Unmaking Sense

Episode 10.12: If we accept and use whole systems of ideas, how do we proceed when we can’t go on?

Those who can “just do things” may seem blessed, but if they have never had to learn to learn, how do they know what to do “when they can’t go on”?

Episode 10.11: How slow learners build understanding by painstakingly fitting the pieces together.

Other learners proceed more slowly: they love examples; they ask questions; they worry about things they don’t understand; they are always asking themselves whether they understand something well enough to explain it to someone who doesn’t; in other words, whether they could teach it.

Episode 10.10: The emergent theme of series 10 becomes clearer. Two types of learner: fast and slow.

We explore the first of two general ways in which people learn. Here, those who grasp ideas as a whole without having to wade through preliminary preparatory example and so, having never had to learn to learn, should not be allowed to teach. They deeply believe that it is not worth explaining anything to someone who needs it explaining. Universities are full of them.

Episode 10.09: Unmaking Sense: the challenges involved in changing how we think of human existence.

We recapitulate the story so far in Series 10 and to some extent the whole if this podcast: just as in physics and biology, in religion and philosophy we have had to come to terms with the need to change our minds, so we need to change our understanding of human thriving and our understanding of understanding.

Episode 10.08: Reconceptualising human life by remaking our sense of the world and human thriving.

The previous episode used the need to remove infinities from our inherited physics to avoid singularities by a process called renormalisation. What are the equivalent shifts in our understanding necessary if life is to be intelligible and sustainable under a new conception of human thriving?

Episode 10.07: That we have evolved and emerged with inadequate ways of making sense is forgivable.

It’s futile to conjecture whether the human species could have evolved with a different, better conceptual system, a better way of making sense of the world. And it is not reprehensible that we have emerged as we have, believing in the necessity of leaders and gods and universal absolute moral and scientific rules and laws. But just as with the inadequacies of Newtonian physics and Aristotelian biology we needed to change the basis of our understanding and move on and could not move on unless and until we changed the basis of our understanding, so it is now incumbent upon us, in the light of the unsustainable way we think of human prosperity and thriving, to change how we make sense not only of biology and physics, but of life itself.

Episode 10.06: Consistency - being led by the hand to unavoidable logical conclusions has its price.

The fundamental assumptions we make force certain conclusions upon us, which is one of the things that led particle physics to conjecture that there were fundamental particles as yet un observed and undiscovered. But is consistency all it seems?

Episode 10.05: Changing the basis of our understanding; reconceptualising; changing our minds.

We consider Søren Kierkegaard’s beloved Aristotle quote “metabasis eis allo genos”: changing the basis of our world-view to something different. In other words, how we change our minds.

Episode 10.04: Understanding as linkage to the evolving web of ideas expressed through language.

More aspects of understanding.

Episode 10.03: Unmaking our sense of what is involved in understanding understanding.

We use some of the challenging conceptual aspects of physics to rethink our understanding of understanding.