The Challenge of Free Will

As children, we learned from the examples of all the people around us how to handle everyday problems. Education provides us information learned from the cumulative experience of hundreds of generations of our ancestors. We develop the talents needed to be successful in our personal and professional lives.

Many people have achieved extraordinary intellectual accomplishments finding solutions to problems that greatly improve the quality of human life. However, most people have great difficulty when facing problems they do not have solutions for. There are several problems of human psychology that prevent most people from developing significant proficiency in the intellectual skills needed for the challenges involved in finding solutions to problems.

Procrustean Thinking

• The human mind is very resistant to new solutions.
• There is a strong preference for the use of familiar solutions.
• This preference is so strong that when faced with a new problem, a person will choose to adapt the problem to fit a known solution.
• This usually produces poor results, but most people will struggle with a bad solution rather than explore new ideas to find a good solution.
• It is very common to see people over reliant on familiar things or methods.
• They are very reluctant to let go of the familiar and explore new possibilities.
• (If you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail).

Positive Thinking

• Perhaps better referred to as Effective Thinking, since this will just as easily produce negative as well as positive results.
• This is often confused with Wishful Thinking.
  • Wishful thinking - what you WANT to do.
  • Effective thinking - what you WILL do.
• What you decide you will do guides your choices in the challenges you face in pursuit of your objectives.
• Regardless of your motivation to succeed, expectations of failure will result in decisions which lead to failure.
• Expectations of success in what you decide you will do requires a positive perspective for confidence in your ability to succeed.
• You must not allow experiences of failure to define limitations in your confidence of your talents.
• If you choose to pursue an objective, but believe things will happen to stop you, then the choices you make each step of the way will be the choices that lead to failure (self-fulfilling prophecy).
• Prayer is an excellent example of effective thinking.

Belief is stronger than Knowledge

• The human mind rejects information which conflicts with beliefs (this usually happens unconsciously).
• Extraordinary will is necessary to accept information which challenges your beliefs.
• Belief is very hard to change. People will --
  • look for information to confirm belief and discount information that conflicts with belief.
  • continue to believe wrong information after the information is corrected
  • believe information which agrees with expectations
  • discard information which disagrees with or contradicts beliefs

Everyone understands that developing physical skills requires practice. An athlete does not automatically achieve optimal results without extensive training. The same applies to intellectual talent. You must train your mind to develop intellectual skills for finding solutions to problems. How effective your intellectual skills will be depends on how well you can avoid the above problems.

Solutions are found, not created. The key to finding a solution is to understand the problem. The solution already exists. It is simply waiting to be discovered. The general process for finding a solution to a problem -

• Identify the problem. Define as precisely as possible, exactly what the problem is for which a solution is needed.
• Identify all the factors relating to the problem.
• For each factor, determine the relationship with each other factor.

Do not modify your definition of a problem to fit your expectations of what a solution should be. You must focus on understanding the problem (not pursuing a solution). You must decide, definitively, not what you want to do, but that you will do what is necessary to overcome all the obstacles you encounter while pursuing your objective. Do not be dogmatic in what you believe. You must be open to the possibility that anything you believe might be wrong. Do not be selective in choosing what might be wrong. It's very easy to ignore exploring some factors to a problem because you are sure they must be correct. If one percent of your knowledge is wrong, which one percent is it? Very many times, scientists have been shocked to find a solution to a problem by discovering something they believed to be unconditionally true was in fact actually wrong.

Theorem: I might be mistaken
     Proof: I think, therefor, I err