A fun-filled process to becoming wise
Don’t let someone from an older age cohort tell you different, we still live by our wits (and always will). Indeed, maybe now more so than ever. Navigating the world of corporate, social, and spiritual life requires studious attention to detail, a dynamism to adapt to change, all blended with a professional regard for the experiences and feelings of those around you. We are constantly checking in, experimenting, guessing, and examining—it can be exhausting.
But, like so much of life, a bit of perspective, a change in point-of-view can turn an aversion into an enjoyment. Curiosity is the key. Take an interest, delve into the details, and you will discover that the process of investigation—the method of scientific discovery—is a willy and fun-filled partner no matter the subject.
Conjecture. Criticism. Correction.
These three alliterative steps are all that are required to illuminate reality with detailed facts that will fill any concept with new depth and a grandeur beyond just passing perception.
Conjecture is inventive and imaginative. Here you use what you know—the explanations of others—to create a new guess that advances our knowledge. As a species, we have become good at hypothesizing beyond our perceptions and our intuitions—often taking turns toward a fantastical conjecture that regardless is still a true description of the way the world works. The universe was not built by processes intuitive to our kind of selected knowledge, so we can imagine and guess well outside our current comfort, build hypothesis from beyond physics (from metaphysics), and still be in the firm embrace of the first step of the method of scientific discovery.
But this conjective comfort ends as our guesses are tested by criticism. A review in reality is conducted on any and all hypothesis. Conjectures are criticized in numerous medium—experimental, mathematical, and philosophical—and must advance our epistemology. Our repeated review offers new firmament for conjecture in a dynamic process with the error correction.
The cycle renews in error correction, hypothesis are updated with new knowledge, nothing is ever taken for granted, resulting in explanations weathered by criticism that come to be regarded as a theory.
Living an examined life means both being cognizant of this concept generating process… and knowing when to just be with what is. Both offer ways to illuminate the ordinary.