Not gain knowledge or gain the right knowledge or even think better, because those are constrained to certain assumptions. I want to escape illusions. How do I do that and get better at that?
Spread misinformation rampantly to lower the average IQ, thus making you smarter by comparison.
Interesting angle. Create an idiiocracy type situation.
Have you tried watching Rick and Morty yet?
Of course. Greatest cartoon ever. First 2 seasons anyway.
And speaking of high quality animation, have you seen Scavengers Reign?
i don’t believe it’s possible to fully escape illusion, but you can minimize it by learning about the subjects you’re interested in. Still you will always be biased based on what you know and what you want to believe. Approaching the problem from a neutral perspective then reading about from different authors will give you ideas that can help you form an opinion, but again it will always be limited to what you know, it’s natural. So the more you know the better decision you make. I heard a law professor said “i know too much to make a decision, tell me what the end goal is and I’ll get there” meaning there are enough arguments to arrive at any conclusion. good luck.
So pursuing your interests is a method (tho imperfect) for escaping illusions. Ok. Probably better than reason.
well, you will become an expert on what you’re interested on. Reason goes back to the problem of who to believe because is based on facts. When you know all the facts you’ll know what’s reasonable, if you have the knowledge. But who can know all the true facts?
It could be called an aesthetic kind of guidance
if you become a millionaire with that phrase “aesthetic guidance” let me get 5% of the royalties 😉
Learn some critical thinking to start. If it’s illusions you’re trying to escape, learn what aspects of human nature those illusions are preying on to sustain them.
Hang out with folks who are at least nominally more intelligent than you. Never be the most ignorant person in the room, nor the most intelligent / expressive.
That holds pretty true no matter your industry - and if you can identify the actual thought leaders in adjacent biz areas, so much the better.
Read. As much as possible. And then think about it, find the takeaways. The takeaways will be crap at first, but will improve rapidly.
Know your limits, but also know your cheat codes. Use the latter to gain admission to progressively more challenging circles.
There is no one on earth, and no series of events, from whom/which you cannot learn something. It might not be life changing, but it’s still worth searching for the worthwhile content.
Read more. Go to the local library and read.
This assumes that ideas have a central significance. I suspect that this is an illusion of perspective.
If perspective is illusory, then learning more subjective perspectives will help you see commonalities and find additional ways to address them.
You may not believe that the writer has valid perspectives, but you will learn more about how perspectives are presented.
I don’t mean that the writer might have invalid perspectives, I mean that the assertion that ideas have a central importance is itself an error of perspective. Thinking might not matter as much as we think it does.
Step two: Try not to be so pretentious and closed-minded.
Being “smart” comes from the ability to see the world from other perspectives. Perspective is the gift books give us, and the reason you’ll get “smarter” from reading them. You gain nothing from taking the easy route and writing these sorts of things off as “beneath you.”
right back at you
If you’re truly looking for some grand “Truth” of the world, the only people that can provide that to you are religions and con-men. So my honest advice in that case would be to go to your choice of religious gathering and talk to the people there.
Not looking for truth so much as a method for getting truth. Even the finest logic is only as good as its assumptions. And even the finest ideas are just ideas.
At the end of the day, you’re right - we can only perceive the world from our own flawed perspective. There’s no guarantee to anything, hence Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am.” Descartes struggled with the same foundational thoughts about the world that you seem to be struggling with, and he wrote books to pass on his conclusions to us.
There are, in fact, many people that have had these same struggles throughout history, and there are whole branches of philosophy and logic to address exactly what you’re talking about here.
But the only way to learn what they’ve found is to read what they wrote (or I guess to consume some other media explaining it).
It’s your refusal to seek out and accept this knowledge that makes me worry that you may have symptoms of schizophrenia. I know people dealing with this, and the way you talk about the world being “illusions” and your desire to be “smart” (using an alternative definition) sounds exactly like something they might say. I’m not trying to be an asshole, I just want you to be aware it might be worth looking into, just in case.
That, or you’re 14. I guess that could also do it.
Ouch. My ego.
Surely there are methods for modifying your perspective in a less-than-biased way.
Wow you are truly insufferable, aren’t ya?
I’m playing it dead straight. It is you who is the source of any suffering here.
By illusions you mean misinformation or bad arguments? Learn the logical fallacies and look for them. It’s astounding how people use them unknowingly or even knowingly. Watch videos on deconstructing arguments.
By illusions you mean misinformation or bad arguments?
The main source of illusions that I can think of is errors of perspective.
For example if you stare at a beige wall all the time you might conclude that the universe is beige, and the evidence would support that conclusion, but of course you are wrong.
Another is the illusion of scale. Where, when something is close it looks large, but when it is distant it looks small. This works for everything, sights, sounds, thoughts…
And of course one’s thinking is built upon this shaky foundation.
Learning new perspectives means you just need to learn more, get out of your comfort zone, entertain new ideas, do a lot of thought experiments. BUT you have to be aware of propaganda and misinformation techniques, so my original thoughts still work.
There’s a saying that the mark of intelligence is entertaining an idea without accepting it. Entertain ideas, learn how to analyze them, watch out for fallacies from them and from yourself.
You could have just said “yeah”
lol the only illusion here is the illusion that you’re a human being worth talking to. Try crack that one first, hombre.
read in general, play mental games like suduko and doing crosswords (mix up from different authors as if you do the same author every day you learn more their preferences). in your reading do some for pleasure like fiction you like but read philosophy and if you have not learned it work on elementary logic.
I think that mental stuff is useful but, in the big picture, just a toy.
yeah rereading your post I gave you the opposite of what you wanted. Your title and posting sorta contradict each other. If you just want to get spiritual I would say breathing and meditation but it won’t necessarily make you smarter in the common usage of the word.
I know, smarter generally means better at brain stuff. Better thinking. Having a lot of good knowledge stored in your head too.
But there is infinitely more the the world than thinking. And having ideas about the world is a pretty shallow form of understanding. Ideas are like shadows.
So a better kind of smarter would give you better understanding of this “infinitely more”. That’s the kind of smarter I’m looking at.
Your question is vauge, however:
I just borrowed this from my local library.
Here are more similar courses from the same series.
There is no magic pill, but these are probably steps in the right direction.
Can you think of a less intellectual approach? I think that the intellect might be a dead end.
Read read read
reading is overrated.
