Sunday 23 April 2017

Higher Wisdom?

"'...the Warlocks taught me that the nonrational sections of the brain were sources of higher wisdom, that dreams, instincts, and intuitions were superior to logic.'"
-John C. Wright, The Golden Age (New York, 2003), p. 192.

We have discussed these issues in relation to Poul Anderson's works. See links here and here.

"Nonrational" can mean either pre- or trans-rational. Only "trans-" would be "higher." Instincts, dreams and intuitions are different phenomena. Instincts are prerational. A dream might be the vehicle for an intuition which might be a realization resulting from unconscious mental processes and therefore not from conscious reasoning. Logic is consistency between propositions, therefore basic to any thought. An intuiton not arrived at by logically reasoning would nevertheless have to be thought about logically.

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

IOW, I could not agree with Wright's Warlocks that the non-rational parts of the brain were better or higher than conscious thought and logical reasoning. To me, a dream is simply how the sleeping mind thinks or remembers things, albeit in a disorganized, non-rational way. As you said, the WAKEN mind might then remember and think logically about dreams and intuitions.

Sean