A Love Heuristic

I continue to slowly read Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow. I recently wrote a post about the title and how I take exception with it. But no matter that.

Kahneman has written a very impressive book. But his methods and his goals are different than mine, I think.

His goal is to show that humans are systematically biased, always relying on heuristics to guide our thoughts and choices. Moreover, Kahneman is skeptical of the possibility of reconfiguring our heuristics and biases so as to improve our capacity for intuitive judgement. Kahneman, it seems, thinks we should do our best to become aware of our heuristics and biases, and should augment our choices with statistical and other types of knowledge.

Choice, this seems to imply, should not be left entirely to intuition, but should be about the intelligent/statistical evaluation of intuitions.

This makes sense to me. I think that Kahneman is right that we will never be able to completely break down and reprogram our heuristics.

But I don't think that we should give up on the idea of training intuitive judgement. I think that we must strive for the purposeful creation of heuristics and biases. We must work to structure our intuitive apparatus, we must try to purposefully create habits of thought and action.

The one habit that I have worked to cultivate in myself is the habit of love. Loving myself, loving the people I know, loving the people I see around me, loving the world.

The more I go forward with thinking the more I am convinced that Gandhi and MLK had it right. Proper morality, proper politics, must be built on a foundation of love.

All of this has something to with what I wrote about God. Because I've realized that what I'm talking about can be called God, but doesn't necessarily need to be. It can be called oneness, connectedness, or the quantum self or some other craziness like that. But there is something serious going on in oneness, in feeling a sense of connection to everyone around us.

I am in the habit of loving these days. I want to keep cultivating that habit.

Dare to think.

Dare to love.