As human beings, we make thousands of assumptions regarding the world and its occupants in the duration of our lives. We assume and we judge without even waiting to gather enough information to support our assumptions.
Sometimes, we don’t even care to verify these assumptions. We just live on believing them and thinking them to be true. That can be dangerous in the long run. It keeps us from actaully knwonunb and learning about things as we grow up. Accepting is a part of growing up, but then, so is challenging.
As much as need to learn to accept, we also need to learn to challenge the assumptions that we make about the world and reach better heights, better truths.
Rene Descartes was a French philosopher who is known for doubting. In fact, his most important principle is based upon the process of doubting. Yes, it’s a process. Of trial and error and finding out what propositions of the endless we’ve been fed by society are actually true.
The story goes a bit like this. Descartes believed, like any other young, impressionable human being. That is he believed right about until the Copernican revolution occurred and it turned out what he’d been taught all his life, about earth being the centre of the solar system, was wrong. Copernicus brought about a revolution of thought, and his theory that it was the sun, and not the earth that was teh centre of the universe greatly affected Descrates. His trust was shattered,
He concluded that the only method to arrive at the truth was to start out by doubting everything, then eliminating what turned out to be wrong or false.
It’s a process of evaluation, critical thought and organisation. What can we do when nothing is certain and no proof is really ultimate for any kind of truth. Because there are developments going on constantly. What was not even conceivable a century is happening in front of outrage eyes today.
A century ago, no one would believe you if you said that humans could travel in flying vehicles. What was a fantasy then is normal today. After all, it takes only a few brains and a bit of hard work to convert fantasy into reality. What was false has become truth. What couldn’t happens once, happens everyday now.
The only option left is to doubt. When you can’t know which truth you’ve been fed ever since you were born is actually true, you either believe all of them, or you challenge each one and confirm it’s validity. It’s a lengthy process, and in my opinion, also an impractical one. I mean, how can one just go and question everything. We have to have atleats some semblance of what reality consists of. There have to be atleats some principles that can’t be doubted. There has to be a foundation, otherwise we just spiral into a black hole of existentialism.
There is, however, some amount of wisdom to the firts principle established by Descartes all those years ago.
Dubito ergo cogito ergo sum
I doubt, therefore, I think, therefore, I am.
When we doubt, we challenge, we question, and we ascertain whether the things we’ve been taught are actually right or not. It’s not disrespectful, or untrusting. It’s a process of growing up and finding our own place in the world.
Descartes had arrived at the conclusion that out I’d all the things in the world, the only thing he could be certain of was his own existence.
In order to doubt something, there must be a doubter, a thinker. Thus, the only thing that can’t can’t be doubted is our own existence.
Everything else is subject to scrutiny and evolution. Everything else needs to be challenged.
Customary and Reflective Morality
There are two kinds morality. There is Customary morality, the moral rights and wrongs we’ve been taught since birth. These are the norms and values instilled into us by parents, society and surroundings.
Then there is Reflective morality, where we rise above what’s been taught to us and find our own way in life.
A transition from customary to reflective morality is essential for the development of any individual. Someone who gets stuck in the frost stage never really grows beyond the level
A person who remains stuck in the first stage never really rises above the intellectual level of a child who only can only believ what they’ve been told and who spiral into an existential crisis in the case someone with a different point of view challenges them.
Such a person will not be able to calmly comprehend that other people can have diverse views and will instaed either outright deny the validity of the other person’s perspective, or begin questioning their own.
However, while one can’t forever live in this stage, it is important to note that Customary morality is also important to build up the foundation on which rational morality eventually stands. So we can’t have just one. We need to have both, in their own time and their own ways.
There needs to be a balance. There needs to a smooth transition from trust to trial. We need to accept what we see, and when we’re old enough and mature enough to make our own judgement, we need to question what we’ve seen so far and just wonder if it needs to be changed. If it needs to be improved.
There needs to be learning first, then unlearning and learning again.
That’s how we grow. That’s how we evolve.
Why Do We Make Assumptions Regarding The World?
Our brain is actually very lazy. We have a brain that seeks to minimise workload, like any other thing that has to work for twenty four hours a day for more than eighty years.
Our brain makes schemas for this very purpose. It categorises and stacks everything into boxes. It tries to organise the mess of all the information that we get in out life so that it resembles less like a bundle of entangled strings and more like, well, information.
Our brain likes to keep stuff in neat, labelled boxes that can easily be reviewed and checked in cases of emergency. Think of it like an office. There are stacks of paperwork that needs to crammed up in a 10×10 room.
There are two ways we can go about this. We can either cram paper, randomly and rude into every nook, over every desk, inside every drawer making it all very hard to find later on. Or we can sort it out by file name, file type and so on, and stack it in boxes to avoid confusion and delay.
Which one is more preferable?
The answer is clear.
Our brain organises all the information it gets from outside world, but there is also a side effect to this. Stereotyping, making assumptions, and lacking the motivation to see things as they are individually, instead of as they appear by the label on the box. The problem is, metaphorically speaking, that once something goes inside the box, it become quite hard to pull it out. Once we categorise something, it becomes hard to give it the benefit of an individual existence—it exists just as a member of the category it has been put under.
There can be no exceptions, no uniqueness.
Categories, which were originally made to organise, become a cage for the mind. They restrain us from thinking. They become easy shortcuts, often inaccurate.
We assume, we judge, and we don’t bother to verify. We forget to evaluate, to confirm and know if what’s been assumed is actually true or not. We forget to check.
More often than not, we forget to think. We make stereotypes about people, we create categories and we divide people into these categories
This is why we need to challenge assumptions. We need to know before we presume. We need to evaluate what we’ve been told by experiencing it for ourselves. We need to think outside the box.
Think Outside The Box
It’s something we’ve often heard, amd yet the statement is vague to the level of being almost impractical. What does it even mean to think outside the box? And for that matter, how do we even know what constitutes the box? Are we naturally that self aware or does it take some effort to recognise the different between outside and inside?
What we mean when we ask someone to think outside the box is, in short, to think of something new. To challenge what’s been laid down and build upon it, probably even recreate it.
Thinking outside the box means challenging assumptions and stereotypes and evaluating whether they actually should be trusted.
It is done by, before anything else, knowing what the box actually is. The box represents a set of all the things we’ve ever been told about everything there is to be told about. It also represents every secondary thought we’ve had. Every thought that has somehow been derived from what we’ve gathered from the society.
It represents every borrowed thought and every overused idea.
Thinking out of box requires knowing what lies inside the box and refraining from limiting ourselves to it.
It means reading and observing and learning about new things, having an open perspective, getting new experiences and eventually making use of all those experiences in practical life.
It entails a personal growth in the level beyond that of mere day to day mental activities.
Thinking outside the box means challenging the everyday assumptions our brain feed us, years and years of learning making it almost reflexive to just assume. It means growing and accepting that people can be wrong, and that if we don’t try, we will never find out where the truth actaully lies.
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