Thinking is the behavior of the intellect at the moment when the intellect tries to find ways of solving problems it has not previously encountered. We make no assumptions about how thinking is structured, what parts it consists of, and how they are related, although we have some assumptions about the composition of the intellect-stack. Intelligence can be enhanced in the course of training. The intelligence of a wild man is significantly lower than that of an educated person. A wild man will not be able to quickly solve even a hundredth of the problems that an educated person can solve. Intelligence is heavily learned, only a small part of it is inborn!
During the development of human civilization it became clear what properties we require from thinking (including systems thinking): thinking must be abstract, adequate, conscious and rational.
Abstraction is the main requirement, as we need to abstract away the unimportant and focus on the important. By thinking, you build models of the world, avoiding all unnecessary details. Thinking “separates the wheat from the chaff” and works only with wheat. Thinking has to be able to detach itself from individuals and think in terms of types, prototypes, abstract concepts: we do not know what is inside of thinking, but we require some level of abstraction in order to omit unnecessary details. We need abstraction in difficult situations, we want the ability to plan and design ahead, we want to work with whole classes and types of situations. Without abstraction, we can’t transfer experiences from one situation to another, we can’t learn effectively, we can’t create languages that serve collective thinking — languages allow us to exchange the most important things about the situations we think about, they purify communication from unnecessary details.
Adequacy is an opportunity to check whether our abstract thinking and the abstractions it generates are connected with the real world or whether it has become detached from the material world. We have no way to check its results and to correlate its results with the real world. Are our thinking conceptions adequate to the real (i.e., material world existing independently of us) world? Or does thinking deceive us and propose some inadequate ideas? We need practical, actionable thinking; we want to be adequate and not disconnected from reality.
Consciousness is the ability to understand how we think, how we reason. If we simply “have intuition”, it will not satisfy us. We will not be able to teach others to think and how to repeat our reasoning. We will not be able to notice an error in our thinking; we will not be able to improve or change it, we will not be able to learn another way of thinking since we will not notice it, we will not be conscious of it. We will not be able to focus on our thinking since we cannot focus on what we are not conscious of. We will not be able to test it rationally using logic and decide whether it is enough to use intuition instead of strict rationality in any particular situation. We want to know what we think about and how we do it; we want to choose whether or not we want to think about something. We don’t want to be unconscious thinking machines. We want to be conscious of thinking, and we need to consider thinking and not forget about the thinker itself.
Rationality is the ability to check reasoning according to the rules, logical reasoning. It is an opportunity to detach oneself from one’s biological and social nature, not to make related mistakes. Rationality is an ability to check the results of quick intuitive thinking for the absence of mistakes, violation of rules and ability to engage the experience of humanity in thinking. It is an opportunity to discuss explicitly (at least in a dialogue with oneself, i.e. using consciousness) these rules of good thinking created by civilization, to discuss the logical foundations of thinking, to discuss the ability or inability to use some thinking techniques. We don’t want mistakes in thinking, so we need to be rational, we need to be able to recognize mistakes in thinking in ourselves and others, we need to be able to express the results of thinking in a way that reduces the number of errors in other people’s perception of our results. We want to be rational, we need to be able to divide tasks into parts (rationality is “division”, after all), we do not want pure intuitiveness or pure emotions, although we do not deny their necessity, but we need civility in thinking in first place, the best of civilization practices on how to think.
All other requirements for thinking are either variants or combinations of those presented. For example, “strong thinking” is usually good abstraction and adequacy, “wisdom” is another word for adequacy, “creative thinking” is the engagement of proper abstraction, “reflection” is consciousness, applied for the past, rather than current.
*This quote is taken from the Systems Thinking 2020 online course.