The reactionary stupidity of the Dull Mind

So, yesterday we've discussed Society in the Abstract and brought up the example of Neural Networks for comparison. One major takeaway with the latter is, that something that does not have agency as by its components can act as though it had.

It is thereby a shared understanding amongst people in what we may call "the science community" that we do not have free will; And equating the workings of our mind to that which we see in Neural Networks lends itself towards that proposition. Neural Networks are after all conceived relative to what we understand of the Brain - or at least deduce that the Brain has to work by these kinds of means - and in that regard it is true, that in as far as none of the underlying parts exhibit agency, the system itself also does not actually have true agency.

What I want to write about here implies that there is a duality. If you don't like the idea, you can just stick to the negatives - because that's pretty much the quality of this pseudo-agency we'd be left with.

You may, based on the headline, deduce what I'm trying to say here. Respectively is it my argument that any effort of honesty or sincerity implies a degree of agency, and is in fact what would make us be different from being just hyper fancy random number generators.
Although, it would seem, we are quite in fact good at producing noise!

So is there our consciousness - the mind, the spirit, the thing that feels - the thing that understands itself as a whole and doesn't have an intrinsic understanding of the components it consists of.
It is however not magical, it that it would in and of itself arrive at the right conclusions when given the opportunity.
Outside of the generic patterns that we can ascribe to neural pathways, there is reason as in terms of words and their implied meaning and understanding. These in turn can be conceived as patterns we can associate to a variety of things.

As per that model, for as far as the individual system is concerned, absolute truth or objective reality do not exist; Outside of the minds own conception of what that is. This, because there is no intrinsic mechanism to determine rights from wrongs.
In order to do so - we have to extend beyond the mere workings of the mind - and allow it to be influenced by the concrete matters outside of it. Generally this is further understood as in conflict, of more or less severe kind, with our individual biases. And respectively can those function as obstacles to our ability to conceive reality as it presents itself.

It is however round about that - where I'd settle the implied meaning of 'Dull' or 'Sharp' respectively.
These being native properties of the willful mind, do however not intrinsically correspond to the objective/factual world as is, outside of our individual mind(s understanding) - as a mind can certainly be "sharp" to ignore as much of it as possible.

Now, generally speaking our experience might defy the given statements, at least to some degree, as we - in as far as our senses are more intrinsic to our understanding than not - do inherently acquire an understanding of the world around us. This primarily shows in how we navigate and react. It does however not require a sharp mind to move from A to B. It does however require some sharpness to implement changes.
Let's say a person lives at H; And since it travels by public transportation, there are three stations - 1, 2 and 3 - within H's proximity. Generally person would take stop 1 as it is the closest. It does however go slightly uphill - from 1 to H - and it's a somewhat ugly piece of road. The way from 2 to H on the other hand is less steep and a lot prettier as it also leads through a park. Now is here "sharpness" not a simple thing. Sure, if we're asking for what the quickest way were - the answer is simple but I don't think it requires one to be particularly sharp. So are there multiple reasons why one would prefer to go via station 1, a lot of which would amount to some degree of 'quality of life'. But so does going via 2. Enough so, that it outweighs the benefits of going via 1 - except that going via 1 is more convenient. And so the mind is torn between quality of life and convenience - let's say - in a pretty even way; To say, it is close to a coin-flip what the mind might chose between the two. It does however have to choose - as stations 1 and 2 are next to each other on the transportation line. And let's say that 2 is the first in line. And that now is one way the mind has to apply this "sharpness" - to trade convenience for quality of life. On a somewhat daily basis.
And station 3 is just there - because we're not in America!
I mean, so, 3 is a different line and a different mode of transportation. Transferring to it is cumbersome, but there's a supermarket. The distance to H is about as much as that between 1 and H. Then there's station 4 - which is like the second stop past 1. There is another supermarket. And generally I couldn't be arsed to stop by 3 if I needed groceries - and would rather go to 4; Even if the distance to H is a lot further.

And yea. A more practical example would be to assume that person X is conditioned to take B to H - as the longer path - to let it's transition to taking A to H be a challenge to its logical reasoning. Maybe A leads through a scary area - that is actually harmless - so person X also has to deal with some biases.

The point however is, that these practices and experiences don't tell us a lot about empirical reality; other than there being a hypothetical of perfect knowledge based on which we can assess different possibilities - which we can further equate, in the abstract, to all sorts of things.
To say, these things have little bearing on the greater questions of life.

And as of that, it would be somewhat relatable to find people who wouldn't want to be bothered by those greater questions - in a sense of saying: if they are so important, why aren't they on the way?
Well, what is on the way is like - arguing for electricity because it might speed things up. OK, we know electricity, we can understand that we'd fucked without it ... good thing. On the other hand we however have ... the understanding of so called "snake-oil salesmen". To say ... "simp for me, and I'll give you free speech". Or "listen to me and you'll get pussy!". And people who believe in that, eventually end up conditioning themselves to be OK with censorship and rape.

As said, that can be done by sharpness - so can one be really enthusiastic and passionate ... about the most utterly wrong, decrepit and hurtful things ... so, yea, being "passionate" about something is also not a real universal quality.


And if we want to maintain this idea, that "the right way" is essentially something that people just stumble upon by chance - with no implied guarantee that it will find any cultural success - we have to change our concept of sharpness a little as otherwise we'd have to settle on being dull by default and locked out of getting any sharper.

So, rather than defining sharpness as something that the mind can do - we can define it as a state of alignment between the mind and reality. Which it sure can do still - but here the demand is at first something determined by an outside observer. Hypothetical or not. So can we try to be sharp - but whether or not we accomplish it is a separate thing.
And that in effect now moves the problem to the next instance: Society.

It is however also not as dire and hopeless as it would seem. So have we - or at least a part of us - long settled on the concept of the scientific method. An esoteric take on it were, that it is a tool by which we can condition our mind to relate to reality outside of our own perceptive biases.

And that's as far as this goes - the point being stuck somewhere in the abstract. Though, I guess ... : "Be water, my friend! Though sometimes - you need to be sharper than that!"