We often argue with people simply to prove our point or win. Take for example the following debate:
‘I believe in free will I can do what I want.’
VS.
‘I believe in FATE everything is predetermined.’
For the record I don’t know what I believe. Back to the post. How can you ever resolve this? You can’t. It’s a bipolar idea. It has one side which is a the down side and one which is the upside. Do you know what these ideas have in common? They are based on an assumption/assessment of the future. Yet there is a connection here. If these people both went about their lives something would happen… something magical. They would eventually die and at some point they are likely to pay tax. Yet they would never report the event in the same way: It’s God’s will that I pay tax, I choose to pay tax. It’s God’s plan that I die, I die because I choose to keep living. Both ways of thinking are different yet can never be proven outside the frame of human thought. Why? Because, they are bipolar ideas. If one says the sun is up, the other says it’s down.
Here’s a third option
Try another idea. Why not say somethings are predetermined others are not, because I choose. Or let’s just do away with the whole stupid bipolar idea in the first place and say it this way: I have no idea. I pay tax because I don’t want to go to jail and I die because life stops at some point. No big deal. It’s just the way it has to be because I choose to pay tax. Or because I can’t cheat death I choose to keep living until I expire. The predetermined has now become my choice, even though it’s not a choice at all.
Breaking your brain?
Maybe. But remember it’s only an idea and that’s all it could be ever ever ever. Why? I don’t know why it’s just what I believe. An idea only has the power to convey the abstract long enough until the reality of life hammers it out. Yet, I won’t know that a turtle rules world as suggested by some religions and Stephen King until I die. Even then I may never find out. It may be black and I will be alone. I still believe in Ghosts.
Is there more than one answer?
To Bipolar ideas? No. They are the same idea but looked at from two different points of view at once. Not all ideas are bipolar some tripolar some have no polar, others are simply unanswerable. Some ideas though have a special quality in that they are the same idea but because they are dealing with a difficult concept you can actually see them two ways at once.
See what happens when you do a PhD kids you eventually go crazy.
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I was lying back fighting off a cold. One of my choirs has a concert on Saturday, and I really don’t want to miss it. We should be singing Fauré’s Cantique de Jean Racine, but in English. The music is running through my head; it seems it could only have been written as a response to Racine’s words, but my mind is struggling to find a better translation into English.
At this point, I remember that Dr Luke has a (relatively) new blog that I haven’t read. So I read it. (Is that “reed” or “red”?) It seems perfectly obvious to me, at this time, that there can be no monopolar ideas. I note, with some amusement (if that’s the word) that you do not suggest that there are. In previous posts, you have spoken about “frames” and “fences”, which seem rather two-dimensional – quite unlike Pratchett’s Discworld, which is supported by four elephants riding on the back of a giant turtle.
An idea knows no boundaries. It exists, if at all, in a universe like our own material cosmos, where boundaries are a projection of forces. It may be true, in fact, that every particle of matter is attracted to every other in a universal gravitational field. Whether this is true is irrelevant. But ideas themselves, in our mental universes, are confined by neighbouring ideas, and defined by the attractions and repulsions that their neighbours produce, and themselves experience.
Matter is (probably) not gravity. But without matter, there is no gravity. And if ideas exist only in relation to other ideas, how could any idea exist? What is “mind” without its set of interacting ideas? What, at the end of the day, is a question?
To me, of course, bipolar ideas invite synthesis, in the same way that logical thought invites transcendence and language demands poetry. Where would matter be without electromagnetism? You said in a previous post that belief sustains ideas. I wouldn’t put it that way. Ideas are kept alive, as it were, by the mere operation of the process of thinking acting upon them. Whether you accept or reject an idea, if it is present in your thinking, it shapes your thinking and, to that extent, you are “believing” it and sustaining it. Can you imagine away an idea? Can you unanswer a question and find the question unasked? You go back to something deeper, or something higher, something more concrete or more abstract. Natural language demonstrates that, both as individuals and a society, we do this all the time. To be creative, in thinking terms, means to think differently “this time”. If we can entertain the non-sensical and incoherent for long enough, which means delaying judgment, we find that the harmonies imply a melody that is not necessarily the original, and the new melody suggests different harmonies.
Hi Alan,
Good to hear from you again. As always I am learning from what you write. Well said. I think ideas are a ‘form’ of concrete and the abstract is a form of ‘real’ that is created and sustained by our thoughts. I am changing my mind on that though, because I think there is a tendency for ‘magical’ thinking to infiltrate and sometimes change the ideas as we know them. Like how some people I know have something good happen to them and claim it be a divine force when the same thing that happened to someone else was merely good luck. It’s the same thing but framed as ‘magical’ thinking. The abstract I think (now) shapes and informs the concrete but I am more inclined to side with James now, ‘the truth is something that happens to an idea.’ But I lack the skills to articulate it beyond James’ comments.
I agree with what you said about ‘this time’. I think the real challenge in that is getting people to do it. It’s very hard. I am assessing students ability to think creatively at the moment. They find it hard.
Thanks Alan… Good to hear from you again!
Thanks, Luke. It’s always interesting to reflect on what you have posted. It’s a shame that there are not always enough hours in the day to articulate a response. It seems to me that all thoughts are “magical” in your sense of the word. Much of what “we”, or our minds, are is what I call the mindframe, which is everything in the mental universe apart from a particular idea. It is axiomatic, for me, that an idea has no existence independent of its mindframe. To represent the idea independent of the mindframe is to delineate a wave without the ocean. And “truth”, it seems to me, is a property of the ocean, not the wave. So I disagree with James to this extent: whilst pragmatic “truth” is in the mental universe rather than the physical, it is not a property of the idea, but of a correspondence between the mental and physical universes.
I can well imagine that you find assessing creativity difficult, but I remain to be convinced that your students find creativity itself difficult. I would assume, perhaps purely for the sake of argument, that everyone is always maximally and equally creative, but this is, for varying periods to varying extents, obscured, in a variety of ways for a variety of reasons. The challenge, if there be any truth in this, is simply to reduce, suspend, or eliminate the obscuring clouds in the clear blue sky of creativity. Although rain is as creative as sunshine!
Hi Alan.
Thanks for that. It’s a real challenge and I have gone off the deep end. But I find I don’t well in many other surroundings.
Luke