The relationship between thinking and rational thinking argument elaboration

Rational thinking is a kind of thinking that has a clear direction of thinking, has sufficient basis for thinking, can observe, compare, analyze, synthesize, abstract and generalize things or problems. To put it simply, rational thinking is a way of thinking based on evidence and logical reasoning. The following is the relationship between thinking and rational thinking, I hope you like it!

Thinking, is one of the most peculiar existences in the universe. But it is not magical to the point of indescribable, it is the same as other existences, also born in the reality of the world's logic, can not be something out of thin air. In a broader sense, every existence has a "mind", because they all have a kind of "memory" of the world's information, as well as a "logical" response to this information. For example, when an object is hit by another object, it leaves information (traces) of the impact on its body, which is not essentially different from the brain's memory of external information, in terms of physical processes. At the same time, the information contained in this "trace" is a logical "depiction" of the impact, which is not fundamentally different from a thought process, which is a logical processing of information. The difference is that the object's "thinking" is passive, without subjective consciousness. In other words, an object can record information and process it, but it does not perceive it. Thinking is an inevitable consequence of the fact that life has a subjective consciousness.

An object can only accept information related to its physical properties and make a response that is consistent with a particular physical logic, while the human brain can also accept all information related to survival, and can make a response beyond the physical level. The reason why a stone does not have "empathy" is that it cannot receive information from others about disasters and destinies, let alone react to such information. A stone can only receive information related to its own nature, such as temperature, hardness, pressure, and chemical effects related to its composition, and therefore, in the face of the world, it can only express itself by moving, weathering, and cracking. The human brain, faced with the world, can receive more and more indirect (unlike a stone, which is confined to one moment and one place) information, and thus can respond to the world in a richer way. Because the brain needs to process a huge amount of information, it needs a "centralized system" to coordinate the whole situation, so each brain has an "I". What is particularly amazing is that the brain's ability to function and process information is not accomplished all at once, but rather undergoes a long process of growth, when it has practiced processing simple information before it can process more complex information. The process of a brain from its first existence to a molded embryo to its development and maturity is simply recreated? Nature has a magical power to evolve a "rock" into a genius.

As the brain is in the development of the formation, thinking is also in the environment of the growth, so each person has their own specific thinking structure, the scope of the reception of information and the degree of acceptance, but also inevitably there are differences. Therefore, some people are always sensitive to some things, its reaction will be exceptionally agile, and for some other things are numb and slow, and some other people may be the opposite performance. Similarly, the thinking of one group of people may be different from the thinking of other groups because of the problem of *** being in an environment. This constitutes a difference in human cultural thinking. Differences in culture are essentially differences in thinking. The difference in thinking is essentially the difference in the way of selecting and processing information, or the difference in the structure of thinking, like a piece of stone and a piece of iron, facing the world to receive information is different, the stone can record the age of the earth, and even carry the evolution of life information, while the iron can receive magnetic signals. Simply put, different cultures will also be like stone and iron, which can only accept and process information related to its nature, a child can only have thoughts corresponding to its age, and a culture can only express emotions and thoughts within its capacity. Therefore, the stubbornness of a culture, like the naivety of a child, believes that what it thinks is the whole world, and naturally treats the information that it cannot receive as "nothing", whose logic is that what it cannot see does not exist, and what it does not understand does not exist. Just as a stone "denies" the existence of magnetism, so does iron "not see" the age of the earth.

Instinct is the precursor to thought. Mechanical external reactions, in turn, are the precursors of instinct. Therefore, the human mind, only clear or in the light of the "I", reproduced the information of the world, so that people can take the initiative and foresight to face the world, and from the breadth and depth, are greatly beyond the "stone" and "iron", and the "iron", and the "iron", and the "iron", and the "iron", and the "iron", and the "iron", and the "iron", and the "iron", and the "iron". In terms of breadth and depth, it greatly surpasses "stone" and "iron", and with the progress of human thought, human thinking can penetrate infinitely into the deeper and wider space of the universe. Therefore, thinking is a higher form of existence and even all existence, which makes the existence of human beings completely different from the existence of other "things" and other beings. Thinking makes the relationship between human beings and the world go beyond a kind of direct and external interaction (the collision of objects and the stimulation of the life reaction) and can produce a deeper connection with the world beyond the present time and space. Beyond the current space-time connection, thus for the survival and development of mankind, opened up an infinite space. It is the birth of thinking that has brought about a fundamental change in the state of human existence, and made human beings completely different from other existences in the universe. Therefore, thinking (consciousness) is the core of human nature and all the secrets of human beings.

The character and manner of thinking, therefore, is sufficient to determine the state of existence of a person and a people. Wrong way of thinking will not only greatly harm the nature of human intelligence, but also threaten the survival of human beings themselves. That is, wrong thinking, instead of helping us, can make us dumber than animals. For example, animals don't stay long before an illusion, but we can spend our whole life running for an illusion. The rigid thinking of a backward culture can make a nation live in an illusion for thousands of years, without being able to move forward into reality. It can be seen that thinking allows us to recognize the truth of the matter, but also allows us to deviate from reality, than the animal instincts and stupid, more than a stone is narrow and closed fallacy.

In order for thinking to maintain the inherent characteristics of wisdom, it must get rid of the subjective and arbitrary characteristics of thinking, and it must be rooted in reality, so as to allow thinking to operate in the logic of reality. Therefore, it is necessary to correct our thoughts with observations of reality, rather than compiling our thoughts with wishes. Thought, no matter how grand, is a thing that needs to be corrected. Therefore, the first sign that the mind is divorced from wisdom is the refusal to correct it refusing to change it. It is conceivable that a nation that is spiritually enamored of its ancestors is inevitably a nation that has lost its wisdom. And the thinking that needs the least correction is a willful moral thinking. This is the reason why cultures centered on moral thinking are always so stupid and stubborn; they cannot create natural science, nor can they understand the modern spirit brought to mankind by social science, and the stubbornness of such cultures is as firm as a stone that cannot discover a magnetic field. The unconditional exploratory nature of wisdom was almost devastatingly degraded during the agricultural period of human civilization, which is why agricultural societies have been staggering in human history for so long. Thinking, the most amazing thing in the universe, seems to have a history of growth, trials and development like everything else that exists.

True wisdom, therefore, requires first of all a spirit of objectivity. The world must not be treated as something that can be changed by imagination and passion alone, thus missing our true understanding and grasp of the world. Otherwise, as long as in those tyrannical and backward things, as long as to put a color of passion, will continue to legitimate slavery to us, and we will only be happy about it. In the history of the world, there is not a single person in power who does not like the people to have a kind of thinking that will only be identified by emotion, because those in power have the convenience of manipulating the emotions of the society, and in the face of the masses who do not have the power of objective identification, emotion is only a kind of anonimity, so the people in power can inject into the people's emotions any arbitrary content, and it can even be the naked killing and maiming of life, for example, Japan and Germany in those years used to stir up The Japanese and the Germans, for example, used to stir up emotions to induce the people to serve his kind of brutal rule, which brought great disasters to their own people and to other nations.

Thinking, in essence, is a reaction to objective information, and this reaction includes the acceptance and processing of information, and the development of human thought is the process of expanding the world's information, no matter from the breadth and depth. As a result, the content of human thought increases and enriches with the progress of human history, so that individual human beings are no longer able to carry all the thoughts of human beings. As a result, human thought divides into various disciplines, which in turn divides thinking about specific information. The progress of human thinking is a ceaseless progression from one field to another, from one level of depth to another, in the contemplation of the world. Thus, human thinking itself, in this process of ceaseless progress, develops correspondingly different ways of doing things.

But from ancient times to the present, there is a way of thinking that has not changed much, and that is everyday thinking, the oldest thinking of mankind, whose content is food, clothing, shelter, and transportation. Everyday thinking deals with the most direct and basic information on the level of human existence, and the logical relationship of this information reflects an external and simplest rule of the world, so as long as a person has a normal mind, he or she will be competent to think about the everyday world. And the deeper and more complex information about the world to think, you need a deeper way of thinking, because the logical relationship presented by these contents, far more complex than the kind of relationship shown in daily life, otherwise, human society will not arrange for specialized people to engage in specialized disciplines, so a person wants to study and understand a discipline, relying on everyday thinking alone is not enough. However, the more elementary the thinking, the more there is a weakness, that is, the stubborn belief that what it contemplates is the whole of the world, and what it understands is the fundamental reason of the world.

So it is interesting to note that while the everyday mind tells us that something is true, the further mind plunges that "something is true" into an uncontrollable absurdity. For example, everyday thinking might describe the process of returning home from work as follows: we must first walk one-half of the total distance, then one-half of one-half of that distance, and so on. But then the question arises, actually so analogous, no matter how fast we go, in front of us waiting for us there will be another "one-half", so endless, and how do we cross this countless "one-half", our home is not always How can we cross these countless "one-half", and won't our home be forever out of reach? It can be seen that everyday thinking always contains contradictions that it cannot explain, because such contradictions cannot be seen in everyday life. What everyday thinking has to deal with is only a rough or approximate manifestation of the rules of the world, and an understanding of these rough and approximate rules is enough to cope with everyday life. In other words, we can tell ourselves or our family members how much time we have left to reach home and how much distance we have left to travel by using judgments such as "one-half". The acquisition of the practicality of everyday thinking also eliminates the need for us to think further about such "one-half" questions. However, if we are faced with the question of whether the world is continuous or interrupted in the study of history, or in the exploration of the deeper physical world, the question of whether we can set up the "one-half" question on "a line" becomes a question that we must answer. This is the question we must answer. At this point, we will discover the deeper rules of the world. It turns out that this "one-half" point does not want to be a static point as we think, but is dynamic, which means that this point itself contains the transcendence of itself, or that the "one-half" point itself contains one-half of the world. In other words, this point itself contains the transcendence of itself, or the "one-half" point itself contains the negation of the one-half. Therefore, when we reach the "one-half" point, we have already transcended the "one-half" point, and the world is thus both interrupted and continuous. Thus, there is a more precise explanation of how we can walk home. Therefore, there are levels in people's thinking about the world, because there are also levels in people's demands and discoveries about the world, and people's existence in a certain level of the world has its corresponding thinking content and way of thinking. The way of thinking at the bottom level expresses only a rougher and more approximate thing relative to the way of thinking at the top level. However, at every level of thinking, there is an instinctive tendency to always think that what one contemplates is the whole and fundamental thing about the world. For example, there are always people who, without training in philosophical thinking, confidently discuss and judge philosophical issues with "everyday thinking" in a "crude" way, almost to the point of being miserable. The first thing a person who wishes to devote himself to philosophical and scientific thinking should do is to humbly transform his "everyday thinking". Thinking, like all existence, has its own rules.

It is clear that the logical structure of thinking is different for different people, different cultures, and different domains that people have to deal with, but everyone does not have a precise understanding of this, and more often than not, we do not pretend to be human beings, but we all have the same mode of thinking, ignoring the differences. Therefore, in many cases, we are not arguing about the same issue at all, nor do we have the same logical basis. The "precision" of human thinking is a continuous process of progress.

The difference between the various types of human thinking is formed in the specific survival and history of mankind. The thinking of primitive people is more closely related to feelings and emotions, and their logic, which follows the rules of external reality, is not possible, and there is no clear external world in their thinking, because their minds have not yet been able to separate themselves from the world environment. Nature, as yet, is only another expression of the mind and body of primitive man, and that in an extremely mysterious way. Thus, the mind of primitive man connects with the world, not in a cognitive way, but through emotions such as fear, worship and excitement to connect and express. Their existential destiny depended on this emotional system. Emotional thinking, therefore, was the original way of thinking for human beings.

Primitive people, the understanding of the world is emotional, and their emotional consciousness is stimulated by the various rituals of society. Therefore, the thinking of the individual primitive man, carrying is actually a collective consciousness. The collective consciousness of primitive man carries a mysterious attribute, and it is this mysteriousness that controls the consciousness of the individual, almost making it impossible for the individual to think independently about the world, and the individual thus becomes an unconditional part of the collective. For the collective action of primitive men is almost the only guarantee of their survival. The mind and thought of the individual reproduces only the collective consciousness of a tribe, without the cognitive significance that the individual has for the world. They can attribute the death of a person in the tribe to an outsider who happens to be here, and no explanation can eliminate the tribe's "hostility" toward this outsider. Therefore, the thinking of primitive man is mainly emotional and mystical rather than logical. Therefore, primitive people cannot understand "mystery" from a series of reasoning; they need to memorize certain rituals to experience "mystery". Their cognition also ends with the evocation of a certain emotion, and their observation of the world only accepts information that can evoke a certain emotion and that has practical value for them. As a result, it is difficult for them to become genuinely curious about the world.

This primitive sentiment is still well preserved until mankind enters the agricultural civilization. The progress of the agricultural civilization over the primitive civilization is that human beings gradually got rid of the domination of mysticism and began to realize the social rules of human beings themselves. Therefore, the gods of the agricultural society have been different from the chaotic totems of the primitive society, expressing a more rational contemplation? Morality. Only this rationality, can not be extended to the contemplation of an objective world, because of this moral thinking, its interest is still limited to the social relations of man, to nature, moral thinking, just as primitive thinking only anthropomorphic interpretation of it, it will only do moral interpretation. Human intelligence, in agricultural societies, has not yet developed the ability to make the human mind consciously face a world of objectivity. The rational rules of morality are therefore highly random and arbitrary. The birth of agricultural civilization, therefore, did not really mean the advent of scientific rational thinking either. The indifference to the independent reality or objectivity of the world is the residual trace of primitive thinking in the agricultural civilization.

Agricultural civilization, because of the initial rational thinking, "mystery" is difficult to become the power to connect the individual, so the "sacred" has become the core of human thinking at a higher stage of human unity. Sacredness can no longer suppress individual thinking, but individual thinking, too, can only be a kind of moral thinking, the object of which is only some rules that do not have objectivity. Therefore, what moral thinking gives people is only a kind of psychological "reasonableness", which has a strong subjective color. In addition, rulers or powerful people can easily manipulate people's psychology, and the "reasonableness" of this moral thinking has a greater arbitrariness and uncertainty. Therefore, although the agricultural civilization has organized a wider society than the primitive society, the social organization has become looser, and the members of the society no longer rely on a subconscious power alone to become a member of the collective as the primitive man did. Therefore, agrarian societies rely not only on morality, but also on power characterized by violence, in order for society to coalesce into a whole. The combination of morality and violence can only make morality more and more hypocritical.

Therefore, the moral thinking of human beings at this time is often or inevitably interfered by specific power or politics, and deviates from the thinking of the fundamental rules of society, which is why the moral thinking of the agricultural society, from the rational thinking of its initial stage, will inevitably degenerate into irrational thinking. The "rational" nature of the basis of agricultural morality soon degenerated into a downright "sacred" nature. The morality contemplated by Confucius was at the stage of morality based on rationality, and later Confucianism, especially after Confucianism's exclusivity, inevitably fell into the sacred stage of morality. This stage of closed and irrational thinking actually began with the direction of thinking long followed by the thinkers of Confucius' time, that is, the kind of strong moral sentiment that Confucius and even Laozi possessed. The moral sentiments expressed by these early thinkers of the agricultural civilization, in turn, stemmed from the impact and implication of a strong and static agricultural society on their minds from various angles. Therefore, after entering the agricultural civilization, human wisdom was like a shooting star, which, after showing its blinding light, disappeared into the long night sky. It can be seen that this light of human wisdom waits for the end of agricultural society before it is rekindled. Agricultural civilization, it is so with its unquestionable "sacred", blocking the further development of the human way of thinking.

Agricultural civilization is a kind of moral thinking, its way of thinking is empirical. Therefore, the thinking of the agricultural society can also be said to be a kind of empirical thinking. In this empirical thinking, the connection between cause and effect is accidentally random and unexplained. Empirical thinking is based on a large number of constantly repeated connections between cause and effect. Empirical thinking expands its scope of thought more than primitive thinking, and it can think about a series of existences in a unified rather than abstract way, which is different from rational thinking. Rational thinking is different from empirical thinking in that it involves a more general conceptual analysis of "cause" and "effect", and the identification of a logical mechanism for cause and effect that is abstractly adapted to all existences, and is therefore fundamentally different from empirical thinking in that it deals not with a specific event, but with a series of events originating from a more abstract source. Therefore, rational thinking is fundamentally different from empirical thinking in that it deals not with concrete events, but with a series of abstract concepts originating from a deeper reality, and, based on the intrinsic relations of these concepts, it carries out a kind of logical thinking and arithmetic on them to find out a more general world order. Rational thought can thus go beyond the present existences and think about the world in a wider and deeper way. Therefore, from primitive thinking to empirical thinking to rational thinking, it is the human intellect, when facing the world, from a point to a surface to a more three-dimensional and comprehensive thinking. Therefore, rational thinking is the direction of the inevitable progress of human thinking.

Rational thinking, the reason why the first comprehensive production in the West, because the Western society, has never been as large as China and static agrarian society, the survival of Westerners, whether geographically, or in the social structure, has always been in the huge changes in their thinking in the face of the unlike in China, is not something that has not really changed (changes in China, just a form of Repetition, for example, an emperor was overthrown, often replaced by another emperor who is essentially the same), but a world that constantly produces new things, so empirical thinking, can not satisfy the Western understanding of the world, they need to make a more general explanation of the world, but also also need to be in front of a miscellany of imagery, abstracted into a series of concepts, and to seek these concepts between the relationship of an unchanging They also need to abstract the many imaginings in front of them into a series of concepts, and seek an unchanging objective rule or law for the relationship between these concepts, so as to grasp the deeper reality of the world, and thus cope with the constantly changing world in front of them. This kind of thinking is precisely rational thinking. Moreover, this kind of thinking is very easy to break the static moral thinking, and is also conducive to breaking through the limitations of empirical thinking. Therefore, once rational thinking arose in the West, there was no authoritarian (and inevitably moralistic thinking based on the divine) thought that could completely erase it from Western history. From then on, human thought under rational thinking had a truly tremendous power of reality, which could not only destroy a theocracy, a despotism, but at the same time could also read the secrets of nature for human beings, so that they could also show their wills and wishes in front of nature. It can be seen that rational thinking is not a special kind of thinking, it is the inevitable result of the development of human thinking.

The difference between the existence of thinking and all other existences, which we have already discussed, is that there is no existence that can receive and process such a wide range and depth of information about the world as the human mind, such as the "stone" and "iron" mentioned earlier. Iron". However, unlike the rational mind, the primitive mind and the moral mind of the agricultural civilization did not fully utilize this potential ability of the human mind; one allowed the human mind to remain in the emotional stage, depicting only an incomprehensible and mysterious world, and the other allowed the human mind to remain in the subjective stage, depicting a world that, although it had a certain degree of order, was still arbitrary and lacking in objectivity and logic. world. These two kinds of thinking **** the same point, is to stay in the world's surface, the difference is that the world in front of the primitive man, just a number of unrelated "points"? Covered with all kinds of "mystery", while the world in front of the moral thinking of the agricultural civilization has presented a surface? Covering the surface of the world's morality, "sacred" is the core of this moral network. Moral thinking, compared with the primitive thinking, is obviously a progress, but it still lacks the real objective logic, and its interest is directed to an emotional "sacredness", which rejects the reception of the world's more objective, broader and deeper information. Primitive and moral thinking is therefore a thinking that leaves out a more complete and comprehensive world. Modern rational thinking, which takes "reality" as its interest and objective logic as its basis and method, can be said to have released the potential nature of human thinking to a degree that has never been possible before, in terms of its openness to the world and its endless inclusion of information about the world. Therefore, modern human beings, whether in terms of their accumulation of knowledge or the speed of social progress, have reached a level that is as high as human beings have ever been able to believe. Therefore, for a person to acquire a rational mind, he must not only cross the way of everyday thinking, but also get rid of the way of thinking of a particular backward culture.

However, theoretically speaking, the development of human thinking would be a natural process from primitive thinking to the moral thinking of an agricultural civilization to rational thinking. But Chinese society, for various reasons (discussed in more detail in my other articles), has let our way of thinking stay in the stage of moral thinking for a long time. Until today, we still wrongly believe that rational thinking is only a product of Western culture. It has not occurred to us that rational thinking is also Chinese thinking, only that it has unfortunately been put aside by our history. As early as the Warring States period, our contempt for Gong Sun Long (the outstanding Chinese logician) predetermined that the development of rational thinking in China would have a more difficult journey than other peoples.

Primitive thinking allows people to experience an incomprehensible "mystery". Moral thinking allows people to obey a kind of "sacredness" that they dare not resist. Rational thinking, on the other hand, leads people to the original rules of man and the world, so that people live with the nature of man and the world. If the existence of thinking is the highest form of all existence, rational thinking is the most perfect form of existence found in the universe so far, because its content and method are sufficient to cover the entire universe, and there is no other kind of existence that can match its breadth and depth, except for the universe as a whole. Therefore, is it not a great joke to say that rational thinking is only a Western thing.

If we still cling to moral empirical thinking and reject rational thinking outside of our daily thinking, then that is the greatest loss facing our nation. Because, without rational thinking, our society, will always operate in an irrational way that is closer to the original structure of mankind, and we will always exist on the surface of man and the world.