Nous

Nous is a value that was formalised by Athenean philosophers, notably by Aristotle in De Anima.

Its meaning is roughly translated as ‘Intellect’, but intellective of what is immediately apparent, seeing what is directly in front of you without deduction or calculation.

Terry Pratchett describes Discworld witches as cultivating ‘First Sight’, which is roughly the same. Before we begin to twist ideas in our head to fit abstractions, we must make the attempt to see things as they are. This is virtually impossible because of preprocessing, the idea that our minds have already abstracted information before we are consciously aware of it. So we can think of Nous as the intellectual activity of keeping in mind first principles or premises, so that whatever later conclusions we draw do not contradict the knowledge that informs them.

Nous can sometimes be extended to the idea of a priori knowledge, or that there are fundamental realities which are the framework for understanding all other knowledge. These are things such as axioms, arithmetic, and language. Nous allows us to spot illusions and inconsistencies by keeping frameworks for truth-seeking in mind while exploring the world. In this sense it is a ‘holistic’ view of knowledge.

Comparitive Virtues

We can contrast Nous to its opposite intellect, Dianoia, which is when discursive thought procedes from first principles in steps, such as through analysis and syllogism.

We can also assert that nous is different from Epistēmē, a category of knowledge about concrete things which exist. Nous can describe whole frameworks which do not physically exist in the same sense. For example, a language may be understood while understanding that it is fundamentally wrong in the way it parses reality.

Nous is different from Phronesis, though it works in concert with it, because it is less concerned with valuation and judgement than it is with seeing things as they are.

Nous is also distinct from Sophia, which can be thought of as ‘Second Thoughts’ or epistemic derivations from first principles.

Forms

The philosophical controversy surrounding Nous concerns the origin of a priori knowledge. Platonists and Theists will often declare first principles to be external, ‘divine’ or derived from an existing world of perfect forms. Aristotelians are sometimes classed in the same, though at other times Aristotle’s ‘Complex Forms’ make it clear that forms are derived by observation (see: Organon).

Nominalists and empiricists state that all ‘a priori’ knowledge originates in experience and observation. This is perhaps the truer or more tempered view for Legacy of Mind. However it is important to avoid a false dichotomy in believing either things are divine or they are experiential.

If we view mind as a kind of algorithm or ‘software’ running on the ‘hardware’ (or wetware) of the brain, and if we can say there are aspects of the brain’s and mind’s operation that are outside of conscious thought or awareness, there is a third possibility for a priori knowledge to arrive through system architecture. This is a bit like saying that experience is ‘hardcoded’ toward particular means of input and output, and ‘biased’ in others to filter out the noise from the message in signals.

If systems architecture is the actual source of a priori knowledge, the ‘blank slate’ debate, and others such as nature vs. nurture, no longer make sense as conflicting theses. Rather, we have niches of reality shaping system architecture, which in turn shape experience from a foundation of inexperience.

In this sense we can also view the ‘rational vs. empirical’ debate as one which has ended in a stalemate. Both views contribute to part of the picture, and must be taken together to understand formal structure.