Improve your thinking (a practical exercise)

a degraded view of humanity uh i feel where we are effectively like marionettes um and that we we're just being played and that we don't have any agency anymore and therefore uh we can't be responsible for our own words not not just our actions we can't be responsible for our own words and their and the ramifications so we have to be controlled and we have to be stifled by the state and it's very it makes me very nervous so i've been thinking through um the importance of free speech i suppose from a psychological perspective and

it seems to me that well we can walk through some axioms and you can tell me what you think about them if you would so i mean the first thing we might posit is that it's useful to think it's better to think than not to think and that might seem self-evident but but thought can be troublesome and stir up trouble and your thoughts can be inaccurate so it's perhaps not that unreasonable to start the questioning there but i think it was alfred north whitehead who said that thinking allows our thoughts to die instead of us

and so he was thinking about the evolution of thought in some sense from a biological perspective so imagine a creature that's incapable of thought has to act something out a representation of the world or an intent it has to be embodied and then if that fails well it fails in action and so the consequence of that might be death it might be very severe whereas once you can think you can represent the world abstractly you can divorce the abstraction from the world and then you can produce avatars of yourself sometimes in image like in dreams

let's say or in literature and fiction and movies and so on produce avatars of ourselves that are fictional and then run them as simulations in the abstract world and observe the consequences and we do that in our stories we do that when we dream we do that when we imagine in images and depict a dramatic scenario playing itself out but then we also do that in words because we encode those images it's one more level of abstraction we encode those images into words and those words become partial dramatic avatars and then the words can battle

with one another so thought seems to work let's say verbal thought you ask yourself a question you receive an answer in some mysterious manner there's an internal revelation of sorts that's the spontaneous thought you know when you sit down to write a book thoughts come to you perhaps because you pose yourself a question and no one knows how that works but we experience it that thoughts manifest themselves in the theater of our imagination so that's the revelatory aspect and then there's the critical aspect which is well now you've thought this and perhaps you've written it

down can you generate counter positions are there universes that you can imagine where this doesn't apply are there situations where it doesn't apply are there better ways of formulating that thought and but i would say with regard to critical thought and to some degree with regard to productive thought an indeterminate proportion of that is dependent on speech i i don't think it's unreasonable to point out that thought is internalized speech and that the dialectical process that constitutes critical thinking is internalized speech so you and i are engaging in a dialectic enterprise you'll pause it something

and i'll respond to it and you'll respond to that and we're we're we're in a kind of combat there's some cooperation about it as well and we're attempting to formulate a truth more clearly at least in principle if we're being honest we do that when we're speaking so our thought the quality of our thought is actually dependent on our ability to speak our minds absolutely and then sure go ahead well i i couldn't agree more because i think speech is the way in which we collaborate on our thoughts you know that that's how it how

it works you you refine those thought processes that you've described i mean i'm no i'm no psychologist but i understand this basic premise that that we have these various thoughts that are continually in conflict within ourselves unless we're able to articulate them and to engage in others through that process through that transactional process of speech then those thoughts are never refined and they remain in this kind of infancy and this is yes they're as refined as we can make them as individuals but that's also assuming that you even have the words which you also learned

in a dialectical process right exactly it's not as though the truth is ever uh fully graspable but we can we can get nearer to it through that collaborative process of speaking and articulating the thoughts and in fact even in the act of like you say writing or articulating yourself uh as with your self-authoring program for instance the act of writing things out is what clarifies the points of view for you i've actually found that the the the the way that i think about these issues now is largely a product of of the fact that i've

written so much about it and changed my mind through the act of learning how to express myself on these points and and and the and the consequence of not having that opportunity i think is uh something i would barely want to contemplate and i think that to give an example of of uh of the moment which is that because any kind of attempt to have a discussion or debate about the perceived conflict between trans rights and gender critical feminism because to even attempt that discussion at the moment will have such uh grave social consequences and

certainly in terms of career prospects major consequences people will not have that discussion i have people i know in politics in the media and they say to me quite honestly i will not talk about this i have concerns i have qualms i want answers to questions but i absolutely will not open my mouth about this and if you don't do that uh this is why no one understands the issue this is why no one has reached any kind of consensus on this issue all we have is a sense in which to have the quote unquote

wrong opinion makes you a pariah and therefore i'd better not have that opinion well then that's not a sincerely held conviction that's just that's just if the definition of wrong is continually transforming and in an unpredictable manner then it's best just to sidestep the issue entirely and then that leaves it murky and ill-defined and assuming that you believe that thought has any utility and so when you're sitting down to write when i'm sitting down to write and i produce a sentence you know it might have come from some theoretical perspective maybe i'm approaching something from

a freudian perspective or a marxist perspective or a uh or a an enlightenment perspective etc i mean it's it's a it's a it's a psychological trope i suppose that we all think the thoughts of dead philosophers right we think we have our own opinions but that's really very very very very rarely the case it's not that easy to come up with something truly original and generally make incremental progress at best and so your ability to abstractly represent the world and then to generate avatars that can be defeated without you dying is dependent on your incorporation

of a multitude of opinions and that in itself is a consequence of i mean that works to the degree that communication is actually free and that you can get access to as much thought as you can possibly manage so i can't see how you can deny the centrality of free speech as a fundamental right or the fundamental right perhaps unless you simultaneously deny the utility of thought but maybe if you are also inclined to remove the individual from the central position of the political discourse then maybe you can also make the case at least implicitly

that individual thought doesn't matter and that mostly it's just causing trouble but i think individual thought is key and actually even in the the the outline you've described there there isn't there is individual agency in reaching a conclusion that has been articulated before insofar as if you are engaged with a multitude of writers and philosophers and artists and ideas and you've come out with a perspective well that perspective may not be original to you but the process that you've gone through to reach that viewpoint is individual to you you know there is a power in

that's there's something important about that you know there's something crucial it's if you're a practicing psychotherapist one of the things you have to learn is to not provide people with your words too much what you want is for them to formulate the conclusion and you can guide them through the process of investigation you talked about the self-authoring process and which is online at selfauthoring.com that it steps people say through the process of writing an autobiography of analyzing their current virtues and faults and of making a future plan the utility of all of that is dependent

on the the person who's um undertaking the exercise generating their own verbal representations right and that seems to cement it somehow as yours if you've come up with the words and so it's that it's the uppermost expression of personhood the ability to have the words that you should speak reveal themselves to you and to have the right to express them as you see fit yes in which case if you if you are merely repeating an accepted script then then to what extent can you say to can you even say to be an individual at all

you know this this to me well i think that's part of the philosophical conundrum is that if you believe that all people do is repeat pre-digested scripts especially if your view is that the fundamental human motivation is power and the entire social landscape is nothing but a competition between equally what would you say selfish and single-minded powers drivers then there is no individual there's no individual in that conceptual world and it seems to me that that's the world that we're being pushed to inhabit and are criticized for on moral grounds for criticizing