Flow as per cognitive scientist is different from the psychologist,
different from the philosopher!

No wonder why a 6th standard student asked the teacher to her question
'what is the smallest thing?'  "Which subject are you talking about"?
Talking of subjects i am reminded of another incident. A child came
home and asked her mother what is the mathematics for onion. It seems
her english teacher had told her the english for 'pyaaz'(marathi word)
is onion.
There is a story from India about fragmented understanding.
A king has the blind men of the capital brought to the palace, where
an elephant is brought in and they are asked to describe it.
When the blind men had each felt a part of the elephant, the king went
to each of them and said to each: 'Well, blind man, have you seen the
elephant? Tell me, what sort of thing is an elephant?'
The men assert the elephant is either like a pot (the blind man who
felt the elephants' head), a winnowing basket (ear), a plowshare
(tusk), a plow(trunk), a granary (body), a pillar (foot), a mortar
(back), a pestle (tail) or a brush (tip of the tail).
The men cannot agree with one another and come to blows over the
question of what it is like and their dispute delights the king. The
Buddha ends the story by comparing the blind men to preachers and
scholars who are blind and ignorant and hold to their own views: "Just
so are these preachers and scholars holding various views blind and
unseeing.... In their ignorance they are by nature quarrelsome,
wrangling, and disputatious, each maintaining reality is thus and
thus." The Buddha then speaks the following verse:
O how they cling and wrangle, some who claim
For preacher and monk the honored name!
For, quarreling, each to his view they cling.
Such folk see only one side of a thing

In one of classes I was asking students to learn photography with out
becoming a 'photographer'. In fact in my pre diploma presentation the
colloquium paper I wrote was called humanizing the professional as i
sensed the danger seeing the world  through 'designers eyes'. I was
talking about seeing the world as a human being as use the skills of
various professions to address it.
The photographer learns to see the way camera sees the world and
misses out the real, unframed world. This ability of the photographer
is praised today! This could be true of all professions.
The eastern (not the present ones) approach to enquiry of reality was
very different. Bringing clarity to perception was the approach. Bacon
mentions about how mind gets distorted input from senses which off
course cant be trusted. the eastern way was to work on cleaning the
senses. Objectivity in this case is to remove the subjective
aspirations and biases through meditation and disconnect from the
'personal, egoistic being'.
"We have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself, but
nature exposed to our method of questioning." -Werner Heisenberg

Jinan


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