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We welcome your insights, questions, suggestions, assertions and musings.
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Assumptions
posted by Iris Tuomenoksa
This evening Mark and I had a visit from our friend Mark Kaufman. We love him deeply and have a great open and loving relationship together. We talked to late in the night (morning) while his daughter was napping on the best sleeping chair ever.
What I was thinking about while participating in the discussion was that we seem to make lots of assumptions if we do not have all the information. Mark is participating in Wide Awake this week and the class had given him lots of stimuli and he was working through his beliefs and responses. In a class setting like this, the subject that is discussed by one participant is stimuli for the others and so gives learning possibilities to everyone else.
There seems to me to be two places of making assumptions: the first one is when you don't know what exactly happened or will happen. In this case we use assumptions to fill in the blanks and play around with them to view the situation from different sides. The other is making assumptions using past experience as proof that your assumption will happen. In this case we use the assumptions to move into a certain direction.
So why do we use assumptions? I believe we use them to make us feel comfortable and make us belief that we understand the situation. We want to understand the situation so we can make a clear stand/ choice if needed. But my question is: is filling in the blanks or using your past experiences really a good measure for understanding the situation?
How do you know if any of your assumptions really represents what will happen or happened? And how important is it to understand exactly what happened or will happen?
And last but not least: where does the assumption end and the fact start?
Whahahaha, what a stimulating night! I hope you will enjoy pondering these questions with me..
With love, Iris
What I was thinking about while participating in the discussion was that we seem to make lots of assumptions if we do not have all the information. Mark is participating in Wide Awake this week and the class had given him lots of stimuli and he was working through his beliefs and responses. In a class setting like this, the subject that is discussed by one participant is stimuli for the others and so gives learning possibilities to everyone else.
There seems to me to be two places of making assumptions: the first one is when you don't know what exactly happened or will happen. In this case we use assumptions to fill in the blanks and play around with them to view the situation from different sides. The other is making assumptions using past experience as proof that your assumption will happen. In this case we use the assumptions to move into a certain direction.
So why do we use assumptions? I believe we use them to make us feel comfortable and make us belief that we understand the situation. We want to understand the situation so we can make a clear stand/ choice if needed. But my question is: is filling in the blanks or using your past experiences really a good measure for understanding the situation?
How do you know if any of your assumptions really represents what will happen or happened? And how important is it to understand exactly what happened or will happen?
And last but not least: where does the assumption end and the fact start?
Whahahaha, what a stimulating night! I hope you will enjoy pondering these questions with me..
With love, Iris
Labels: all blogs, iris tuomenoksa, philosophy
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Iris: this is a great topic indeed; something I was pondering briefly last week. Might jump in later, but I just want to share a quote that I read this morning at work that's somewhat relevant:
“ The only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew each time he sees me. The rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them. ”
-- George Bernard Shaw
“ The only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew each time he sees me. The rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them. ”
-- George Bernard Shaw
Sree,
I LOVE this quote. Thank you so much for sharing. Wouldn't the world be different if we all would be like the tailor?
I LOVE this quote. Thank you so much for sharing. Wouldn't the world be different if we all would be like the tailor?
Yes, thanks for the quote Sree! And great blog Iris! I just did a consult yesterday all about assumptions....it must be in the air....OR...ha ha...I was focusing on assumptions by reading your blog so I attracted more assumptions to me in my consult! (Based on my last blog) Ha ha!
I think Sree's quote is so appropriate because we all use assumptions most of the time of the day in any situation. If you get coffee milk out of the fridge and the date says that it is expired we assume the coffee milk is bad and so we trow it out. Before we had regulated expiration dates where we would use the milk as long as it was not clumping together in the coffee! Making assumptions make our lives easy. It makes that we don't have to question everything and check everything. But that doesn't mean that the assumption is build on facts, reality or truth. In opposite: facts, reality and truth are all built on the assumptions we make.
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