[Glass Joe]

Originally Posted by Michael Chui

Right. And eventually, it becomes mind-blowing and maddening to exhaustively consider it all, considering everything is necessarily "meta". One of the reasons the mind is so labyrinthic is precisely because it's self-reflective. To cite Heisenberg, the act of measuring changes what is being measured: you're necessarily always wrong.

Just a weird coincidence... when I read your comment, for some reason I saw it as Heidegger (who I already heard of, but not that familiar with), so I checked him out on wikipedia and found this:

Phenomenology

Originally Posted by Michael Chui

In learning, there are three stages.

1) Ignorance, wherein you do not know what you are doing. You flail around, and perhaps you do well, and perhaps you do not. It is uncontrolled and foolish.
2) Sophistication, wherein you have learned rules, boundaries, theories, and so forth, but become trapped by this knowledge. In this case, you are controlled, but ultimately ineffective, crippled by an excess of reflection.
3) Artlessness, wherein you have internalized the rules to a point where you are capable of breaking them based on when they apply to the situation. Having achieved control, you now achieve effectiveness.

Thanks for the more detailed description. I had a pretty good idea of this process so I didn't want to go into it too much above, but that additional way of looking at it helped clarify my own understanding. And "artlessness" is now one of my new favorite words.

Also... I was originally going to post more in response to your other comments, but yeah... like you said... the whole thing is pretty much like a two standing mirrors facing each other, and then staring into one of them.