Why I study wisdom

  I've got my first comment... exciting! Thanks, Azim. I was vacillating between replying as a comment and creating a new post for a few minutes, but my reply seems to have become long enough to necessitate the latter.

  The question posed was about my reasons for picking wisdom as my area of expertise. Since wisdom is a rather long-term phenomenon, I'll have to provide a rather long-winded explanation, too. :-)

  I've always seemed to be interested in cognition in one form or another. From the type of science fiction stories and movies I've liked as a child, to my early interest in computation and artificial cognition, it seems like my childhood experiences and interests had been preparing me for CogSci.

  This, of course, was a complete surprise to me. In fact, I didn't know that there even was a program at university called Cognitive Science. Instead, I tried to pursue a degree in other fields that, despite having strong theoretical overlaps, are quite different, methodologically. After flailing around rather uselessly as a Computer Science undergrad, and then as a Philosophy student, I took a couple of years off from university, to step back and clear my head. I was competent enough to do well in whatever courses interested me, but it seemed to me that I simply wasn't interested in very much at all.

  After becoming thoroughly disenchanted with working in a boring office for two years, I took stock of the courses that I had taken in university, and what I thought of them. Dr. Vervaeke's Introduction to Cognitive Science jumped out as the one course in my entire undergraduate career to have left a strong impact on my thoughts and actions as a person, despite having taken it as an elective, purely on a whim. It seemed like I was on to something.

  Then, I did something I hadn't done even while taking the course; I read the textbook cover-to-cover. What had once seemed like tedious details that were needed to pass a course became fascinating ideas that could be assimilated and recombined to fantastic effect. I began buying books on the mind and brain, on consciousness and A.I., and devouring them in rapid succession. Within weeks, I had re-enrolled in the Cognitive Science program at the University of Toronto.

  Now comes the question of what made me take up wisdom instead of some other interest within CogSci, since there are surely other fascinating topics of study that have better-established research programs, many times more experts in the field, and all of the advantages that come along with that. Why wisdom? I guess there are two answers that I could give, which provide responses to the hypothetical and categorical aspects of why I'm doing what I'm doing.

  After returning to university, I took Thinking and Reasoning, a psychology course on problem solving and decision-making, with Dr. Vervaeke. I did well in it and enjoyed myself immensely. It whet my appetite for learning more about how people make decisions, how they reason, and what factors lead to successfully achieving solutions to problems. It really helped me build invaluable research skills, too, since Dr. V. taught it in a way that emphasized the difference between answering three questions:

How do humans solve problems? (Descriptive)

How ought humans solve problems? (Normative)

How could humans solve problems the way they ought to? (Prescriptive)

  I remember spending days on end, scribbling ideas down, and obsessing over theoretical mistakes that seasoned researchers had made in understanding phenomena like insight. It was so much fun that I took Dr. V.'s next course, Higher Cognitive Processes, right after.

  Going into the course, I wasn't quite sure what to expect. I knew it was tied closely to Thinking and Reasoning, and that it dealt with phenomena that were hierarchically superordinate to problem solving. Those two facts, I felt, were reason enough for me to take the course. :-) The course was about rationality, thinking styles, and the coordination of distinct types and modes of thought. All of these ideas were presented in ways that were mutually reinforcing, and that provided a way of understanding not only how their respective phenomena behaved on their own, but how they interacted. All of these higher cognitive processes were explained in connection to wisdom.

  Once again, I found myself happily mired in vast swamps of tricky problems, and after weeks of neurotic note-taking, spent about 7 hours straight, typing up my final essay, which took the components of cognition that facilitate wisdom, as presented by Dr. Vervaeke, and presented their functional and taxonomic connections in innovative ways, building on concepts from the previous course on lower-level problem solving. Dr. V. liked my final essay so much that he asked me if I'd like to write a paper on wisdom with him. I was totally blown away... to be second author on his paper, which has been over a decade in the making, was a dream come true. I immediately agreed, and have been working on the project with him ever since.

  That was the first answer to the question... one that gives a contingent, historical narrative of what led me to wisdom research. There is another way of answering, though. Telling you about what quirks of chance graced me with the opportunity to work on this project don't really tell you about my own perspectives or motives viz. the study of wisdom, about why I like learning about wisdom, or what I hope to accomplish. Well, that's precisely why I need to give you a second response.

  I seem to like asking 'why' more than asking 'how'. Instead of wondering how someone could perform better at a particular task, I usually wonder whether that task has to be done at all, and what that person hopes to accomplish upon its completion. I'm continually thinking about people's motives for performing, rather than their ability to perform. Part of the reason behind this is that I've encountered many instances of people performing excellently on tasks that they never had to do in the first place. Running really fast in the wrong direction won't help you reach your destination, as so many ancient proverbs mention.

  This interest in motives is strongly related to wisdom, since wisdom has to do living well, and deciding what that means -- for a particular individual, in a particular context. Not being aware of the reasons for pursuing a goal precludes the possibility of determining whether achieving the goal has a positive or negative impact on the actor's life.

  Another reason for choosing wisdom has been a strong distaste for an attitude that some people hold towards evaluating others. In most parts of the world, especially those parts that have been more heavily influenced by Western culture, one's monetary net worth (or the material goods one possesses) has typically been the greatest factor for determining that person's worth as a person. This isn't meant to deny that some poor people haven't been held in high regard... that is certainly true. However, for the most part, if someone wishes to garner the respect of his or her peers, it seems that accumulating goods and currency is the way to go. And while having money can, to some degree, indicate that a particular person ought to be held in high esteem, there are many, many examples of the most despicable people accruing obscene amounts of wealth, usually making many other people's lives miserable along the way.

  Another issue that I have with this money-equals-worth attitude seems to stem from the fact that money is easy to measure, and other forms of personal worth are not, and this makes it much easier to compare people using money, rather than by some other standard. If, for example, we had a reliable way to quantify and measure people's honesty (so that we could say things like, 'Bob is 1.2 times as honest as Harry', or something like this), or humility, or reliability, then our evaluation of others would depend significantly less on how much money they make, or what they own. Now imagine being able to measure a person's propensity to do good, and act excellently. Wouldn't that be a boon to society? Although I'm not even sure that such objective measures of wisdom will ever be possible, or whether having such measures could potentially have some negative ethical impact, for that matter, I think that knowing more about wisdom will probably improve the accuracy of people's evaluations of others.

  It would be extremely useful to have some magical formula that allowed a person to determine, for any given context, which of several live options would be the best to pursue. While there are good reasons to believe that such a univerally-applicable formula is impossible, it is certainly true that at the level of a single problem in a single context, people do come up with solutions on a regular basis. Psychologists that specialize in studying problem solving (and similar fields such as behavioral economics and decision theory) have been trying to come up with an account of how people accomplish this, with some measure of success. However, the situation becomes rather intractable when taken up one level... how do we solve the problem of figuring out which problems are worth solving? In other words, when someone, your boss at work, let's say, gives you a problem, a solution can usually be found rather locally, using the resources at your disposal. However, if you're your own boss, or when you're dealing with problems in your life as a whole instead of a neatly sectioned-off task, not only would you have to solve individual problems, but you'd also have to find and formulate them, and then determine whether they are even worth solving at all. It's much easier to study how people solve a particular problem than how they choose which problems need to be solved. Now, when this scenario is stretched out over a person's entire lifespan, so that the 'problem space' becomes identical to his or her entire life, then the problem that the person faces is the problem of how to act wisely. Since I'd like to live a good life myself, I feel that studying wisdom will be a worthwhile endeavour to invest my efforts in.

  Some of the problems in Artificial Intelligence have to do with making a robot or other artificial agent behave autonomously. A.I. researchers hope to produce machines that have more than the capacity to solve problems that simply require the machine to take easily identifiable types of data, slot them into predetermined process threads, and churn out a response and super-human speeds. We already have computing machines like this in abundance, and while they are unbelievably useful, from the point-of-view of autonomy, most computer software and hardware amount to little more than glorified calculators. By contributing to wisdom research, I hope to help us figure out how humans are able to come up with solutions in completely novel problems, where no 'cookie-cutter' answer remembered from the past or looked up in a book would work.

  As things stand, there are massive lacunae in current research on wisdom. These gaps in people's conceptual schemes, concerning what counts as wisdom and what doesn't, I can't help but find really, really annoying. There is a lot of equivocation going on about what people mean when they use the words 'wise', 'wisdom', and 'wisely', and as a result, a lot of researchers seem to wind up talking at cross-purposes. Getting rid of these annoyances has been a strong motivating force for me.

  Finally, and perhaps most importantly, our world seems to be in urgent need of wisdom. Not only is wisdom a commodity in short supply, but it's also a commodity that few people recognize, that even fewer can appraise, and that even fewer still can generate. As Harvard psychologist Robert Sternberg says, while IQ-measurable intelligence seems to continue to climb upwards worldwide, people continue to do the stupidest things imaginable, and on an ever-grander scale. Without being coupled to the guiding force of wisdom, high intelligence and nonexistent or malformed normative standards can produce individuals or entire societies of people that are highly capable of behaving foolishly, or even of being every efficiently evil. 

  That's a world that I can't condone. And that's why I study wisdom.