Are we ready for real-world complexity and systemic understanding?
Almost everyday I am flabbergasted about the level of ignorance or ‘arrogance of ignorance’ we still display when trying to make sense of the world. One example is that we still trust ‘common sense’ or ‘intuition’ when we should have learnt, historically and scientifically, that these are the things least likely to make us understand what is really going on. For example the notion of ‘I’, as Francisco Varela explains (1999): "There are the different functions and components that combine and together produce a transient, nonlocalizable, relationally formed self, which nevertheless manifest itself as a perceivable entity ... we will never discover a neuron, a soul, or some core essence that constitutes the emergent self of Francisoc Varela or some other person."" (Capra/Luisi, 2014, 181)
Another one is this absurd idea that there are these ‘good’ emotions vice versa the ‘bad’ mind, particularly popular in so-called Eastern philosophy and religions like Buddhism. In yoga and meditation the mind is constantly vilified as the great distractor, yet in fact we are nothing, literally and simply not alive without our brain/mind. There is no emotion, not gut-feeling, no nothing without our brain processing the sensory information and actually producing an emotion. Or as Kristen A. Lindquist put it: “It goes without saying that the brain produces emotions—in this day and age, you’d have to be a pretty staunch dualist to argue otherwise. The big question that remains concerns how the brain creates emotions.“
As long as we still refuse to really let go of these dualistic, non-systemic approaches we will never even come close to an understanding of what is going on within and around us, let alone come up with solutions that actually deal with reality as opposed to some ideologically conceived notion of it.
