Showing posts with label reasoning. Show all posts
Showing posts with label reasoning. Show all posts

Wednesday 13 August 2014

Reasoning or Instinct?



Written by Mathew Naismith

I came across the following vid which quite clearly shows a bear recuing a crow out of the water, is this a sign of reasoning or instinct?



Wiki
Reasoning: Reason is the capacity for consciously making sense of things, applying logic, for establishing and verifying facts, and changing or justifying practices, institutions, and beliefs based on new or existing information.

Instinct or innate behavior is the inherent inclination of a living organism towards a particular complex behavior. The simplest example of an instinctive behavior is a fixed action pattern (FAP), in which a very short to medium length sequence of actions, without variation, are carried out in response to a clearly defined stimulus.

Science says the only difference between man and beast is reasoning, going by the definitions of reasoning and instinct the bear obviously showed reasoning to me.   The logics was the bear could obviously see that the bird was in trouble, instinct would have told the bear to seize the bird to eat not to save the life of the bird.


This might just be because the bear is in captivity, rescuing the bird could be of human instinct not animal instinct brought about by human interactions, there could however be another explanation here.  Is human consciousness, not just instinct, playing a part here?  Consciousness has no boundaries, it doesn’t judge one life form from another so if one life form becomes more compassionate, would this not also affect other conscious life forms in some way especially if they are interacting?  

Monday 16 December 2013

Spiritual Reasoning


Written by Mathew Naismith

Spiritual awareness is all about being aware not unaware which also includes our reasoning processes we all use at one time or another. There are two main reasoning processes that us human use, deductive & inductive & of course there are also other reasoning processes we use as well like adductive & reductive reasoning however on most parts we use the first two mentioned here.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Deductive reasoning, also deductive logic or logical deduction or, informally, "top-down" logic,[1] is the process of reasoning from one or more general statements (premises) to reach a logically certain conclusion.

Inductive reasoning (as opposed to deductive reasoning) is reasoning in which the premises seek to supply strong evidence for (not absolute proof of) the truth of the conclusion. While the conclusion of a deductive argument is supposed to be certain, the truth of an inductive argument is supposed to be probable, based upon the evidence given.


Recently I have been in conversation with a person who only deductively reasons, anyone not reasoning deductively seems to be wrong to this person no matter what.  I should say here that at times I will also use deductive reasoning myself. This would seem this kind of reasoning process is ego controlled remembering this reasoning process is all based on logics, we must think here where this logics is mostly obtained from!! Logics are learnt through books & study which denotes knowledge but what is this knowledge?  Knowledge is only what we can remember in most parts from books & study so the more knowledge we can obtain/remember the more we can sprout about which is in most feeding the controlling ego.   The other problem with only thinking deductively with most people is because it’s mostly learnt through books & other people’s study very little actual experience has be obtained through all this knowing, we are obviously only gaining knowledge to feed our egos because if we are not experiencing this knowledge what else are we doing with it?

Inductive reasoning is quite different for the main reason it’s not based on logics & for this reason it is more open to various other possibilities & reasoning processes believe it or not.  Inductive reasoning, especially for a spiritually aware person, is more about experiences & feelings which in most parts is impossible for a person who only deductively reasons to understand & accept.  Inductive reasoning for a spiritually aware person is obviously more about awareness than knowledge & once you take away this egotistically empowered knowledge you are left with pure awareness which of course isn’t egotistically controlled, this to me seems like spiritual reasoning in it’s purest form.  Spiritually aware people can make the same mistake like people who only deductively reason by accumulating knowledge & calling it awareness & as soon as we have done this we are back at the ego being in control again unless we are able to use this knowledge to obtain actual experiences & even then this could denote the ego being in control .  We should also remember our ego will tell us one thing when it’s quite something else, our egos will tell us we are not egotistically driven when we are, just something else to be aware of.  


At the human level of learning awareness & knowledge are seemingly the same, the more knowledge you have obtained/remembered the more aware one is going to obviously be which takes the brain to analyse however spirituality isn’t just about  the human self but of all of what is. It is also not all about thinking either.  When we sit within our own quietness what are we doing, are we accumulating knowledge or are we just being aware? Knowledge has nothing to do with being spiritually aware, humanly aware yes but not spiritually. We in fact need very little knowledge to become spiritually aware just aware of our intuitive instincts & feelings, in other words becoming more in tune with ourselves instead of the ego self.