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Comment by hosh | Hacker News Reader

Wisdom can't be squeezed out of a rock. The experience of wisdom is individual, because wisdom is transformative. What's being transformed is not the knowledge but you, your consciousness. It's local in that sense. It's not something that can be packaged or productized.

Wisdom comes from an awareness of the greater whole. The insights do not come from analysis, but rather, synthesis. It engages with the intuition rather than the intellect.

Although it can seem mystical, I think there are authors who have been able to express ways to engage in wisdom even if they are not directly talking about it. For example, Christopher Alexander has some interesting things to say about wholes, centers, and unfolding:

Seeing Wholes - https://iamronen.com/blog/2018/01/14/christopher-alexander-s...

Centers - https://iamronen.com/blog/2018/01/08/christopher-alexander-c...

Unfolding - https://www.livingneighborhoods.org/ht-0/whatisanunfolding.h...

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I think what you are talking about are what a few hundred years ago you called prophets. Some people can pass on wisdom but it’s a very rare skill, and followers can often exhibit the cult like behaviour that’s so repulsive to others. Probably because they can’t pass on that wisdom to others.

Also, many so called prophets can easily exploit this skill, which they might well do if that’s their personality type.

Just typing this out has made me think it’s almost like passing on wisdom and the religious experience are probably inseparable.

Yet, in the Tantric and Classical view, art was a way that ordinary people can connect to wisdom. No mystical experiencies or psychedelic substances necessary.

What's amazing to me about Christopher Alexander and his work is that he's able to describe the process of generating such art (in the form of architecture) to ordinary people, using plain, relatable language. The links I posted in the earlier comment are examples.

In other words, you don't need to be someone with a rare skill.

I think its because, very often, wisdom requires rewriting a fundamental assumption about the world. And people tend to tie up their identity with their fundamental assumptions.

As a result these changes can destabilize a persons identity, which causes said person to look for the closest source of stability, often the 'peophet'.

This gives the 'prophet' enourmous power over the person, not just because of the identity destabilization, but because when you change someones fundamental assumptions about the world, those changes don't nessecerily have to be truthful or helpful for the person. The person only has to think the changes do.

This identity change and stability dependence is probably what causes the cult like appearance/ behaviour.

Wow, very well said. Thank you for the insight!

In my view, wisdom is just more situational than intelligence. The latter is about abstracting away a problem to its core so that the situation becomes tractable to reason about. With enough abstraction, it becomes easy to write down ten different solutions to a problem, which is then what you find online.

The next step in the process is to undo your abstractions to determine which of the previous solutions (if any) is the best one for your particular situation. It's not entirely identical, but I tend to think of intelligence and wisdom as deductive and inductive parts of the same process.

So I don't think that means that wisdom is so far removed from scientific enquiry that it becomes mystical, far from it: instead, it requires so much more rigour and discipline to codify wisdom into laws that it just doesn't happen that much; and even when it does happen, the most you'll find is fuzzy frameworks on how to deal with certain problems rather than the hard and accurate rules you can find in deductive analysis.

If that is how you conceive of "wisdom", sure, and I can see where you are coming from. It looks at limited notions of wholes (the whole of a chain of logical steps).

However, wholes are nested. The computer you are using to read these words, wherever you are, are part of a larger whole. Further, there is a paradox in which, while parts make up the whole, it's the whole that makes the parts.

Taking those all the way, "The" Whole in which all wholes are parts of, then, is boundless (no edge), and it is beginningless, (no causal origin).

My understanding of the scientific method is that it is ultimately limited in what it can find. It is not necessarily true that the scientific method is capable of explaining everything, though it is broadly applicable. That method is very good for analysis, but not synthesis, and focused on the origin in causal chains rather than the teleos.

As a response to the GP, You're making this much too hard. Google's results have become the crap they describes fairly recently - in the last two years, with a specific and noticeable change (and good stuff is even still there if one works hard and the crappiness might have receded a bit lately, even).

Sure, one also needs understanding to get something out of search. But Google when was in it's sweet-spot, it could get a researcher extra knowledge and insight. After all, a researcher needs both a holistic perspective and information they'd know at the start of an exploration.

Some years ago, Google+ had this question for me as a way to populate my profile: "What are things you still cannot find on Google?". I know why they asked that question, yet I was tickled by the more interesting question: "What you will never find on Google?"

I was so tickled that I put it on my profile here on HN and elsewhere -- but all of those things I put down are different ways of saying "Wisdom".

Google has aspirations about organizing the world's knowledge, and making it easy to search for facts and knowledge. What I'm saying here is that people have never been able to find wisdom in a Google search -- and never will. Each person finds it within themselves through awareness of wholes.

So in my view, it is not that it's getting harder to find wisdom from a Google search, but rather, the proliferation of knowledge and facts over the years have increasingly made it even more distracting to find wisdom within themselves.

Or it's a trick and the mere fact that you're seeking answers and asking for help is the wisest move of all.

Yep. Maybe the search for wisdom starts with sitting silent and still under a tree for a while.

What you'll never find on Google: a good answer to "What should be added to Google?"

The Göögle Incompleteness Theorem

Being a practicing Christian who has had several verifiable paranormal, if not supernatural, direct experiences I'm pretty comfortable with mysticism, but I read through that and it just looks like bafflegab. I realize that might be misunderstanding on my part, but I'm the kind of person who thinks C.S. Peirce's semiotic is sensible, and Leibniz's monadology is fascinating, so it's not like I'm unfamiliar with dense philosophy.

> ...several verifiable paranormal, if not supernatural, direct experiences...

As someone who once thought this was true of my experience, yet have since learned they were just common phenomenon, I'm curious what these experiences were. And how do you think they have effected your perspective?

Not OP, but I can identify with mystical experiences like what's hinted at in that post.

I don't have any experiences I would call "verifiably paranormal", but I've had a few I've not been able to fully account for to my own satisfaction from a purely materialist perspective (despite a total collapse of my childhood evangelical Christian beliefs).

One was sudden, total cessation of a destructive habit I'd struggled to stop for decades, after a single prayer I hadn't realized was related to that struggle ("I don't care what it costs - make me more like You"), a very unexpected turn of improbable events immediately following the prayer, and an intense spiritual experience following the unexpected events.

I have devised pure materialist accountings for it, but they aren't rigorous and haven't persuaded me.

...all that said, I actually found the GP post very understandable and thought it made tremendous amounts of sense - perhaps even was "wise." I certainly wouldn't call it "bafflegab".

> despite a total collapse of my childhood evangelical Christian beliefs

I should perhaps clarify that while I had the total collapse and found myself staring nihilism in the face, I currently am drifting towards a very heretical, Bible-is-flawed-and-maybe-not-divine-at-all form of faith in Jesus (in part due to the above-mentioned experience).

The most striking one was an injury transference. I had a severe medically diagnosed intercostal rib strain from a botched deadlift. Someone took it from me by touch. Literal laying on of hands. I mean going from so much pain that rolling over in bed is agony to completely fine. Punchline is she got to have a severe rib injury for a few weeks. I’ve still got no idea how that worked.

I’ve also experienced telepathy, seen a ghost (with multiple corroborating witnesses) and witnessed poltergeist activity. The last of those I can kind of doubt though. The mirror falling off the wall could maybe have been some kind of microquake.

Yeah, what you're describing with the injury is a skill I'd call empathic absorption. A rib injury is fairly dramatic and eye-opening. I know someone who did something similar with scarlet fever.

It's good to see this surface up here, though it's the kind of stuff I discuss in other communities.

I wrote a bunch of stuff, but then I deleted it and decided to just copy someone better at wording than me:

  There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy

I view materialism much like Newtonian physics. It's a fine approximation for the situations you'll face almost all the time. I just choose not to wear it like a set of blinders, because I don't want to deny the evidence of my senses when they don't fit it.

Is this phenomenon reproduceable? Can it be experimentally verified?

If you're open to it, I'd love to hear more details and context around these stories.

Email is my profile, if you have the time and inclination to get in touch.

I'd have my own share of experiences, so I'll take what you say here at face value. (Though there are a wide variety of experiences).

Given your background, I think you might find Christopher Wallis's Tantra Illuminated -- in particular, the chapter on the View of Tantra -- more sensible. Although it does not talk about wholes, centers, and unfoldings in those terms that Christopher Alexander does.

I think the key is in the non-duality of creator and creation. That within all parts are the Whole. I can't tell from the wikipedia page on Leibniz's monadology if monads are distinct from each other, whereas that stuff about wholes and centers point to apparent distinctions on a continuum that is the Whole.

From [0]:

  wisdom, 1. in general, the best form of knowledge. 
          2. specifically, the intellectual virtue 
             or science concerning the first or 
             supreme causes of all things.

  philosophical wisdom, intuitive knowledge combined
                        with scientific knowledge of 
                        the objects which are 
                        naturally the highest; 
                        metaphysics, including 
                        natural theology.

  practical wisdom, 1. prudence. 
                    2. any excellent form of 
                       practical knowledge, as of 
                       one of the architectonic 
                       arts.

[0] https://isidore.co/misc/Res%20pro%20Deo/TheCatholicArchive_O...

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