Sapience - Introduction

Sapience - Introduction

NOTE: As good as typepad is for general blogs, it just can't seem to handle somewhat more complex HTML! Therefore I have posted this on my own web site. Sapience Introduction

Here is an excerpt.

From Whence Cometh Wisdom?

What is wrong with the world is not a lack of intelligence or creativity, what I like to call 'cleverness'. The existence of our science, engineering, works of art, music, and literature, and social institutions are adequate proof that we are not lacking in that capacity. Nor do we lack in passions, everything from our primitive emotions to our refined spirituality show that our minds are propelled by feelings of every sort. What is wrong is a lack of wisdom. That is what most profoundly affects our lives and, in these times, the whole world. We need to have a better handle on how to use our cleverness, how to modulate and appropriately use our emotions and feelings, to make life sustaining decisions for humanity and the Ecos. As a species we lack, ironically, a sufficient level of the very capacity for which our species was named, what the Greeks called sapience — wisdom. Carrolus Lineaus named us Homo sapiens, man the wise, thinking, I suppose, that to be the defining character of our kind (and to make a clear distinction between man and the rest of animal life!) Indeed, humans possess some capacity for wisdom. Occasionally persons of greater than normal wisdom shine forth and the rest of us intuitively recognize them. But that is really the problem. The occurrence is all too infrequent. Moreover, the common level of wisdom seen in the average human is simply not sufficient to provide benefit in the modern fast-paced and complex world produced by our cleverness and passions. If we are to succeed in surviving our own foolish mistakes, made from not having wisdom to make the right choices, we had better take a closer look at this mental capacity and see if we might not have a way to expand it in the future. We need to understand where wisdom comes from. And that means understanding not only what it is, but where in the brain it is 'processed'.

What makes a person wise?

Comments

[Lutrinae]

Could you elaborate on "affect" in the diagram of sapience?

[George Mobus]

Lutrinae,

Affect is the general rubric for all emotions, feelings and moods as generated from the limbic areas of the brain. Damasio differentiates between these, each having different characteristics. These are actually names applied to our conscious awareness of affective responses, but their sources are in the limbic system. Here is a link to a Wikipedia article on Affect: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affect_(psychology) . Hope that helps.

George

[George Mobus]

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Enjoyed reading your incisive introduction George and will be a keen follower on the educational ride.

Two brief comments; Agree completely with your assessment of wisdom being a rare feature in even intelligent and creative people. I have been a member of a UK dedicated cyclists forum for over 5 years now and out of 3500 active members I have found only two other forrumers in the ‘politics and life section’ who display signs of sapience, with a clear vision of the world the way it actually is rather than how they would like it to be.

As you can imagine, as a statistical group keen cyclists tend to score well above average in intelligence and general awareness, yet even in this group sapience remains something like a 1:1000 ratio (even taking into account my observer bias)

The other comment concerns the correlation of age and development of sapience- I would like to learn more about this relationship.

I suspect that in our modern frantic society most people are so wrapped up in finding themselves, settling down, self-discovering the emptiness of egotism for the first 30 years of life that only with this base pyramid of life established can they develop wisdom aided by accumulated experiences…that is my personal experience ( I am in my mid forties now)

GaryA

[RBM]

George,

Are you familiar with author Ingo Swann ?

One of his books is The Wisdom Category. I haven't read this particular work of Ingo's but I have read much of his work.

Ingo is an out-of-the-box thinker, like yourself.

Cheers
RBM

[George Mobus]

I haven't heard of Swann. I could not find a listing on Amazon of The Wisdom Category.