What does it mean to be a scientist?

Hi guys,

So what I was wondering about is the following:
What is a scientist for you?
The pdc is for scientist and so on, but what exactly does it mean?

Philosophically spoken anyone who is interested in science, seeking to find the truth behind natural phenomena could be a scientist.
But practically spoken there's different forms of science, some say only nature science are real science.
Others would say a real scientist starts at the phd level, bachelor and masters are only wanna - be - scientists.

So what's your opinion about it

Also important for me to know if I can call myself a scientist or not. 😆


Thanks

Charlotte Tessadri wrote:Hi guys,

So what I was wondering about is the following:
What is a scientist for you?
The pdc is for scientist and so on, but what exactly does it mean?

Philosophically spoken anyone who is interested in science, seeking to find the truth behind natural phenomena could be a scientist.
But practically spoken there's different forms of science, some say only nature science are real science.
Others would say a real scientist starts at the phd level, bachelor and masters are only wanna - be - scientists.

So what's your opinion about it

Also important for me to know if I can call myself a scientist or not. 😆


Thanks

Hey Charlotte,

There certainly do seem to be a lot of different opinions about what qualifies a person to call themselves a "scientist." All I can do is comment on my personal way of looking at the question.

Universities and colleges have worked very hard to position themselves in the mind of the general public as the sole gatekeepers of higher learning. There is a lot of money to be made by playing the role of gatekeeper and making sure everyone has to jump through your precisely-defined hoops to get a piece of paper that says that they know something.

As a result, these institutions have also worked hard to make sure that people view them as having the sole right to bestow titles such as "scientist" or "engineer" on people. Having been in the industry for about three decades and having gone through engineering school myself, I don't buy it.

Some of the people I have met with PhD's in science and engineering have been so clueless that I wouldn't trust them to look out the door and tell me whether I needed an umbrella (although I should note that there have been some extremely sharp PhD's I have worked with as well). And I have also met folks with absolutely no formal education above high school that come as close to the ideal of being a scientist or engineer as anybody I have ever met.

In fact, if I had to name some of the best scientists I have ever run into, it would be the trackers among the San people of the Kalahari Desert. Most of them can't even read or write, yet every researcher who has worked with them is amazed at their abilities as observers and researchers.

In fact, Louis Liebenberg, in his book The Art of Tracking: The Origin of Science, argues that the trackers among our hunter-gatherer ancestors were the first true scientists. He worked with the San for many years and was able to use an icon-based software interface to allow them to record what they were seeing in the landscape around them. Louis was able to show that these trackers know way more about the ecology of the Kalahari than any of the PhD researchers that are studying it. They are also much better observers and don't seem to bring their own preconceptions to the table nearly as much as most researchers with a formal education.

Because they live in a place where there are several dozen species that can kill them or their children, the San have to learn at any early age to pay close attention to what is really happening around them. Allowing themselves to put their own pet theories ahead of the actual evidence of what is going on around them would likely result in getting themselves or somebody else killed. So they can't afford to get stuck in their own heads and ignore what reality is clearly saying. They clearly use their own version of the scientific method to figure out their environment and how to survive there. They let reality teach them without holding onto a particular idea because the happen to like it or think it makes for an elegant theory.

So if I were forced to define what makes for a good scientist, I wouldn't point to degrees or the amount of formal education a person has. I would look for the following things:
*Do they observe what reality is telling them and put that evidence ahead of what they think they already know?
*Are they actually effective observers, able to see what is really there instead of what they want to see?
*Do they use some form of the scientific method to work out how the world really works?
*Are they curious about the world and actively building a mental map of how the things they are studying work?
*Are they rigorous and thorough in their work?
*Do they put in place ways to check their conclusions so they don't get caught by their own biases and blind spots?

If you want to define "science" in the strict terms of western academia, then there are probably other things to add and certain pieces of paper you need to pay a lot to get. For me, a scientist is a person who thinks and acts like one, not one who has a piece of paper that says they are.

And I very much appreciate what Alan just said about defining "scientist."
The original science was about using the results of experience - experiment - instead of orthodoxy to determine truth or falsehood of claims.  

Scientists, artists, religious scholars, and riflemen may all have well-honed intuition.  And they may all take training from authorities and masters of their craft.
What distinguishes an effective scientist - and often an effective artist, rifleman, or minister - is that they take those lessons and impulses, and test them against actual results.  
A rifleman may believe that breathing out or holding his breath improves his aim - but he will need to practice it, and the shot groupings will prove which is more effective.  In some cases, what works best for one person or weapon may be different from another; in that case, it's still your job to do as your drill sergeant trains you (authority), but it may not truly be the best method for your best performance.  You can become a very good marksman just shooting at pine cones - but target papers give you a better way to test, and thus hone and calibrate, your best practices.

I'm enjoying the company of fire fighters partly because, like the bushmen's traditional environment, the fire ground is a field where reality can kill you if you get it wrong.  
There are good reasons for a lot of the 'orthodoxy' of these high-risk livelihoods; novices do well to follow their training and follow orders religiously.
But there's also a culture of lifelong learning, and of sharing observations, and updating the models as conditions warrant.  
By sharing observations, I'm not talking about endless discussions of theory in the field.  New fire fighters are more likely to talk a lot than older/more experienced ones.
Often the most interesting days have long periods of silence, or minimal verbal communication over the noise and confusion of events.  It's the boring days when people talk over repetitive tasks.
Talking and comparing beliefs involves sharing mental models, and as such, can be a barrier to actual observation.

Thank you for this detailed and very deep answer to my question. I'm really impressed and thankful for the package of knowledge you just gave me. I am really wondering how it would be to talk to you for real.  :-)

And I have to say I'm also very happy about your answer. I like to call myself a scientist because I love to observe and I also love the challenge to break my boundaries and search for the unknown or let's say renew old, dusty paradigms.
I'm very much into the science of yoga which is a very old and mostly misinterpreted science about how we perceive our reality. I believe that yogis were the first indian scientists, who included much more in their observations than modern scientist do today. That's why they might have gone much deeper as we go today.
Studying yoga deeply definitely redefines your view of human capacities and practicing it truly extends yours and the capacities of your surrounding for sure.

Please forgive me my English, it's a bit late now and my brain is tired. 😊

Anyway thank you for the answer.
I'm still a bit curious tough:
I studied educational science and I am very much interested in pedagogical concepts that educators use to teach people.

Can you tell me a bit about your approach of teaching permaculture and also your way of teaching to teach permaculture. 😊

How do you think can and will people sustainably learn and which methods to you use to support them in your courses?

Looking forward to another great answer
Thanks

I kind of look at it as....when one is using the scientific method one is acting as a scientist.  You can be a professional scientist, an amateur scientist, have a doctorate in a science, have a bachelor's degree or be a high school drop out.  Those are just extra titles to characterize the folks, but I think someone is only a scientist when they are doing science.  Don't get me wrong, some people are better at it than others....some much better.  And peer review is a critical part of the process.  Without peer review it gets dicey fast because it's much too easy to fail due to our unexamined biases.  Peer review isn't perfect, but it certainly tends to help.

Charlotte Tessadri wrote:Thank you for this detailed and very deep answer to my question. I'm really impressed and thankful for the package of knowledge you just gave me. I am really wondering how it would be to talk to you for real.  :-)

And I have to say I'm also very happy about your answer. I like to call myself a scientist because I love to observe and I also love the challenge to break my boundaries and search for the unknown or let's say renew old, dusty paradigms.
I'm very much into the science of yoga which is a very old and mostly misinterpreted science about how we perceive our reality. I believe that yogis were the first indian scientists, who included much more in their observations than modern scientist do today. That's why they might have gone much deeper as we go today.
Studying yoga deeply definitely redefines your view of human capacities and practicing it truly extends yours and the capacities of your surrounding for sure.

Please forgive me my English, it's a bit late now and my brain is tired. 😊

Anyway thank you for the answer.
I'm still a bit curious tough:
I studied educational science and I am very much interested in pedagogical concepts that educators use to teach people.

Can you tell me a bit about your approach of teaching permaculture and also your way of teaching to teach permaculture. 😊

How do you think can and will people sustainably learn and which methods to you use to support them in your courses?

Looking forward to another great answer
Thanks

Charlotte,

I think you are bringing up a very important point when you ask about ways of teaching to teach permaculture.

A young man I was working with several years ago said, "I finally realized you aren't just interested in creating good students or even creating good teachers. You want to create good teachers who can create good teachers."

I think this precisely catches the point. If we only create good students, we pass things down for one generation. If we create good teachers, we can probably pass things down two generations. But if we can create teachers who know how to create other good teachers, then we are moving towards being able to keep things passing down sustainably.

Let me first attack the question of pedagogy in general, and then address how it applies to teaching a PDC or helping people learn permaculture in general.

Modern Pedagogy vs. Deep Learning

Teaching via lecture to students in a group setting is a rather recent human innovation which probably only started a few thousand years ago and wasn't widely practiced on large numbers of people until the later part of the nineteenth century. This way of teaching imposes a number of specific habits and patterns of thought on those who are taught this way, not all of them good.

I mentioned the San people above. If you look at how they pass on knowledge to their children, you will quickly notice that the have nothing that remotely looks like a classroom or a bunch of kids sitting down to listen to a didactic lecture. The closest you will come is everyone listening to the storytellers around the fire in the evening. Yet when the average 14-year old San is tested to see what they know about their environment and how to live there, the estimate is that they have also assimilated and can apply at least as much information as the average person with a Master's degree from a major university. The San are clearly doing something much more sophisticated than we are. Without classrooms, books, lectures, or even reading and writing.

What the San have is something that Jon Young (an expert in cultural mentoring systems and the founder of the Eight Shields Institute) calls the "invisible school." It is built into their culture so that children absorb information as an ongoing part of simply living in the village.

As I studied these mentoring systems with Jon, I started to sort out an categorize all the different ways I had noticed that human beings have developed to share information with each other. My list right now stands at 13 distinct methods. I don't have room here to explain all 13, but will at least list them to give you an idea of the range of techniques:

 1. Didactic Instruction
 2. Art of Questioning
 3. Storytelling
 4. Games
 5. Role Modeling
 6. Experiential activities
 7. Invoking children's universal passions
 8. Imitation and Emulation
 9. Trickster
 10. Symbol and Pattern
 11. Synchrony and Entrainment
 12. Music and Rhythm
 13. Objects that teach on display

If you look at this list, you will probably agree that most teachers in modern classrooms spend the vast majority of their time on the first method. Good teachers will add the second and third methods. Great teachers will manage to work in even more.

The invisible school run by the San uses all 13 and probably others I haven't figured out yet.

The problem is, of course, that the logistics of a single teacher running a classroom full of students doesn't typically allow for bringing the full range of teaching tools to bear. Thus the heavy dependence on didactic teaching.

Didactic teaching can certainly be effective in the right contexts (though probably never as effective as the proper mix of all 13 methods), but as I studied how didactic instruction works I realized that there are certain prerequisites that must be met in order for a group of students in a classroom to learn efficiently.

I came up with a list of eight prerequisites for effective didactic learning, which I will included in the attached PDF file for those who would like to read it.

If you look at this list, it becomes obvious that a number of things all need to line up for the standard academic classroom structure to work well. And in many cases this isn't happening in a lot of our schools.

Pedagogy in Permaculture

This brings me down to the challenge of teaching a PDC.

To make any sense, I think we have to approach the PDC as one prong of a multi-faceted approach to learning. I call the PDC "an introduction to thinking like a permaculture designer." When done well, it is a great compliment to all the other critical pathways of learning, such as working with mentors, hands-on experience, reading and studying on your own, etc.

The reason I say that teaching a good PDC is a challenge is that there is so much groundwork to lay down to help people start to think like a whole-systems designer, and you have a very limited amount of time to do it. The result is that there is a fairly good amount of didactic instruction that creates the backbone of the course.

The reason for so much didactic is that it is the most efficient way to transfer certain forms of information in a short time provided that all of the prerequisites are met. So what you end up doing is working through the required 72 hours of classroom material, making it a mixture of lecture, discussion, storytelling, art of questioning, and design activities. You intersperse that will hands-on activities and demonstrations. And you let each student work through an entire design project on their own, broken down into well defined phases over the course of the entire class.

(There is a trade-off between letting students work together as a group and asking students to work through their design projects on their own. Group designs do help certain students learn to better work in group settings, but often at the cost of some students simply sitting back and watching as everyone else does all the work. For the more professional level students that I usually teach, I want them to work through all phases of the design project on their own and then present their design to the group individually. This insures they have worked through and internalized all parts of the design process.)

When done properly, a good PDC can help students learn to think in a whole new way: as whole-systems designers that embrace complexity instead of try to fight it. This preparation super-charges all of the other forms of learning they will do over the course of building the deep experience required to become an expert designer.

I certainly don't think that any single PDC can make someone a great designer all by itself. Instead, it should be a launching pad to send you off in the right direction, equipped with the right tools, to start the real journey of life-long learning.

Part of the reason I have designed my PDC to be tailored to the needs of a specific type of student is that I know that this is the best way to make sure these students get what they need. Because of that, I feel that there is a lot of room for many different approaches to teaching a PDC, each one optimized for its intended audience.

Greg Martin wrote:I kind of look at it as....when one is using the scientific method one is acting as a scientist.  You can be a professional scientist, an amateur scientist, have a doctorate in a science, have a bachelor's degree or be a high school drop out.  Those are just extra titles to characterize the folks, but I think someone is only a scientist when they are doing science.  Don't get me wrong, some people are better at it than others....some much better.  And peer review is a critical part of the process.  Without peer review it gets dicey fast because it's much too easy to fail due to our unexamined biases.  Peer review isn't perfect, but it certainly tends to help.

Greg,

Yes. I count peer review under the category of "putting in place ways to check your conclusions so that you don't get caught in your own biases or blind spots." It is the preferred way in many areas of modern academia, but not necessarily the only way.

When the San trackers hunt, they often do so in groups of two or three, constantly communicating back and forth, challenging each other's interpretation of what they are seeing. This is their form of peer review, and it works very well for them.

You could probably come up with any number of different ways to accomplish this. I think the most important thing is to make sure you have at least one (or preferably several) and that you make sure you are using it.

The problem with putting yourself into a name is that you limit yourself to what that name define. Scientist have protocols and guidelines to obey as thought in school. That to me is a limiting factor. Considering that each one is unique as they say ""no one rule applies to everyone". A very good example is given by Allan above. I am a scientist and inventor to me. What other people think of me is non of my business.

I think that with respect to the PDC, the idea is that this PDC is different from others.   The others are going to be taught at a level for people that have not yet read a book about permaculture.   So in the course, the very basics of composting will need to be taught.  

This course, will assume one of the following:

  - a foundation of permaculture.  maybe having read several books, or have a great deal of practice, or maybe consumed a lot of podcasts

  - ability to ramp quickly

  - a strong background in teaching

  - a strong background in science and/or engineering

Therefore, the course will be far more information dense.   Somebody who might enjoy a regular PDC will be overwhelmed.   A person that will enjoy this PDC will be bored with a regular PDC.

In 2012 I arranged a PDC such that 40 people that listened to my podcasts attended.   At least a dozen of them pulled me aside to say that they were bored.  I thought it was a pretty decent PDC, but, yes, I could see that they wanted much, much more.  

Alan provides a far more intense PDC.

I also think that a PDC like this is a good place to meet others of a similar frame of mind.

julian Gerona wrote:Scientist have protocols and guidelines to obey as thought in school.

Yes for most things protocols have been developed to simplify things, but they are not binding. It is perfectly valid to run things different from the norm, assuming the process is documented.
If scientists would only stick to existing norms, new discoveries would be quite rare.

Sebastian Köln wrote:If scientists would only stick to existing norms, new discoveries would be quite rare.

That's so true, Sebastian.

Dependence on government funding motivates scientists to stick to existing norms.
Not comforming to the orthodoxy of scientism can be a career ending event.
New discoveries are frequently met with condemnation and exile from the scientific establishment.

Sebastian Köln wrote:

julian Gerona wrote:Scientist have protocols and guidelines to obey as thought in school.

I disagree. Yes for most things protocols have been developed to simplify things, but they are not binding. It is perfectly valid to run things different from the norm, assuming the process is documented.
If scientists would only stick to existing norms, new discoveries would be quite rare.

This is something I noticed, during a bachelor-level education and science education career in which I met a lot of working research scientists.
Some of them gave encouragement along these lines:  
Don't sweat the memorization and math requirements. Those are "filters" that are used to test and grade students; they're very useful in some fields, but not as important as you might think for others.
Many people working in research can go for days or months without doing higher math, or trying to memorize new technical terms.  One mathematician described an actual mathematician's working life as "you spend a lot of time imagining and visualizing problems, like trying to figure out if you can turn a basketball inside out without pinching its surface...."
You can build strong teams where members have different skills.  
The daily work of doing scientific research involves a lot of intuition, a lot of creativity, a lot of persistence and stepwise completion of repetitive tasks, and a lot of head-scratching and problem solving when things don't go the way you expected.  One research chemist said if you're not "failing" (getting results other than expected) at least 90% of the time, you're not doing cutting-edge research.  (He also said the welding and machine shop classes were the most useful part of his PhD.)
So persistence, good record-keeping, and a creative eye for new implications of funny things that happened today, can be far more important than a particular protocol.

One mentor's favorite example was a story of a screw up that changed history: Dr. Flemming was studying mold, sneezed on a petri dish, and instead of throwing it out, he documented it.  the dish in question contained penicillium, he was alert enough to notice that the bacterial colony shapes were unaffected (the other germs got knocked out of their way), and the result was penicillin and the age of antibiotics.  Fortune favors the prepared mind, but the best education makes no difference if you run your lab with your eyes shut.

Protocols are certainly critical in some forms of research, particularly applied sciences like medicine.  "Labs" like blood work or drug screens are not opportunities for creativity - they are diagnostic tools that need to be consistently performed and documented in order to serve the doctors and patients who need reliable information.  
The data you are gathering is critical to real-world, life-altering decisions for patients; and it's also part of a much larger, slower process where that data may be compared in large-scale statistical trials and models.  Gathering consistent data, or finding ways to compare different data fairly, is also critical to studying large-scale complex problems like climate change, tidal chart predictions, or new diseases.  Where complex systems affect people's lives, it's easy for small errors or assumptions to multiply into misleading results.  
Insight about these issues often come in a flash of creative inspiration, but fact-checking them can take years.  In some of these sciences, rigorous protocols are part of a respectful due diligence to protect the lives involved.  Where the data and decisions affect lives immediately, or where they may be used to mandate government regulations that affect many lives for many generations, we expect and demand more careful study from our scientific experts.  The reason we ask for scientific data, as well as public opinion or local knowledge, is that there may be many opinions, and getting it wrong could hurt many people.  Our population now moves so frequently, that traditional knowledge and rules of thumb that we learned from our parents and grandparents may not even apply to our current ecosystem or culture.  Science can help determine which of several appealing mental models is actually relevant to the current situation.

And then we go and elect politicians to run the system, regardless of the science. ;-P

Making this far to complicated.

First a scientist is an observer.

what is learned then goes thru the scientific method.  A hypothesis is formed.  A way to test it is found and applied.  At this point either we go back to step one or we continue and what is learned is shared with others so others can check the work.

Learning, forming hypothesis, testing, sharing with others for verification is a scientist.

I think practicing permaculture is a great way to awaken the inner scientist in people, but I am not very strict with the word scientist. For me a scientist definitely is a person who wants to free themselves from the norms to discover the truth beyond the known. Old paradigms have to be changed or thrown out for something new to come. If you research within a discipline you already are caught in the concepts of that discipline, meaning you're already nit thinking freely, because the perspective you're researching from has been taught to you from someone else, who has also taken over concepts from another person.  
Thus a scientist who has studied in his field for many years might not be as free as someone who has never studied anything before.

And I think to really observe something, perceive it purely it is better to have a free mind rather than a mind stuffed with various concepts.


Anyway: Alan, thank you for the response about the education techniques from the San people. I'm very fascinated now and I'm wondering why you have such a deep knowledge in that field. Did you live with them for some time?  

Charlotte Tessadri wrote:I think practicing permaculture is a great way to awaken the inner scientist in people, but I am not very strict with the word scientist. For me a scientist definitely is a person who wants to free themselves from the norms to discover the truth beyond the known. Old paradigms have to be changed or thrown out for something new to come. If you research within a discipline you already are caught in the concepts of that discipline, meaning you're already nit thinking freely, because the perspective you're researching from has been taught to you from someone else, who has also taken over concepts from another person.  
Thus a scientist who has studied in his field for many years might not be as free as someone who has never studied anything before.

And I think to really observe something, perceive it purely it is better to have a free mind rather than a mind stuffed with various concepts.


Anyway: Alan, thank you for the response about the education techniques from the San people. I'm very fascinated now and I'm wondering why you have such a deep knowledge in that field. Did you live with them for some time?  

Charlotte,

I grew up outdoors all the time and started learning wilderness skills fairly young. I started studying tracking seriously about 20 years ago and have had the good fortune to spend some time tracking with a number of native people in a few places around the world, including Botswana. The native tracker I got to spend some time with there was not San; he grew up in the Okavango Delta. I used the San for illustration because one of my teachers has spent a lot of time with them and has documented the details I discussed.

In addition to permaculture, I also teach some wilderness skills, tracking, primitive fire making, bird language, and navigation. Primitive skills is an ideal way to help people build the connections to the natural world that makes them both excellent observers and caretakers, thus acting as a gateway to them wanting to learn permaculture and how to work with the Earth in a better way.

I am currently writing a book called Observation for Design that takes students through a 14-week program of learning deep observation skills and helping them understand how this relates to being a good designer. We always say that observation is a key to good permaculture design, but we seem to almost never actually teach that skill.

Quite a lot of scientific findings are profoundly counter-intuitive.
Wave-particle duality for instance isn't something that just anyone could notice, you need the foundational physics from which to build and an extremely specific experiment to illustrate it.

Our perception is derived from imperfect animal senses designed to survive the world, not understand it.
I find the science around things like confirmation-bias, optical illusions and the Dunning-Kruger effect make it easier to doubt the first-impression model our brains present us - which produces the humility necessary to investigate new ideas and be open-minded about abstract ones.
And the more times your intuition is proved wrong, the easier it is to entertain new theories.

For all the things said against academic orthodoxy, we wouldn't be having this discussion without it.

Jondo Almondo wrote:Quite a lot of scientific findings are profoundly counter-intuitive.
Wave-particle duality for instance isn't something that just anyone could notice, you need the foundational physics from which to build and an extremely specific experiment to illustrate it.

Our perception is derived from imperfect animal senses designed to survive the world, not understand it.
I find the science around things like confirmation-bias, optical illusions and the Dunning-Kruger effect make it easier to doubt the first-impression model our brains present us - which produces the humility necessary to investigate new ideas and be open-minded about abstract ones.
And the more times your intuition is proved wrong, the easier it is to entertain new theories.

For all the things said against academic orthodoxy, we wouldn't be having this discussion without it.

I agree with most of what you said except that I regard intuition as being something separate which is not a derivative of our physical senses.

Intuition is the birthplace of innovation.

I think intuition usually fosters the opposite of innovation and too often we impose hypotheses on our intuited-designs after the fact and then revel in how 'clever' we are.
Our brains are not beyond a little self-serving revisionism, it can be instinctive and totally subconscious and guarding yourself against it requires constant vigilance.
--
When a farmer sees some plants growing poorly on hard-panned soil, its his intuition that tells him to repeatedly plow the soil.
Meanwhile the weedy species outgrowing his cash-crops above the hard-pan are invisibly repairing the soil below-ground, counter-intuitively benefiting him.

Intuition turns howls of winds into malevolent spirits and it makes us anthropomorphize our pet predators so we don't mind consuming valuable resources in feeding them in their billions.
Pareidolia gets right down to brass tacks in showing how unreliable our mental apparatus can often be.


The design science we call permaculture definitely wasn't intuited, it was painstakingly referenced and it compiled information from the various faculties in the academic orthodoxy - which had actually done quite a good job up to that point with their reductionist approach to their respective fields, it simply lacked the interdisciplinary and practical application of the sciences for individual and environmental benefit.

Jondo Almondo wrote:I think intuition usually fosters the opposite of innovation and too often we impose hypotheses on our intuited-designs after the fact and then revel in how 'clever' we are.

What you described is the majority view of intuition.

My own experience is different because I wasn't educated. As I see it, the real world is the only place where the rubber meets the road.... and this objective reality is the only place where you can discover whether or not your intuited designs actually work.

Although I work in my own businesses, I also invent as an enjoyable hobby. Most of my ideas are literally dreamed up. I come up with a concept and build a prototype. I dyno test it to make sure it works. Then I build them and market them myself. The profits get ploughed into the next project. This intake manifold is one of the projects.

Jondo Almondo wrote:I
When a farmer sees some plants growing poorly on hard-panned soil, its his intuition that tells him to repeatedly plow the soil.
.

Nope its the mind conditioning that tells him to do that. He had seen it done by his parents and fellows therefore he does it too. His mind has been conditioned to think that way. A permie will not flow because his mind has been conditioned not to.

You are mistaking mind conditioning for intuition.

julian Gerona wrote:You are mistaking mind conditioning for intuition.

Bullseye.

Intuition is a separate experience which occurs outside the boundary of intellect.
After you experience intuition you can then use your intellect to ponder it.

Hi Alan,

I'm so interested in the life and education of the San people now.
Do you know if it's possible to visit them and directly learn how they educate their people?
It would be so great to write a thesis on them.

Thank you so much