Introspection

I was chatting with my friend and he told me that he was making a list about what he likes.I told him it was very simple and why at all someone should list them.He said he wanted to list 50 but could list only 25.He said that I can also try.Its self introspection.This word really hooked me.It really made me wonder what that word really meant.English is a language where you have nice synonyms.So I went about browsing the word introspection....I came across real interesting facts and meanings...Introspection is the self-observation and reporting of conscious inner thoughts, desires and sensations. It is a conscious mental and usually purposive process relying on thinking, reasoning, and examining one's own thoughts, feelings, and, in more spiritual cases, one's soul. It can also be called contemplation of one's self, and is contrasted with extrospection, the observation of things external to one's self. Introspection may be used synonymously with self-reflection and used in a similar way.
While I was browsing I came across an interesting finding that Henri Poincare - the great French Scientist who was the Grand-Father of Chaos Theory and co-discoverer of Special Relativity Theory - was also interested in the way his own mind worked. He gave a talk about his observations in 1908 at the Institute of General Psychology in Paris. He clearly linked his way of thinking to how he made his scientifical discoveries.
His mental organization was not only interesting to him but also to Toulouse, a psychologist of the Psychology Laboratory of the School of Higher Studies in Paris. Toulouse wrote a book called Henri Poincaré which was published in 1910. Toulouse noted that Poincaré never spent a long time on a problem since he believed that the subconscious would continue working on the problem while he worked on another problem.(wow this is a lovely theory)
Poincare was originally a mathematician - he performed better in mathematics than all the other students at the prestigious Ecole Polytechnique - but he believed that logic was just a way to structure ideas not to make scientific discoveries. He strongly opposed the philosophical views of Bertrand Russell when he said in his book Science and Hypothesis:
"For a superficial observer, scientific truth is beyond the possibility of doubt; the logic of science is infallible..."
For Henri Poincaré, the way the Real World is working cannot be deduced just from Logics. For him, Mathematics is not Science, it's just an abstraction tool.
Unfortunately today, Bertrand Russell's point of view seems to dominate for today many people do implicitly consider mathematical theorems as Truth in Reality. Since his viewpoint was lost against Bertrand Russell's, it is not astonishing that Shewhart and Deming claimed they have much difficulty to teach their philosophy to the Americans because they said the US Engineers did think Quality Control was just about doing Mathematics whereas Probability was only a mathematical tool inside their theory. Their theory was not just about statistical formulas - these latters were already invented centuries ago - but about how NOT to apply them !I wish all people would do their own introspection. By doing this they may open their mind to true knowledge for information is not knowledge: it must be processed like a raw material. As we are overloaded by informations in our modern world, this process is all the more necessary.
Coming back to the discussion .....when he told me I was least interested I felt it was waste of time but after my extensive browsing,I decided to try it out and I sat down to prepare a list...it real was very interesting...I started thinking and started living my likes too.....why don't you people try .After reading this I know you sure will.I should really thank my friend for bringing the word SELF INTROSPECTION into my mind........ :)