The Speculative Nature of Human Understanding - Our Edge over AI
How to make good decision...
Introduction
- Life is mostly speculation with little ultimate truth. The proximity of your speculation to the truth determines the accuracy of your decisions.
- Personal Note: This blog is my speculation, my understanding of this topic. Seek understanding when reading it. If it doesn’t click, scrap it for now and maybe come back to it later on.
Section 1: The Speculating Machine
The human brain creates all possible explanations of the world around it. Curiosity drives the need to understand things.
We understand things through speculations. The brain processes information from our senses by comparing it with stored information from the past. In other words, the brain is a pattern recognition machine.
Predicting the future, listening, and interpreting any form of communication involves speculation.
Section 2: The Role of Fallibility
- Fallibility is present in everything. There is always a better explanation of something.
- Good speculations become good explanations and keep improving. Beliefs are speculations about the world around you.
- Better beliefs (good speculations/explanations/guesses) improve your ability to make good decisions. Knowledge improves through a loop of conjecture, criticism, and improvement.
Section 3: Open-Mindedness and Growth
- Being open to changing your mind (being open-minded) in the pursuit of truth seems to be the right path forward.
- Open-mindedness helps you grow and make right decisions. It’s okay if past decisions seem wrong in retrospect, as this indicates improvement.
- Decisions made today may seem different in retrospect because knowledge and understanding grow over time.
Section 4: The Importance of Constructive Criticism
- Looking for constructive criticism while being open-minded is important. It doesn't mean accepting any belief as a possibility.
- Seek good explanations that better explain situations than your current beliefs or understanding.
Section 5: Overthinking and Mental Health
- The human mind is a speculation machine. Overthinking is speculation production at its peak.
- Having little information about a topic can lead to numerous possible explanations. Accepting those thoughts as truth is an error.
- Fixating on negative outcomes rather than positive ones can harm mental health.
Section 6: The Role of Meditation
- Meditation helps calm the speculation machine and gives space for constructive analysis of theories created by the mind.
- Observing thoughts trains the mind to distinguish good speculations from bad ones over time.
Section 7: Interpreting Information
- Most of the information we receive is noise because it is either incomplete or outright wrong. Misinterpretation can result from this.
- Ignoring most advice makes sense because interpretations are based on current knowledge. Inaccurate knowledge leads to misinterpretation.
Conclusion
Knowing that you are prone to misinterpretation makes you smarter. It helps you be open-minded to fix mistakes and shortcomings.
Lowering ego and grandiosity helps you seek truth, not comfort.
