≠ ✰ pagan festival season       🌜waning half moon       ※ Suncrest - Solar Festival

<,/a>With this entry, I'm introducing a new category, Philosophy.

Howard Gardner is a developmental psychologist and professor best known for his theories of multiple intelligences. I first ran across the theory in Gardener's 1983 book Frames of Mind.

Wikipedia has more:

❝According to Gardner, an intelligence must fulfill eight criteria: potential for brain isolation by brain damage, place in evolutionary history, presence of core operations, susceptibility to encoding (symbolic expression), a distinct developmental progression, the existence of savants, prodigies and other exceptional people, and support from experimental psychology and psychometric findings.

Gardner chose eight abilities that he held to meet these criteria: musical-rhythmic, visual-spatial, verbal-linguistic, logical-mathematical, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalistic. He later suggested that existential and moral intelligence may also be worthy of inclusion. Although the distinction between intelligences has been set out in great detail, Gardner opposes the idea of labeling learners to a specific intelligence. Gardner maintains that his theory of multiple intelligences should "empower learners", not restrict them to one modality of learning.According to Gardner, an intelligence is "a biopsychological potential to process information that can be activated in a cultural setting to solve problems or create products that are of value in a culture."❞

When I first read Frames of Mind, it was obvious to me that Gardner had left out at least two intelligences and probably others. Gardner did not distinguish between gross motor coordination and fine motor coordination. Since watchmaking doesn't necessarily help throwing a baseball, there's a difference there.

The second one I called gnostic intelligence. Gardner's concept of existential intelligence began to touch on it slightly. As nearly as I can tell, gnostic intelligence is perception of something beyond, ability to interact with that something beyond, and the ability to bridge between that something beyond and human experience.

And that raises the first philosophical question. What exactly is that something beyond? How are we sensing it?

I don't know.

I do know that it took centuries for humans to build instruments so they could detect radiation. Humans had to learn how to isolate chemicals so we could study them. When we use science to study, it is about things we can not directly perceive.

The anecdotal and mythological evidence between cultures might indicate that there are non-human intelligences that know more than we do and aren't necessarily bound by space-time in the same ways that we are. They may not exist as matter and energy.

Does that make them gods?

I don't know.

It might be some sort of collective human consciousness. It might be individual humans after death. It might be something else entirely.

How do we measure and test the possibilities?

I don't know.

What the stories tell us is that the rules of time and other human limitations don't necessarily apply. And the few times that humans have looked directly into that beyond, no one could perceive more than a fraction of the overwhelming reality that was there. So we made godmasks to protect our sanity.

So which godmasks are real?

All of them.

None of them.

I don't know.

What is really out there?

We may never know.

But we do know this. The stories are absolutely clear about one thing. Gods make you stretch.

Open your eyes. Open your mind.

Maybe you'll catch a glimpse.

If you do, be sure to bring it back and tell the rest of us.

Tags: Howard Gardner & 1983 & multiple intelligences & gnostic intelligence & godmask