keep your mind on your driving and your eyes on the wheel

So this is Tata's 1 lakh car. I have been talking to people about the poetry project and this morning I found myself on Skype messaging with Andrew Rixon about the creative process.



More specifically, the creative process as applied to poetry. The way I have been conceptualising this is like a car (hey I'm a bloke, I have a Y chromosome and I'm not afraid to use it). Maybe not quite like Tata's little baby here but something similar. Every halfway decent poem I have written has an emotional engine in it - fear, love, regret. Without this motor, the poem goes nowhere. Then there is the steering (structure & conceit) and bodywork (language). If I encounter problems in the writing process, it's rarely with the structure or the language. It's often at the level of the emotional engine (the libidinal drive?) powering the piece.

Which is where the tricky bit with the poetry project comes in. When I am writing off my own idea or experience, I have direct access the emotions driving the poem. When I am writing off someone else's experience, it's a lot harder. So I'm deploying some techniques to give a voice to the emotions of the commissioners. I'll write more about these once we've actually done them but I think it's impossible to overstress the importance of the emotional aspects of experience in creative endeavour. And I'd also like to warn potential commissioners that we may be opening a whole nother can of worms in this process.

I second that emotion

So EngineersWithoutFears is quite an intellectual enterprise. But EwF has been pondering human emotions recently. As I recently shared with Miguel, I sometimes wonder that if I study humans for long enough, may be they'll let me be one. So this is perhaps another step towards that goal.

For all our powers of empathy and the presence of mirror neurons, the only person that feels my emotions is me. Neurologically, hormally, whatever - they happen inside me in reaction to any number of things. And yet, it seems that I often do not take ownership for these personal chemical events. "Don makes me feel happy", "Jane makes me feel angry". Now unless Jane & Don are standing behind me with big syringes filled with serotonin or something, that isn't strictly true. Don & Jane do what they do - conscious of my feelings or not. For me, the source of these feelings is a bit mysterious and a little unpredictable. And when human beings find things a bit mysterious and a little unpredictable, we tend to seek a reified source outside outselves (cf. the reasons for our existence and the claims for a god as author of same).

One response to this is the importance of mindfulness and the importance of detachment. However even if I was fully aware of this source, my control over my emotions would still be limited. Just because I can comprehend why the loss of a loved one might cause grief does not mean that the pain will be any the less intense when it hits.

Another response is simply acknowledging that our emotional responses to others are our business, not necessarily theirs. This doesn't mean letting people get away with unacceptable behaviours but it does mean us recognising that "he did something bad" and "he did something that made me feel bad" aren't always the same thing. It also means that we shouldn't let others make us take responsibility for their emotions - only for our own actions.

I also wonder if we own our ideas too much and our emotions too little. Which would imply some kind of swap is required here.

I'm only scratching the surface here so I'd appreciate some comments, criticisms & links from others to further my pondering on this. Don't worry, at no stage will I insist on a group hug.

Thinking critically

Why is critical thinking important? To me, it's the flipside of creativity & imagination. All those great new ideas need testing. And all those current ideas and notion need a good poke too. Some of them will be solid, some of them rotten underneath a shiny surface of efficacy. But we won't know which until we poke them.

Lets kick off with some definitions: Richard Paul describes CR as "critical thinking is thinking about your thinking while you’re thinking in order to make your thinking better". Alec Fisher goes into some more detail on the history.

Now this is all good stuff. And frankly sounds like "mindfulness" with added logic. And we at EngineersWithoutFears are big fans of mindfulness. And logic.

However most of the material I have read on CR is very dry. And a tinsy bit meta. Because it's written by thinkers. And it strikes me there's a post here about critical thinking for non-thinkers. Because there's an awful lot of us out there, like.

So apart from following the various critical thinking methods (and they are good, so give them a go), what can you do outside your head to encourage critical thinking?

1. Get out more. And it's here that critical thinking and innovation overlap. Diversity of viewpoints is good for both discovery and verification/falsification (google Vienna Circle / Popper*). I love reading writings by right-wing, utopian technophiles and the day I stop reading this stuff is the day I die (intellectually).

2. Practice. My little brother is a blackbelt in jujitsu. Now this simply makes him a tiny bit more awesome than he is already (and a lot harder to bully) but he's spent a decade getting slammed into dojo mats to get to that level. Practicing his moves, his muscle memory, until he doesn't have to think when someone comes at him tooled-up. And we have to do the same with our critical faculties. Wax on, wax off with those fallacies.

3. Fuggetaboutit. Seriously. Those ideas of yours. They're all rubbish. And you know the scandalous thing? It doesn't matter. Really. Once I realised how unimportant my ideas were, everything became so much easier. Let go. Write them down and then burn them. N.B. Books are meant for burning. They're just rocket fuel. Let go.

Triggered by posts to the onlinefacilitation group.

*Our Karl has had mixed reviews. I remember being an wet-behind-the-ears undergrad in 1995 shortly after his death and one eminent philosopher of science said to the seminar room: "I'm glad the bastard's dead". I like KP's writings but then I never had to have the guy to dinner.