> On 25 Jun 2014, at 5:58 am, LizR <[email protected]> wrote: > > I assumed Kim's original post was intended partly ironically. Clearly there > are a lot of intelligent Americans, but there does seem to be a bit of a > "dumbed down" culture there at times.
My original post was only apparently about Americans and their negative qualities. That was just some content by which to,articulate the main purpose of the thread: a demonstration of "provocation" which is a known thinking skill. You can be as "racist" as you want, just as long as the observations made are positive ones, which nobody feels hurt, rather flattered by; particularly if they happen to be American. I am showing the diference between real thinking, which is a emtal operation performed independently of one's personal values, and perception which is where we articulate our values and hence talk largely about ourselves and not the subject. You have all been misled by the content of the post, and not the process embodied by the thinking, which is precisely what I expected would happen. Thank you for turning a discussion into an argumemt complete with the usual ad hominems and slanderous attacks. This is what happens when people place their values in front of their thinking. This is what is known as "argument"; it is the basis of most Western thinking and we are infected by it like a heliobactor pylori bacterium that never goes away. To learn to think properly, there is a need to forget entirely about the importance of one's values and to concentrate on learning the PROCESS of thinking. Real thinking can make use of any content at all. All that is necessary is something to think about. The default tendency is for people to polarise their opinions into,a "for" and an "against" which is the nadir of true thinking. In true thinking there are a myriad points bewtween "yes" and "no" and discovering them is what I call "creative thinking". You might have a bunch of data that supports your stance about something, but by using a process of creative thinking you might arrive at a different interpretation of that data. Ths is what Bruno does and why he qualifies to my mind as a highly gifted creative thinker. He takes the existing ideas and runs a new filter over them and comes up with a new way of seeing them. It is true that we are all born creative and that this is the default state of mind of the young child and that everything that happens from there on "educates" us to be uncreative. The child is "Löbian" or self-referentially correct. Adults rarely are. Kim -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
