B. LEVEL 7 INTELLECTUAL MATURITY
by Edwin L. Young, PhD
October 4, 2003

PROLOGUE TO INTELLECTUAL MATURITY
Understanding What Is Happening in Dialectical Reasoning and Creative Thinking
May 9, 2004

This is an introduction to a set of cognitive processes and operations that one can learn, practice, and apply to five aspects of intellectual life. Part of managing one’s mind in the pursuit of intellectual tasks entails the use of dialectical reasoning. Dialectical reasoning is usually thought of a involving two or more people. In fact, it can be more productive when carried on within your own head. As the term ‘Dialectical Reasoning’ is used here, it means reasoning and discussing through dialogue with oneself.

Dialoguing with oneself in one’s own head, or mind, can be a kind of intellectual investigation or a method to gain insight. Even if engaged in for only a short while, it can lead to deeper understanding of your question. If you use it to question your assumptions, it can expose your false beliefs. The more you use it, the more fruitful and unique angles you see. You have to trust that it will yield, that you will yield, surprising, and valuable insights. It can elicit ideas that seem to contain enough truth to be worth writing down and then follow up with researching the relevant literature or even designing a test. Eventually dialoguing with oneself, writing thoughts down, and follow up with action becomes and habitual cycle full of creativity.

Dialoguing with oneself and questioning oneself can result in gaining a new, more creative or productive perspective. Sometimes it may lead to seeing blind alleys and thereby eliminating fruitless ideas and reducing the accumulation of irrelevant knowledge about your subject. It may also lead you to grasping the essence of the problem that can be reduced to a simple abstraction or abstract principle that eventually may lead to some broad explanatory concept or some relevance or applicability you might never have discovered otherwise.

Dialoguing with oneself could or should sometimes involve imagining or conceiving opposite viewpoints or propositions and taking each side as an argument in one’s mind, pitting one each contrasted concept against the other. It also could involve imaging the non-existence of what you thought was a significant component. Therefore, you are pretending that what you thought was an essential, unquestionable part of the world you are studying, no longer exists. Now you try to imagine what that would do to that plank in the solid floor of reality. You can take this to a higher level, imagine all sorts of improbable or even unacceptable ideas, and see how they would play out in your thought experiment.

In a major study, dialectical reasoning is likely to involve stages of development in which one loops back from stages that are more advanced and setting them along side earlier stages to see if there is consistency or a cogent sense of logical development or evolution of the central thesis, proposition, or abstract principle. At some point, a general hypothesis may be developed and techniques for testing the hypothesis entertained and evaluated. A tentative theory might be set forth and then projected into appropriate arenas of science or life to get a sense of the value of its possible application. Arguments for and/or against these thought experiments can be developed and dialectically set against one another to get a sense of their relevance, viability, integrity, and even the aesthetic nature of the inner form of each considered possibility.

In daily life, in an occupation involving reasoning, or an academic discipline, people may engage in highly elaborate and sophisticated processes of dialectical reasoning or they may simply get rudimentary ideas that have an initial appeal or even somehow be identified with their self or ego and still go with that. Some seemingly shake hunches can turn into powerhouse ideas. The latter is a short-circuiting of the dialectical process and is more likely to lead to implausible results or blind alleys. You have to know when to pursue and when to let go of a sterile hunch.

Many people, I suspect, are not aware of the inner processes of dialectical reasoning that they go through. Becoming aware of the elements of their processes and/or learning what they are and developing them further tends to be very effective even when seeming to be inefficient. However, taking it a step further and learning more about your inner processes and practicing new processes may seem daunting or an unproductive use of their time. It will, however, prove both creative and significant.

The assumption of this work is that mastering these cognitive elements and inner processes of reasoning can greatly increase the person’s creativity, productivity, and success in their future work within whatever their discipline, occupation, or profession may be.

To succeed in this endeavor, you must understand and master the more basic underlying structures and processes of the mind and then move up to the way awareness itself is structured, and finally make a detailed analysis of the more sophisticated or cultivated cognitive operators that can be employed to pave the way for successful creative reasoning and creative production of an intellectual project. Finally, you must learn not only how to use some of these processes but to master and manage all of them when executing the tasks involved in your next intellectual project.

Table of Contents for Level 7 Intellectual Maturity

Preview Exercises Related To Intellectual Maturity

Using Your Mind to Acquire and Manage Cognitive Processes and Operations

Using Your Mind to Manage Opinion Formation

Using Your Mind to Manage One’s Approach to Intellectual Tasks

Using Your Mind to Manage One’s Conduct of an Intellectual Task

Using Your Mind to Manage Orientations to Time

Using Your Mind to Manage Your Body

Review Exercises Related To Intellectual Maturity

Intellectual Maturity
Preview Exercises Related To Intellectual Maturity

After reviewing these suggestions, consider how learning to manage your mind better and more intelligently could help you with your intellectual tasks.

Will this study of intellectual maturity make me aware of weaknesses in my mental functioning?

Be able to list some ideas related to mental functioning that you are going to try to incorporate, practice, and master.

Notice what will help you become aware of how difficult it is to detect the way your mind works and to manage your mind intelligently.

Ask if this will help me be more aware of the possible ways my own mind works, particularly how the way minds work that may be keeping you from living and learning intelligently?

Take note of ideas that will help you, stop, and write these thinking processes down. You may want to determine if there are other techniques that you could try in order to function more intelligently. Could you apply these suggestions to yourself and do it systematically?

Try to imagine examples of each of these possibilities. Next, think of how they could work for you.

Imagine how you might put these suggestions into practice. Next, you will want to try these new mind management techniques.

Consider how learning to manage your mind better and more intelligently has helped you?

The following, Section 1 is a near to final draft:

Using Your Mind to Acquire and Manage Cognitive Processes and Operations Necessary to Conduct Your Project

Management of your mind means:

To switch perspectives on a problem or experiment from its presented or normal field of play to conceptual levels on successive levels above and below that playing field and consider whether and how that alters the approach to the problem or evaluation of the significance of the experiment.

To switch to other perspectives such as temporal, cultural, historical, social environment, settings, situations, individual characteristics, life histories and the like. Practically everything about humans and human social organization changes to varying degrees over time from centuries to the course of a few years.

To manage the parameters of your attention or awareness as you move between different types of cognitive tasks.

To adjust the breath or narrowness of your focus.

To adjust the porousness of your field of focus.

To adjust the temporal direction of your focus in order to recall and reflection upon the past, project into the future, or restrict your focus to the present.

To maintain a persistence of versus a rapid switching between types of cognitive tasks in your project.

To make decisions about when to simplify the elements of the task, to isolate one or a few of the elements, when to expand and deal with more elements, or in the extreme when to attend to the full complexity of the whole task.

To make decisions about whether to temporarily try different ways to organize the task and its elements or to begin again and try to re-construe the task completely.

To pause and consider whether you should use logic and abstract signs or drawings to conceptualize and configure the elements of your task.

When using logic in analyzing and solving problems, you must also develop the ability to subject your own arguments and propositions to the test of logic and your hypotheses to testing.

To pause and consider whether this is the best time to begin categorizing or quantifying your task or building models with flow charts.

To consider using your imagination to recast your task or problem from different perspectives or even with art forms.

As you take different perspectives on different levels, exercising your ability to use or switch to different cognitive approaches or operations.

To consider moving from purely mental, paper or monitor oriented work or to switch to direct and physical contact or field investigations.

To consider moving into state of reflection or reverie so as to use thought experiments.

To consider whether this is the right time to step back and try to make cross-discipline comparisons. This will require being open-minded no matter how remote a discipline is from your own and being non-disparaging toward unfamiliar or different intellectual disciplines. Cross-discipline inquiries can often lead to cross-creative-fertilization as well.

To consider trying intuitively placing yourself inside the subject matter under investigation as though you are ‘it’. Within that subjective context, you might even attempt to use any other potentially relevant cognitive operations on you as the ‘it’.

To consider whether this is the right time to surrender focusing on the project itself and simply allow yourself to indulge, for an extended length of time, in a period of inaction for the sake of incubation.

If you engage in a period on incubation, then, if and as new insights surface, renewed patience and perseverance will be necessary to both bring the prior status of the task back into focus and at the same time to resolve to apply the new insights with vigor as the intellectual work or project will undoubtedly be extended over longer periods of time than previously anticipated. Do not be fooled into feeling that you are procrastinating if incubation goes on longer than you had expected. If you have a vague sense of what your criteria for fulfillment of your project should look like or feel like and are committed to reaching those criteria, you will not be procrastinating, and the incubation time will have proved worthwhile.

As some of the methods of mind management will demand stretching your mental muscles or cognitive repertoire, this will also require acceptance of the degree difficulty and effort involved in mastering these new cognitive processes. This means mustering the ability to accept one’s mental limitations on the way to mastery and then a willingness eventually to try to resume and forge ahead again.

The following Sections are still under construction.
Using Your Mind to Manage Opinion Formation

Reserving and suspending judgment until all relevant evidence is in and considered; ability to consider new contrary evidence and revise conclusions after contrary evidence is presented.

Realizing, in forming opinions about stands taken, developments, or events, it is not how much you like or do not like it but rather your understanding of the origins, validity of reports, explanations, significance, interpretations in terms of levels, and potential effects.

Rigorous orientation to facts; attempts to discriminate between spurious and less probable versus realistic candidates to be considered as causes for the explanations of the effects.

Discerning and being willing to admit errors and logical fallacies in one’s own opinions, assumptions, and sources of information.

Being able temporarily to assume opinions you deem antagonistic are true.

　

Using Your Mind to Manage One’s Approach to Intellectual Tasks

The ability to get a fix on and understand one’s lifetime beliefs and deep-rooted interpretations of perceptions, even searching out possible unconscious prejudices, and examine and question them as though from a different universe.

Ability to admit one’s mistakes in thought processes and conclusions.

Ability to question one’s mental processes and conclusions and ability for Self Correction of one’s thought processes and conclusions.

Honest recording and public revealing of one’s path and procedures in an intellectual project.

Ability to persist in an intellectual project; ability to delay, when necessary, and resume with composure and rededication.

Ability to reason objectively about issues of values, beliefs, and ethics.

Ability to overcome feelings that may bias you toward a subject, to take a dispassionate stance, and to observe patterns objectively over time.

Record, quantify, look for alternate configurations and patterns, portray data in different ways, and step back and regard from different perspectives.

　

Using Your Mind to Manage One’s Conduct of an Intellectual Task

Ability to both conduct intellectual projects in coordination and concert with others or alone.

Ability to take the risk of being intellectually creative.

Ability to accept possible validity of alternative approaches or strategies to an investigation.

Ability to use modeling of processes as an abstraction to bring order out of chaos and massive information, bring order to trends over time, and test the abstract model to see if actual patterns of reality conform to the patterns specified by the model.

Ability to plan in detail the steps to be involved in an intellectual project and subject them to scrutiny.

Ability to execute steps exactly, with precision, and accurately record the history of the executed project.

Ability to subject your conclusions and explanations of your project to the scrutiny of critics and skeptics and heuristically take their perspective and point of view for possible self correction.

Ability to acknowledge and reason honestly but fairly about intellectual differences in outcomes and the processes that were involved.

Using Your Mind to Manage Orientations to Time

Ability to conceptualize dimensions and directions of calendar time.

Ability to take different perspectives on time.

Ability to comprehend and master the art of timing.

Ability to work in concert with schedules.

Ability to comprehend different modalities or categories of time.

Ability to differentiate between the distortions produced by different kinds of experiences of time.

Ability to make comparisons between periods of time.

Using Your Mind to Manage Your Body

Ability to use your mind to differentiate between what authenticated experts diagnose as the most likely causes of diseases and what well-meaning friends suggest as causes based on limited personal experience.

Ability to use your mind to differentiate between what authenticated experts prescribe and that produce cures or ameliorate symptoms and what medications or remedies friends suggest as cures or remedies based on their limited experience, family tradition, or the appealing but dubious lore about magical cures found in subcultures.

positive sensations but must be delayed to achieve positive future consequences;

positive sensations that have negative future consequences;

cravings that are unpleasant but gratification must be delayed for positive, or avoidance of negative, future consequences;

negative sensations that you must endure for positive future consequences;

negative sensations that you endure to gain social acceptance in spite of the fact that they have negative consequences for health, psychological, social, or economic wellbeing;

harmful cravings you give in to in order to gain social acceptance in spite of the fact that they have negative consequences for health, psychological, social, or economic wellbeing;

negative sensations that must be attended to because they are the body’s signals that you must examine your physical or emotional health; cravings that you must heed for your health.

Review Exercises Related To Sections Covered in Intellectual Maturity

Has this study of intellectual maturity made you aware of gaps or weaknesses in your mental functioning?

List some ideas related to mental functioning that you are going to try to incorporate, practice, and master.

How difficult do you think it is to detect the way your mind works and intelligently to manage your mind?

Do you feel you will be more aware of the possible ways your mind works, particularly how the way your mind works may be keeping you from living and learning intelligently as intelligently as you would like to?

Can you train yourself to coach yourself in ways to stop and consider your thinking processes and decide to try to use new techniques so that you function more intelligently?

Give an example how you might have use prompts to make yourself aware of how you are proceeding mentally and switch to some new, more effective, mind management technique.

Are you convinced that learning to manage your mind better and more intelligently can help you?

Can you sketch out a tentative plan to practice mind management with respect to the different kinds of intellectual tasks?

Suggestions for Socially Responsible Thinking Techniques
Paths to Intellectual Maturity
by Edwin L. Young, PhD
May 24, 2009

Learning to adopt mental postures of questioning and doubting even toward seemingly trustworthy sources

Learning to take perspectives of others

Learning to take cross discipline perspectives

Learning to take perspectives on different levels of breadth and depth

Learning to integrate and organize items from disparate sources to see and form patterns and decipher systems

Learning to make the effort disintegrate and reorganize such items in different configurations

Learning to accept an increase in the level of complexity of one’s project if and when the subject matter demands it

Learning to expand or narrow the boundaries of the thought project

Learning to adapt the way one learns or thinks to the requirements of a different foci

Learning to recall consonant and dissonant instances to check assumptions

Learning to set aside positive or negative feeling reactions and take a more dispassionate posture

Learning to retain reservations about consonant and dissonant information until it can be researched or tested more thoroughly

Learning to persist in a line of thought or observation

Learning to shift temporarily to another, related goal for or direction of thinking while holding the former in readiness

Learning when to disengage from thinking and reflect on the processes you have used to get to this point and perhaps devise alternative processes and approaches to try

Next, learning to reengage and put the thoughts in writing to clarify them and then to repeatedly review and revise what you have written, set it aside and then go through the whole reviewing and revising process again

Learning to identify and resist social or ego pressures to forsake one’s sense of truth and forsake one’s integrity

Learning to forswear niggling, pedantic, academic questions and objections

Learning to resist the temptation to use or be drawn into the use of debate tactics as they are intended to win and are antithetical to the pursuit of truth

Without surrendering the goal, learning to increase the intensity or effort invested when difficulty requires it or to back off and retreat into reverie in order to allow one’s imagination free reign

Learning to adopt and adhere to a time schedule for work on an intellectual project and coordinate it with others demands on one’s time

Learning to avoid loss of focus or discontinuing a pursuit with failure to resume due distractions or temporary, long or short, interruptions

For expansion on this topic see: http://www.thenaturalsystemsinstitute.org/Postings_of_Essays_on_a_Wide_Range_of_Topics/CREATIVITY%20AND%20MANAGING%20THE%20CONSCIOUS%20MIND.ppt

At http://www.thenaturalsystemsinstitute.org/Stages_of_Growth_in_Maturity/index.html you may find the following additional topics on Level 7 Maturity

Personal Maturity
Interpersonal Maturity
Societal Maturity
Maturity in Intimate Relationships

Descriptions of earlier stages of growth in maturity are included at this site: http://www.thenaturalsystemsinstitute.org/Stages_of_Growth_in_Maturity/index.html