An individual's personality is his consistent proactions and reactions in similar situations ... — Robert H Kroepel

:up:

...caused by his desires, fears and priorities that comprise his mind. — Robert H Kroepel

:down:

Does this not explain the visible in terms of the hidden, the public in terms of the private? These old, familiar postulated entities, ghosts in the attic. What if 'desires, fears and priorities' are ultimately fancy and potentially confusing words for 'consistent proactions and reactions' in various situations?

. :up:

shit, I can't write... I laugh to hard! — Raymond

'Random' arrangements of words can signify, and this supports a detachment of words like 'qualia' from any ground in secret 'Experience.' ('Thesis a chew sorry.') Buy the whey, a friend once too no:

Who in his heart doubts either that the facts of feminine clothing are there and that the feminine fiction, stranger than the facts, is there at the same time, and that one may be separated from the other, that both may then be contemplated simultaneously & that each may be considered in turn apart from the other successively?

PS__It sounds like a political rant or screed, not a philosophical analysis of Consciousness. :cool: — Gnomon

Capitalist postsemanticist theory holds that the purpose of the writer is social comment, given that language is interchangeable with truth. That 'rationalism is a mythopoetical totality' is anything but Irrelevant or Obscure. In short, “consciousness is fundamentally unattainable"(Fardter 1976). "Qualia are rather the collapse, and eventually the absurdity, of consciousness". Or, in another register, the main thesis of any legitimately dialectical theory must be the absurdity, and some would say the futility, of any necessarily merely purportedly postdialectical 'language.'

inspirations

Except that qualia are the conscious understanding of the nòn-material content of the two gauge-coupled massless Dirac fields constituting reality. — Raymond

Too much tuna ! But would not that imply that the subject is performatively recontextualised within a theory that foregrounds a vanishing narrator? If 'truth' is indeed to be capable of significance, reality itself must be created by a lusty proletariate (but only if reality is equiprimoridal with culture; if that is not the case, knowledge is intrinsically impossible within a dismal regime of dialectical nihilism.) In other words, the subject is merely a self-referential pseudo-totality fluffed by a consensus which includes language as a hole.

influences

Can you break-down some of those polysyllabic words, so a non-specialist can follow the logic? — Gnomon

I hope an initially ingenuous investigation of the following is incipiently instructive. Awareness merely regulates a symbolic representation of Chaos, while an otherwise 'formless' Void illuminates our therefore essentially infinite Experience. If culture always exists only as a symphony of boundaries within which imagination shapes self-righteous belonging, the true Self nevertheless maintains its existential silence as a primordial summoning of Qualia.

a helpful co-creative source

Qualia Are Fundamental Particles Of Information

A seemingly secondary but eventually essential theme of Rhet Fardter’s critique of cultural objectivism is the paradigmatic hypermeaninglessness of any predialectical 'society.' If his rehabilitated and purified (counter-)semiotics holds, we have to 'chews' finally either a metaphysically conceptualist desituationism or an ignominiously infinite Conversation. In other 'worse,' either the aforementioned 'we-appropriation' of his 'slurrealism' or conclude after all that art is used to marginalize the proletariat.

paraphrased source

I'm not sure if I qualify as radical but I'm a dualist too. — Raymond

How can you be sure that charge is necessary for qualia? What data have you collected, even anecdotally, to show a relationship between brains and qualia ? I do not dispute the well known relationship between brains and reports of qualia.

How do you know the nearest toilet doesn't have a soul ?

If we accept pains as special qualia known absolutely but exclusively by the solitary minds that perceive them, this may be taken to ground a Cartesian view of the self and consciousness. Our consciousness, of pains anyway, would seem unassailable. Against this, one might acknowledge the absolute fact of one's own pain, but claim skepticism about the existence of anyone else's pains. Alternatively, one might take a behaviorist line and claim that our pains are merely neurological stimulations accompanied by a disposition to behave.

Wittgenstein invites readers to imagine a community in which the individuals each have a box containing a "beetle". "No one can look into anyone else's box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle."

If the "beetle" had a use in the language of these people, it could not be as the name of something – because it is entirely possible that each person had something completely different in their box, or even that the thing in the box constantly changed, or that each box was in fact empty. The content of the box is irrelevant to whatever language game it is used in.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_language_argument

Taking qualia seriously is like thinking a ten dollar bill is worth whatever you want it to be worth.

"...if we construe the grammar of the expression of sensation on the model of 'object and designation', the object drops out of consideration as irrelevant..."

Qualia are not information messages, whatever you mean with that. — Raymond

Mentioned above that I never made such claim, but I'll also add that the loose use of 'information' is not much better than the use of 'qualia.'

Huffing their own exhaust in a brown paper bag, it seems to me.

whatever you mean with that. Structures don't represent messages. — Raymond

I was quoting a paper I find suspicious. I'm wondering whatever they can mean by that sort of talk.

It is one thing to grasp the idea through skills living beyond a given generation but another to see how it applies to the very principle through which one understands themselves to be alive. Reproduce that. — Paine

It's not clear that 'principle through which one understands' isn't just some fancy word for the ability to learning. Will you grant an immortal substance to rats? Do direction-dancing bees get a piece?

From my POV, respectfully, you have not demonstrated an understanding of my point. That may be my fault, for not finding the right words. My point is not about consciousness denial at all, but only about the phoniness of the hard problem. This point does involve a denial of the utility or intelligibility of a certain metaphysical use of 'consciousness' or 'qualia.' In short, I think folks often don't know that they don't know what they're talking about.

Regarding the "how" of "establishing that qualia are caused by something", you can refer to neuroscience articles such as those linked below. — Gnomon

I just browsed the second link. It seems to completely miss the logical-semantic issue (as perhaps you do), and it's hard to gauge a priori whether it's published by cranks.

If you've actually read it, perhaps you'll be willing to summarize the argument for conclusion #3 below, namely the qualia of our inner conscious world are information messages.

So some basic conclusions can be drawn from the discussion of information processing so far.

• Information can be in the form of structures or messages.

• The brains physical activity deals with information structures.

• The qualia of our inner conscious world are information messages.

• Structures represent messages.

• Messages can be identified from structures.

• Structures, but not messages, can be transmitted from a sender to a receiver. — second link

As far as the Aristotle quote goes, it's at least as plausible to talk about dogtricks being a 'substance' independent of the dogs that learn and eventually forget how to do these tricks. Dogs come and go, but a dog-culture of tricks remains, assuming no interruption of cultural transmission or the canine dog.

Similarly you can think of dancers and dances. An old body can lose its moves, but usually there's a young replacement body to keep the dance from dying, since the dancers can't be saved.

Do they see the conscious as separate from matter? I mean, is it tied to it or can it escape, like the soul leaving the body when dead? — Raymond

A really radical dualism (or something like it) has (as I see it) nothing at all to say about the relationship between qualia and its substrate.

Think of it this way. No data is even possible, or not as long as a radical gulf is supposed to exist between I and thou (my private theatre and yours.) I might be a zombie. Your toilet might be a genius. External signs of consciousness are not signs at all, from this extreme POV, for there is and never has been any data.

In fact, of course, we attribute 'consciousness' to animals with sufficiently complex nervous systems, which suggests that the word gets its meaning not from some mysterious hidden stuff but according to publicly criteria, like number of neurons, successful learning, etc.

I was addressing an "occurring (i.e., actually happening) first person point of view". You were saying this assemblage of words has an unclear referent. — javra

I said that it's a matter of context. But (necessarily roughly speaking) I can say 'from my point of view' or 'from your point of view' unproblematically. My point is more critical than constructive. It's 'thrusting against language' and ultimately absurd to talk about some X that is radically private in principle (grammatically).

And how is a fictional first-person point of view an innocent ignorant assemblage of words? That we can all understand what a novel, fiction, written in the first-person point of view entails directly contradicts your affirmation. — javra

I think you misunderstand me. I said that the first-person-POV makes solid sense in a literary context. 'Innocent' is synonymous with acceptable in what I wrote above.

The main idea is that the questionable metaphysical extension (rarefied to absurdity) is parasitic upon the typical worldly use and context in which the hard problem vanishes. In fact, we make judgements about 'conscious experience' using the 'physical' all the time. Any meaning that 'conscious experience' can have for us depends precisely on the stuff that science can handle.

I imagine you imaging this world somehow transformed so that ceteris paribus (somehow) there is no more electric charge. So then brains as we know them don't work, etc. Fair enough.

But those who defend a radically immaterial 'private' I-know-not-what could suggest that charge-less mass could indeed be Conscious. The more the mysterions require an organic brain for and exclude calculators from 'conscious experience,' the more they demonstrate the parasitism of the sacred concept on our mental-and-physical-entangled ordinary life. In other words, saying that an organic brain is necessary for consciousness already 'defeats' or transgresses the hard problem and starts to explain-constrain-articulate consciousness, in terms of stuff we can all see. The true or consistent hardproblemer is or should be worried about stepping on cobblestones.

Oh. For that matter, evolution on this planet could have taken a different turn, so that no complicated nervous systems developed. Lots of things could be otherwise and plausibly make what we ever-so-vaguely call 'consciousness' impossible.

I see. Can you link me to some research? Some peer review? Or is this just a hunch?

'First person point of view' is potentially just as innocent as 'conscious experience,' such as a novel being written in the first person point of view.

Perhaps the subject is dull. It's been a long time since I was myself a mysterion, trying to build a world out of qualia.

Still, the hard problem is hyped as a profundity, and it seems to serve mostly as propaganda for irrationalism.

I can't do much either way with that phrase out of all context. Note that I mentioned giving the dead a better 'view' in my post above. Am I implying they have 'qualia'? Our language is so riddled with perceptions and intentions that we are simply haunted with obscure entities for which familiar entities serve as signs. This makes sense, because we are obsessed (evolved to be obsessed) with predicting others and holding them accountable. So we constantly talk 'through' what is manifest and measurable 'toward' a realm of souls with 'qualia' and 'free will' and ...

I suggest that this vocabulary of the hidden 'spiritual' layer depends (for its institution and continuing intelligibility) utterly on the banal, practical layer where science can take its measurements.

On what experiential or rational ground to you grant the first word no referent when, I presume, you do the second? — javra

As I said above, 'consciousness' has a family of meanings that are valid in ordinary life. If we thought the dead and buried were 'conscious,' we'd dig them up and offer them a better view. If we thought someone 'consciously' let a disaster happen when they could have easily prevented it, we'd treat them differently thereafter. The point is that any legitimate meaning of 'consciousness' is already so entangled in the world that the hard problem vanishes. It's only a hyper-rarefied paradoxical and parasitic notion of consciousness that helps the hard problem sound like a problem with science as opposed to its (the problem's) mischievous inventors.

Facts are an interpretation. — Raymond

Is that a fact? I suppose Nietzsche meant that our nervous systems are liars from the beginning, making unequal things equal, so that the raw material for thinking is already hyper-processed. I agree.

But in this context the point is whether one can be rational or scientific about this ghost of private conscious experience.

And, hey, Nietzsche still used the word 'facts.'

perhaps the time is at hand when it will be comprehended again...what actually was sufficient to furnish the cornerstone for such sublime and unconditional philosophers' edifices as the dogmatists have built so far—any old popular superstition from time immemorial (like the soul superstition which, in the form of the subject and ego superstition, has not even yet ceased to do mischief), some play on words perhaps, a seduction by grammar, or an audacious generalization of very narrow, very personal, very human, all too human facts. — Nietzsche

Its when the conclusion is made by an occurring first-person point of view that their own occurrence as a first-person point of view is a falsity (an illusion or whatnot: basically, not real) that the "cannot be taken seriously" issue comes into play. — javra

Respectfully, from my POV, you 'mysterions' (I dub thee such playfully) are trapped in the grammar of a word.

Just because some philosopher invented (the strange idea of) an entity-process-mystery that you or I personally (but always only personally) can't be wrong about, doesn't mean that such a thing actually exists or makes sense, however habitual it's become since then.

To be sure, 'we' know what you are talking about. But it's a screwed-up paradoxical concept.

What was missed in all of that is that mind (consciousness, being) is never an object of consciousness, because we're never outside of or apart from it. It is always only the subject of experience, but you can't 'objectify' it, for reasons which ought to be obvious on reflection. — Wayfarer

But we are talking about it right now. The concept is familiar and 'objectified.'

If we were truly 'never outside of or apart from it,' we'd have no word for it and no need for a word for it.

But that also means that it can't be accomodated by the 'objective sciences', due to their constitution being oriented exclusively around what is objectively the case (which is why the eliminative materialists wish to eliminate it, as there is literally no conceptual space on their map for it). — Wayfarer

'Objective sciences' sounds redundant to me. "Expressing or dealing with facts or conditions as perceived without distortion by personal feelings, prejudices, or interpretations." I can't speak for all critics of the qualia concept, but I suspect most of us know (in the usual problematic way) what the 'mysterions' are trying to say. We say it's a bug, not a feature. The hard problem is a hard problem for those want to give 'conscious experience' a metaphysical as opposed to an everyday-and-impure-and-unobjectionable meaning.

The physical sciences can describe organisms like ourselves as parts of the objective spatio-temporal order – our structure and behavior in space and time – but they cannot describe the subjective experiences of such organisms or how the world appears to their different particular points of view. — Thomas Nagel, the Core of Mind and Cosmos

'By definition' , only the 'experiencer' could describe their 'subjective' experiences.' It's just not physical scientists who have no means to chase such a ghost. It's every kind of serious, critical inquiry.
To be sure, anyone can make a public statement about their 'pain' or 'undying love,' and these tokens can be recorded and counted and correlated with other tokens and heart rates and shoe sizes.

The odd thing is asserting there's something 'logically' hidden (so no yet-to-be-invented machine will find it either) and yet insisting that the existence of such an entity is beyond question. (If philosophers do question it, they are monsters who can't be serious.)

If qualia are understood to be "intuited, given, and...not the subject of any possible error because...purely subjective" (as defined by C. S. Peirce), then any answer for us (any evidence-and-reason-supported rational answer) is impossible from the beginning.

The idea seems to be that science 'can't get at' or can't explain some mysterious stuff that we all have in common. What's missed is that our words for this 'conscious experience' can only get their public significance through our worldly interactions, through the kinds of stuff that science can and does get at.

the hard problem of consciousness simply doesn't exist. — Hermeticus

:up:

"Why is the performance of these functions accompanied by conscious experience?"

Another prior question is...what do can we mean by 'conscious experience' ? Looking at the use of the word, it seems we always depend on 'material' or 'objective' criteria for ascribing 'consciousness.' All we can reason from must be more or less uncontroversially public. (This is not new. Consider key passages from Philosophical Investigations.)

In short, the 'hard problem' is 'defined' (paradoxically) into a kind of pseudo-existence. It's a mirage.

Qualia are caused by physical processes, but have no causal powers of their own. — Gnomon

Hi. Picking on qualia is a hobbyhorse for me lately, so please pardon a question. How would one establish that qualia are caused by something? Would we not instead be limited to saying that reports (like 'I heard music') are caused by physical interference (like running a current through some part of the brain) ?

How would a case be made for the existence of qualia in the first place? Like the red square I'm using as my thumbnail. All we have to offer as evidence are public entities like reports or a rat trained to stop at a surface reflecting a certain frequency of light, etc.

It's tempting to treat qualia as fundamental, so that maybe existence is even 'made' of/from qualia, but I think the concept is problematic if not paradoxical.

C.S. Peirce introduced the term quale in philosophy in 1866.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia

There are recognizable qualitative characters of the given, which may be repeated in different experiences, and are thus a sort of universals; I call these "qualia." But although such qualia are universals, in the sense of being recognized from one to another experience, they must be distinguished from the properties of objects. Confusion of these two is characteristic of many historical conceptions, as well as of current essence-theories. The quale is directly intuited, given, and is not the subject of any possible error because it is purely subjective. — CS Peirce

"The quale is directly intuited, given, and is not the subject of any possible error because it is purely subjective."

If it's impossible to be wrong, it's impossible or just meaningless to be right also.

Along these lines, 'being-in-the-world' and 'being-with-others-in-language' seem to be 'equiprimordial.' Wittgenstein spoke of an urge to thrust against the limits of language. Can we hope for more than an objective correlative?

The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an “objective correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked. — TS Eliot

There's no way for Eliot to know that he's getting 'the' emotion he wanted, not if emotion is (misleadingly) understood to point to an inaccessible inwardness as opposed to a cluster of related practical significations.

Yet I think I know what people want to say with 'qualia.' It's part of that urge.

Finally, the wiki page on qualia features a red square, as if that could successully point to the quale of red. Does that sound right? Or does it not assume a singular quale for red? Not only without any evidence but in a context of the impossibility of evidence that's guaranteed by the concept/grammar of the word 'qualia.'

However, these questions are addressed in psychology and social sciences - they aren't simply matters of opinion or contextless philosophizing. — SophistiCat

:up:

the passage from moment to moment is its own kind of death and re-birth. He should have focused on that instead. — Joshs

I agree that living is dying is being born. Life is a controlled burn. It has a learned, inherited shape (genetic, cultural, and even little bit individual).

For me it's the intersection of Heidegger of language and history (and therefore what we are able or not to think now.)

One of the most interesting and important 'concepts' in Being and Time is that of Das Man, for which there is no exact English translation; different translations and commentators use different conventions. It is often translated as "the They" or "People" or "Anyone" but is more accurately translated as "One" (as in "'one' should always arrive on time").

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heideggerian_terminology

I connect this 'one' with the generation.

Dasein, whiling away its own time in each case, is at the same time always a generation. So a specific interpretedness precedes every Dasein in the shape of the generation itself.

A definite sense of being guides every natural interpretation of beings....Precisely by its being inexplicit, it possesses a peculiar stubbornness...

The fundamental way of the being-there of the world, namely, having the world there with one another, is speaking… — Heidegger

In another thread we disagreed about whether it makes sense to call the community prior to the individual. Well, I had this kind of thing in mind:

'Being together with others' implies an ontological characteristic of Dasein that is equiprimordial with 'being-in-the-world'. — Heidegger

Attempts to separate language from the world tend to crash and burn. The purified, isolated subject is ultimately unintelligible, but so is the notion of the purely physical. Note that I can snap the words together, but this is like writing a check I can't cash. It won't stop the philosophers from thousands of pages of intricate fun, of course.

Anyway, I credit Heidegger as one of several thinkers who seemed to grasp the shape of philosophy as a whole (or/also he creatively took-it-as such.) This take on Gadamer (H's student) gets it right.

The prejudicial character of understanding means that, whenever we understand, we are involved in a dialogue that encompasses both our own self-understanding and our understanding of the matter at issue. In the dialogue of understanding our prejudices come to the fore, both inasmuch as they play a crucial role in opening up what is to be understood, and inasmuch as they themselves become evident in that process. As our prejudices thereby become apparent to us, so they can also become the focus of questioning in their own turn..
...
Conversation always takes place in language and similarly Gadamer views understanding as always linguistically mediated. Since both conversation and understanding involve coming to an agreement, so Gadamer argues that all understanding involves something like a common language, albeit a common language that is itself formed in the process of understanding itself. In this sense, all understanding is, according to Gadamer, interpretative, and, insofar as all interpretation involves the exchange between the familiar and the alien, so all interpretation is also translative. Gadamer’s commitment to the linguisticality of understanding also commits him to a view of understanding as essentially a matter of conceptual articulation. This does not rule out the possibility of other modes of understanding, but it does give primacy to language and conceptuality in hermeneutic experience. Indeed, Gadamer takes language to be, not merely some instrument by means of which we are able to engage with the world, but as instead the very medium for such engagement. We are ‘in’ the world through being ‘in’ language.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/gadamer/#DiaPhr

I should note that 'nightmare' is more negative than necessary (but allowed me to connect Heidegger and Joyce.) Another way to talk about this is in terms of a snake trying to slide out of its dead skin.

'I am the prison and the prisoner.' Today's escapee is tomorrow's warden.

[The] point is that in as much as tradition serves as the condition of one’s knowledge, the background that instigates all inquiry, one can never start from a tradition-free place. A tradition is what gives one a question or interest to begin with. Second, all successful efforts to enliven a tradition require changing it so as to make it relevant for the current context. To embrace a tradition is to make it one’s own by altering it. A passive acknowledgment of a tradition does not allow one to live within it. One must apply the tradition as one’s own. In other words, the importance of the terms, “prejudice” and “tradition,” for Gadamer’s hermeneutics lies in the way they indicate the active nature of understanding that produces something new. Tradition hands down certain interests, prejudices, questions, and problems, that incite knowledge. Tradition is less a conserving force than a provocative one. Even a revolution, Gadamer notes, is a response to the tradition that nonetheless makes use of that very same tradition.
...
Just as the literal horizon delimits one’s visual field, the epistemic horizon frames one’s situation in terms of what lies behind (that is, tradition, history), around (that is, present culture and society), and before (that is, expectations directed at the future) one. The concept of horizon thus connotes the way in which a located, perspectival knowing is yet a fecund one: without the limitation of a horizon there would be no seeing.

https://iep.utm.edu/gadamer/#SH4c

The essence of something is not at all to be discovered simply like a fact; on the contrary, it must be brought forth. To bring forth is a kind of making, and so there resides in all grasping and positing of the essence something creative…. To bring forth means to bring out into the light, to bring something in sight which was up to then not seen at all, and specifically such that the seeing of it is not simply a gaping at something already lying there but a seeing which, in seeing, first brings forth what is to be seen, i.e., a productive seeing. — Heidegger

In other words, ποίησις (poesis) is central. :up:

To see X as Y (metaphor, analogy) is primary and even creates the culture. Dead poems stack up until rivers have mouths but no teeth. The tree stump is a chair. The stone is a hammer.

Heidegger himself is subject to an unpredictable taking-as.

Sounds rather like a description of karma. — Wayfarer

I don't know much about karma, but I like the theme, so I encourage you to share more on this.

frameworks of intelligibility aren’t stagnant. — Joshs

If they were, we'd have a framework rather than frameworks.

When I interpret a new experience by reference to such a frame , the frame is developed and articulated. — Joshs

Sure, the way we approach things ('mentally' or physically, individually or as a community) is modified as we go.

the past that frames my present comes already altered by that present. — Joshs

:up:

I think most would agree with this.

Uncanniness is the fundamental kind of being-in-the-world, although it is covered over in everydayness. Tranquillized, familiar being-in-the-world is a mode of the uncanniness of Dasein, not the other way around. Not-being-at-home must be conceived existentially and
ontologically as the more primordial phenomenon. — Heidegger

Yeah, I've seen that. I'm not sure there's a reason to believe it. The game of 'more primordial' seems to touch on the quasi-religion that Heidegger sometimes seems to be brewing. His talk about death is fascinating but eventually frustrating. I get the impression that he himself didn't quite know what he meant, that it was more of a feeling-clump than a thesis. Perhaps you can make a case, but I expect you'll want to venture outside the familiar jargon, else it's just repetition and not exegesis.

Here's an edit of what I quoted above.

The world with which we are concerned and being-in itself are both interpreted within the parameters of a particular framework of intelligibility.
...
One has a timeworn conceptuality at one's disposal. It provides the fore-concept for the interpretation. The interpretedness of a 'time' is strictly determined by these structural factors...And it is precisely the unobtrusiveness of these factors --the fact that one is not aware of them -- which gives public interpretedness its taken-for-granted character...The 'fore'-character in the structure of interpretedness shows us that it is none other than what has already been that jumps ahead, as it were, of a present time pervaded by interpretedness.

Guided by its interpretedness, expectant concern lives its own past. — Heidegger

I find this echoed and developed in your quote.

The past is not an earlier position but the now implicitly functioning past....the past functions to "interpret" the present,...the past is changed by so functioning. — Gendlin

Once a thinker becomes aware of this, history is a nightmare from which he is trying to awake. He himself is this history awake from his own blinding, imprisoning past --the one that governs his dreams of the future and his interpretation of the present.

This explains how philosophy personified could be trapped by ancient decisions that were never questioned since but experienced rather as 'obvious' necessity. I imagine fish seeing objects in the water, not the water itself. Heidegger tells me to look for the water, the unquestioned inherited framing of the situation that only becomes questionable and editable when foregrounded, made 'visible.'

I'm ambivalent about Heidegger. There's the stuff that seems both clear and good, and there's the stuff that comes off as confused spirituality. The challenge is finding honest English when possible for some of the insights...or in letting go of the attachment to some blurry promise that never quite materializes.

Also, I find 'temporalization' to be an extremely ugly word. There must be a better way.

I think this might contribute to the thread.

Scientists are just as vulnerable to wishful thinking, just as likely to be tempted by base motives, just as venal and gullible and forgetful as the rest of humankind. Scientists don't consider themselves to be saints; they don't even pretend to be priests (who according to tradition are supposed to do a better job than the rest of us at fighting off human temptation and frailty). Scientists take themselves to be just as weak and fallible as anybody else, but recognizing those very sources of error in themselves and in the groups to which they belong, they have devised elaborate systems to tie their own hands, forcibly preventing their frailties and prejudices from infecting their results. — Dennett

Critical thinking is social. If a hundred fools and mediocrities are properly organized, they can function together as if a genius.