To see beyond the obvious is to understand that there are phenomena, information that comes through our senses. To achieve this capability, it is advisable not to comply with the accessible and understand the context of situations.
While very intuitive people can see beyond the obvious, not everyone develops this skill. There are professions that base their exercises on this kind of thinking. Physicians, psychologists, investigators, and forensic experts must go beyond apparent facts or evidence to reach a final conclusion. Conclusion We can all practice this kind of thinking.
- However.
- To see beyond the obvious is a disused art.
- When we receive information about a problem.
- We tend to simplify its approach almost automatically.
- And we do it a lot.
Trying to look for other more complex alternatives to certain approaches is unusual and would not be consistent with the principle of cognitive economics, people’s natural propensity to process the information we receive in the most economical way possible.
As if that were not the case, we always tend to simplify responses to certain problems and yet, thanks to the accessibility of technological development, problems could somehow be simplified and, with them, their approaches.
However, this can prevent us from looking beyond the obvious and approaching the truth, so to see beyond that, complex thinking needs to be developed and practiced.
This need to look beyond the obvious and approach the truth is studied by the French sociologist and philosopher Edgar Morin, according to him, the greater the complexity, the more details we must take into account about the society in which we live. it’s easy to ignore what’s priority or relevant.
Thus, due to the characteristics of today’s society, it is necessary for a person to have a well-founded opinion to think carefully about the information they receive; this capacity for reflection is what he called complex thinking.
Don’t think about reducing what’s going on
Instead of falling into a simplistic thought to approach the truth, he argues otherwise: increase information, the person should not think in a way that reduces what he is living, nor choose a position based on one or few facts.
However, complex thinking has the disadvantage of not being innate, it is necessary to learn it and know how to apply it.
Pedagogical philosopher Matthew Lipman felt that it was extremely necessary to instill this kind of thinking in children from an early age.
Complex thinking is accessible to everyone and, just as we do with simple thinking, we can also practice it.
The term complexity, in Edgar Morin’s thinking, can be represented as a great network, whose fine threads intertwine and connect its components. Cables are events, actions, returns, determinations, or luck.
If the founder of this type of thought was Edgar Morin in the twentieth century, his predecessor, Leonardo da Vinci, had already studied the subject in the fifteenth century and proposed strategies to develop the complex thinking observed in his theory of complexity. , from this vision, they push the viewer to look for information on aspects that are not evident.
Greek philosophers have used notics, the philosophy that studies thought, especially the objective and the intelligible, yet sometimes we ignore or do not have access to information.
The word noetic comes from the Greek verb noew, which means “to see to discern”, from which “to think” is derived. The Greeks used this verb in the close sense of “intuitively” in the sense of seeing intelligible.
Understanding that there is information we do not know is the first step in the development of complex thinking, seeing beyond the obvious is accessible to all. However, to see beyond the obvious, one must have more intention than intuition. To see the obvious, we must first see what is not so obvious.