The Futurists - Critical Thinking

Date: 1st July 2009

Place: Hair Affair, The Adelphi, Singapore.

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The Futurists Group, aka Acceleration Aware Singapore, is an informal group that gathers once a week to discuss a pre-selected subject and how that subject will evolve to be in future. It is an open group and anyone can join in. I think it is a group that needs an outlet to express its intellect, quite decadent in a way considering that the time and minds spent here would not add much to save the poor and starving. And I am guilty! :)

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Discussion:

Critical Thinking is the evaluation of competing account of the same situation. How a particular discipline deals with this problem is not necessarily focused on the problem. We need an inter-disciplinary approach and agreement to understand the problem.

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In the PhD offered by the Minerva School, it covers how we can deal with entrepreneurship, media and academia. Such education is not adequate in today's society.

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To analyse media, we need a critical approach. Critical thinking will lead you to possibility thinking. That much of what we observe is relative, depending on our orientation, classification and identification with the issue. There is no right or wrong in critical thinking, but 'stronger' or 'weaker' interpretation of the subject. A stronger interpretation is one that is more comprehensive and covers more elements.

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For instance, Freud's Interpretation of Dreams uses a free association within a given context to eventually derive a latent dream thought, with internally cohesive fragments.

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Me: Actually it is basically like Relational Database Design. :)

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Dominant myths translates society beliefs relative to the society and culture. Dominant myths defines society.

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Objectivity can be seen as a process or a task to understand subjectivity.

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Me: I think 'critical thinking' is 'non-dogmatic thinking'. That means we accept that knowledge and opinions are never 'crystal clear' and are in a permanent state of flux. However, we can achieve a better understanding of the subject matter through critical thinking. Ironically, critical thinking is more stable than dogmatic thinking, for the former embraces a belief that no knowledge or argument is permanently corrrect, whilst dogmas are demolished once contradictions are established.

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With the information ecology, it arises the need for more critical thinking. With the advent of information technology and the Internet, we can get vast volumes of information with ease. However, it is precisely this ease to obtain vast volume of information that we do not have the time to go through them all that we have become more selective. We put out harsher filters and tighter jargons.

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Go back a thousand years, we probably did not need critical thinking. Go back 150 years, and it would probably have been similar. Then, information is scarce and the pace of life is much slower. Just watch some of the older TV series, like West Wing and they were using pagers in their episodes. Nowadays, news get reported first on twitter before the mainstream media catches the events.

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What will happen when we reach 'Singularity'? At that point, we can upload modules of information and skills into our brains. How would 'critical thinking' be then? In such a state, surely critical thinking will leap many orders of magnitude in complexity and sophistication. Then it could be difficult to fathom the thoughts of a technology aided brain, by mine which is unaided. That is, if I am still around then and that if 'Singularity' is achievable.

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My Note:

The Minerva School is embarking on 'inter-disciplinary' approach to their PhD coursework on 'Critical Thinking'. I think that it is a misnomer to accept that there is a naturally occurring thing as a discipline. I would rather treat all issues as one. All issues exists in one universe operating with common generalised principles. So, it would be more fruitful to start with the universe, than to assume that there are these (human-defined) disciplines that ultimately would be empirically fractious on their own.

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Other Futurists posts:

Bucky's Vision of the Future, click here

China, click here

Survivalism, click here

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