The Four Key Behaviors For Wisdom
Wisdom – Society should favor the mature, but we don’t. Why?
Just so we are on the same page, wisdom is not something you explicitly know. Instead, wisdom is your ability to make excellent decisions without existing knowledge.
The image slide for this post comes from a detailed post on finding truth. It is found here.
The four essential behaviors:
- (Image bullet #2) Exercise SELF-control. This is definitively free will. Without SELF-control, it is not possible to be reasonable. Without reason, others will gain control of your mind.
- (bullet #1) Think of all the things you think you know as falsifiable hypotheses, not truths. This can only happen if you have SELF-control and are thus operating out of your brain’s prefrontal cortex.
- (bullet #3) Embrace the concept of reality as ordered. Reject any temptation to interpret reality as chaotic. It is not chaotic.
- (bullet #4) Learn to disprove hypotheses. Then, seek new hypotheses. Attempt to disprove them. That’s reason. Proving, by contrast, is habit, i.e., decision-making. Reason is about learning something new.
In REASON, you develop wisdom.
FIRST: Master SELF-control
This makes a person reasonable.
Most people know what SELF-control is. But few realize it is critical to reason. SELF-control (free will is how you begin the process of reason.
Do you have it?
You develop it by …
- controlling emotional reactions
- good manners
- no impulse purchases
- no profanity
- no name-calling,
- no over-eating
- etc.
This is what it looks like when an individual is without SELF-control. This thinking handicap presently affects more people than you know.
Think only in falsifiable hypotheses — no truths!
A falsifiable hypothesis cannot be maintained as habit. Habit is about decision-making in the service of the SELF. In habit, the mind connects truths with what the individual observes or senses and their behaviors. The SELF doesn’t take kindly to truths that are not always true.
Accept the absolute truth of an ordered reality (i.e., rules and predictable behavior) — maybe it’s invisible to you now, but it’s real.
All my life, I have assumed that reality was ordered. What I mean by that is, that there are rules. This was never a question to me.
Imagine my surprise when I discovered, on Twitter, that Atheists think reality is instead chaos. They imagine that humans provide order in their thinking. To them, this human-developed order varies and is temporary.
There is a name for this type of thinking: postmodernism.
They can’t see order because they often lack free will (SELF-control). Their habitual beliefs are truths. They do not think in (falsifiable) hypotheses. And, as any scientist would attest, hypotheses evolve. From an atheist’s perspective (i.e., their HABITs), they are right. The rules appear to change. Only they don’t. Absolute truth is absolute truth. Unfortunately, humans can’t always see and characterize absolute truth. Human truths are thus imperfect. We change and improve them, and this looks like there might be no order in reality.
The following interaction after a long Twitter dialogue about order reality with Atheists. I summarize their views in the paragraphs to the left.
Develop or Look for new hypotheses and begin disproving them.
Habit is proving
If you are proving, you are decision-making using what you know already.
How great is that? Rarely is an idea so black and white. In fact, it is like night and day. They cannot happen at the same time.
Reason is disproving
If you are unfamiliar with reason, you might initially have difficulty with this process.
Try to figure out how something works, then use that understanding to make a prediction. If you cannot predict an outcome, your hypothesis may be disproven.
