Self-Introspection: thinking about how oneself thinks

I often think about how I think because I believe that's the way I can improve my mental process. So I was surprisingly happy to discover that Henri Poincaré - the great French Scientist who was the Grand-Father of Chaos Theory and co-discoverer of Special Relativity Theory - was also interested in the way his own mind worked. He gave a talk about his observations in 1908 at the Institute of General Psychology in Paris. He clearly linked his way of thinking to how he made his scientific discoveries.

His mental organization was not only interesting to him but also to Toulouse, a psychologist of the Psychology Laboratory of the School of Higher Studies in Paris. Toulouse wrote a book called Henri Poincaré which was published in 1910. Toulouse noted that Poincaré never spent a long time on a problem since he believed that the subconscious would continue working on the problem while he worked on another problem.

Poincaré was originally a mathematician - he performed better in mathematics than all the other students at the prestigious Ecole Polytechnique - but he believed that logic was just a way to structure ideas not to make scientific discoveries. He strongly opposed the philosophical views of Bertrand Russell when he said in his book Science and Hypothesis:

"For a superficial observer, scientific truth is beyond the possibility of doubt; the logic of science is infallible..."

For Henri Poincaré, the way the Real World is working cannot be deduced just from Logics. For him, Mathematics is not Science, it's just an abstraction tool.

Unfortunately today, Bertrand Russell's point of view seems to dominate for today many people do implicitly consider mathematical theorems as thruth in Reality. For example the so-called Normal Law is being mistakingly used in many fields from Quality Control (see this article "Becoming a Black Belt with Edwards Deming's Theory of Profound Knowledge") to Financial Risk Calculation. And this could be generalized to other fields like Economics and Politics (see J.K. Galbraith and his book "The Economics of Innocent Fraud").

Deming and Shewhart with their theory of Profound Knowledge were very close to Henri Poincaré. Since his viewpoint was lost against Bertrand Russell's, it is not astonishing that Shewhart and Deming claimed they have much difficulty to teach their philosophy to the Americans because they said the US Engineers did think Quality Control was just about doing Mathematics whereas Probability was only a mathematical tool inside their theory. Their theory was not just about statistical formulas - these latters were already invented centuries ago - but about how NOT to apply them !

I guess you realized why I referred to Deming, Shewhart and Poincaré so often in many posts: the way I think is close to the way they think. I look at premisces of mathematical theorems before applying them. I enquire about History in details before drawing a theory. I never base my opinions on subjective thinking and am resistant to the phenomena of cognitive dissonance which consists to make self deny a truth to protect his mind.

I wish all people would do their own introspection. By doing this they may open their mind to true knowledge for information is not knowledge: it must be processed like a raw material. As we are overloaded by information in our modern world, this process is all the more necessary.