have already produced works of integration within their specialties, provide a base for further integration across disciplinary boundaries. Besides, the readers of this blog are more likely to find the books more interesting than wading through papers detailing methodologies and data.
I have heard, via e-mail, from several readers who are slogging along with this series. I understand that without some background in several (or more) of the disciplines represented in this work it will be real work to follow everything. And that is OK. I don't expect everyone to recognize every little reference or inference, but I think there is something in here for everyone. If nothing else than that this provides a list of books for interesting reading, it will have been worth the effort.
The next installment will look at some specific neurological aspects of what parts of the brain and how they operate to produce the four functions covered here. Those who are not terribly interested in how a network of neurons can produce models and use those models to produce judgments could understandably skip it. But I will attempt to keep it semi-untechnical. The final installment, however, will look at the evolutionary aspects of sapience and wisdom, how it got started in human evolution, and then where it may be going. That part will be, of course, speculative. But so is any strategic thinking about the future (read this article to see what I mean!) When this series is complete I will be ready to tackle the issues of the future of our world from a strategic view that incorporates the role of sapience — namely the evolution of higher levels of sapience or 'eusapience'. Homo eusapiens is what I had in mind as Human 2.0. Stay tuned.
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