Datasets:
eliwill
/
Watts

Dataset card Data Studio Files Community
text
stringlengths
11
1.23k
It isn’t going anywhere; that is to say, it doesn’t have some destination that it ought to arrive at. But it is best understood by analogy with music. Because music as an art form is essentially playful; we say “you play the piano,” you don’t work the piano.
Why? Music differs, say, from travel. When you travel you are trying to get somewhere.
And of course, we—because being a very compulsive and purposive culture—are busy getting everywhere faster and faster and faster, until we eliminate the distance between places. I mean, with the modern jet travel you can arrive almost instantaneously. What happens as a result of that is that the two ends of your journey become the same place.
So you eliminate the distance and you eliminate the journey, because the fun of the journey is to travel, not to obliterate travel. In music, though, one doesn’t make the end of a composition the point of the composition. If that were so, the best conductors would be those who played fastest and there would be composers who wrote only finales.
People would go to concerts just to hear one crashing chord, because that’s the end! Say, when dancing, you don’t aim at a particular spot in the room; that’s where you should arrive. The whole point of the dancing is the dance.
But we don’t see that as something brought by our education into our everyday conduct. We’ve got a system of schooling which gives a completely different impression. It’s all graded.
And what we do is we put the child into the corridor of this grade system with a kind of, “C’mon kitty, kitty, kitty!” And now you go to kindergarten, you know? And that’s a great thing because when you finish that you get into first grade. And then—c’mon!—first grade leads to second grade, and so on, and then you get out of grade school and you go to high school, and it’s revving up—the thing is coming!—then you’re going to go to college, and by Jove then you get into graduate school, and when you’re through with graduate school you go out to join the World.
And then you get into some racket where you’re selling insurance, and they’ve got that quota to make. And you’re going to make that. And all the time this thing is coming.
It’s coming! It’s coming! That great thing, the success you’re working for.
Then, when you wake up one day—about 40 years old—you say, “My God, I’ve arrived! I’m there!” And you don’t feel very different from what you always felt. And there’s a slight let-down because you feel there’s a hoax.
And there was a hoax. A dreadful hoax. They made you miss everything by expectation.
Look at the people who live to retire and put those savings away. And then, when they’re 65, they don’t have any energy left, they’re more or less impotent, and they go and rot in an old people’s—“Senior Citizens”—community. Because we’ve simply cheated ourselves the whole way down the line.
We thought of life by analogy with a journey, with a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end, and the thing was to get to that end—success, or whatever it is, or maybe heaven—after you’re dead. But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing, or to dance, while the music was being played.
But you had to do that thing. You didn’t let it happen. And so in this way the human being sometimes becomes an organism for self-frustration.
Let’s take—Korzybski called man a “time-binder.” That means that he’s the animal peculiarly aware of the time sequence, and as a result of this is able to do some very remarkable things: he can predict. He studies what’s happened in the past and he says the chances are so-and-so of that happening again. And so he predicts.
Oh, this is very useful—to be able to predict—because that has survival value. But at the same time it creates anxiety. You pay for this increased survival ability involved in prediction by knowing that, in the end, you won’t succeed.
You’re all going to fall apart by one way or another. It might happen tomorrow, it might happen fifty years from now. But it all comes apart in the end, and people get worried about that; they get anxious.
So what they gained on the roundabout they lost on the swings. If you see, on the other hand, that existence—this is, as I said, my basic metaphysical assumption which I won’t conceal from you—that existence is musical in nature, that is to say, that it is not serious, it is a play of all kinds of patterns. We can look upon different creatures as we look at different games; as we look at chess, checkers, backgammon, tennis: there’s the tree-game, the beetle-game, the grass-game, or you can look at them as you look at different styles of music: mazurkas, waltzes, sonata, et cetera, et cetera.
All down the line. They’re all these different things doing their stuff. And they’re going “Be-doo-de-doo-de-doo-de-doo-de-hoo-jee-doo-dee-doo,” you know, in different rhythms.
And we’re doing that! If you were in a flying saucer—from Mars or somewhere—and you came and looked to try and make out what was living on this world, from about 10,000 feet at night—or early morning—you would see these great ganglia with tentacles going out all over the place. And early in the morning you see little blobs of luminous particles going into the middle of them, see?
And then, in the late afternoon or early evening, it would spit them all out again. And you’d say, “Well, this thing—the thing’s breathed.” And it does it in a special rhythm. It goes in and out, in and out, in and out, once every 24 hours.
But then it rests a day and doesn’t spit so much; it spits in a different way. That’s a kind of irregularity, and then it starts spitting all over again in the same way. You’d say, “That’s very interesting.” That’s the kind of thing we have, see?
This is something that goes this way, you see? Just like music goes, “Umm-pa-pa, umm-pa-pa, umm-pa-pa, umm-pa-pa.” Did you ever see a lady go this way, go that way? That’s what it does.
And when you think a bit about what people really want to do with their time; what do they do when they’re not being pushed around and somebody’s telling them what to do? They like to make rhythms. They listen to music, they dance, or they sing, or they do something of a rhythmic nature; playing cards, or bowling, or raising their elbows.
Everybody wants to spend their time swinging. That’s the nature of this whole thing we’re in, you see? It likes to swing.
That’s why it does it. What I want to do is have a mutual brain-picking session, and I’m going to start the ball rolling by saying why I, as a philosopher, am interested in many things that you are all probably interested in, professionally. Basically, what we’re going to talk about, I suppose, is the problem of control as exemplified in the ancient Latin question “Quis custodiet custodies ipsos?” Who guards the guards?
Now, we know that we’re living in an age when there’s been an enormous proliferation of techniques for subjecting every kind of natural process outside the human skin—and now increasingly inside the human skin—to some form of rational control. And, as we succeed in doing this, it also becomes apparent that we’re failing; that the process becomes of such a high degree of complexity that we begin to feel that we are standing in our own way. That everybody complains the state of affairs in the modern world, in the technological world, is so complicated that nobody can understand it, and nobody really knows what to do.
That, for example, you want to run a small business, and you find you run into such enormous legal hassles that you need so many secretaries to do the paperwork that you can hardly do the business. That you’re trying to run a hospital, but that you have to spend so much time making records and writing things down on paper that you don’t have much time to practice medicine. That you’re trying to run a university, and the requirements, the recording, the endless red tape of the registrar’s office and the administration building is such that the actual work of research and teaching is seriously hampered.
So the individual increasingly feels himself obstructed by his own cautiousness. This is basically what it is. Now, to explain myself, first of all—because most of you are strangers to me—I am a philosopher who has for many years been interested in the mutual fructification of Eastern cultures and Western cultures, studying Oriental ideas not in the spirit of saying to the West, “You ought to be converted to Oriental ideas,” but in the spirit of saying, “You don’t understand the basic assumptions of your own culture if your own culture is the only culture you know.” Everybody operates on certain basic assumptions, but very few people know what they are.
You can, say, very often encounter the sort of character who is an American business man, and he says, “Well, I’m a practical business man. I believe in getting results and things done and all this thinking and highfalutin logic and nonsense is of no concern to me.” Now, I know that the practical basic assumptions—the metaphysics of that man—can be defined as pragmatism, as a school of philosophy. But it’s bad pragmatism because he’s never thought it through.
And so it’s very difficult, you see, to get down to what are your basic assumptions—what do you mean by “The Good Life,” what do you mean by “consistency,” what do mean by “rationality?” The only way of finding out what you mean by these things is by contrasting the way you look at something by the way it’s looked at in another culture. And therefore we have to find cultures which are, in some ways, as sophisticated as our own, but as different from our own as possible—a; the East Indians—and that, by studying the ideas of these people, by studying their life goals, we can become more aware of our own. It’s the old principle of triangulation.
You don’t establish the situation of a particular object unless you observe it from two different points of view and thereby calculate its actual distance from you. So by looking at what we are pleased to call reality, the physical world, from the basic standpoints of different cultures, I think we’re in a better position to know where we are than if we only have one single line of sight. And therefore this has been my interest and my background.
And arising out of this there has come a further question which I would call the problems of human ecology. How is man to be best related to his environment, especially in circumstances where we are in possession of an extremely powerful technology and have, therefore, the capacity to change our environment far more than anyone else has ever been able to do so? Are we going to end up not by civilizing the world, but by Los-Angelizing it?
In other words, are we going to foul our own nest as a result of technology? But all this gets down to the basic question is, really, “What are you going to do if you’re God?” If, in other words, you find yourself in charge of the world through technological powers, and instead of leaving evolution to what we used to call, in the 19th century, the blind processes of nature—that was begging the question, to call them blind—but at any rate, we say we’re not going to leave evolution anymore to the blind forces of nature, but now we’re going to direct it ourselves. Because we are increasingly developing, say, control over genetic systems, control over the nervous system, control over all kinds of systems.
Then, simply: what do you want to do with it? But most people don’t know what they want, and have never even seriously confronted the question of what they want. You ask a group of students to sit down and write a solid paper of 20 pages on, What is your idea of heaven?
What would you really like to happen, if you could make it happen? And that’s the first thing that starts people really thinking, because you soon realize that a lot of the things you think you would want are not things you want at all. Supposing, just for the sake of illustration, you had the power to dream every night any dream you wanted to dream.
And you could, of course, arrange for one night of dreams to be 75 years of subjective time—or any number of years of subjective time—what would you do? Well, of course, you’d start out by fulfilling every wish. You would have routs and orgies, and all the most magnificent food, and sexual partners, and everything you could possibly imagine in that direction.
When you got tired of that after several nights you’d switch a bit, and you’d soon find yourself involved in adventures, and contemplating great works of art, fantastic mathematical conceptions; you would soon be rescuing princesses from dragons, and all sorts of things like that. And then one night you’d say, “Now look, tonight what we’re gonna do is: we’re going to forget this dream is a dream. And we’re going to be really shocked.” And when you woke up from that one you’d say, “Whoo, wasn’t that an adventure!” Then you’d think more and more far out ways to get involved and let go of control, knowing that you’d always come back to center in the end.
But while you were involved in the dream you wouldn’t know you were going to come back to center and be in control. And so, eventually, you’d be dreaming a dream in which you found yourselves all sitting around in this room, listening to me talking, all involved with the particular life problems which you have. And maybe that’s what you’re doing.
But here’s the difficulty, you see: the difficulty of control. Are you wise enough to play at being God? And to understand what that question means we’ve got to go back to metaphysical assumptions underlying Western common sense.
And whether you are a Jew, or a Christian, or an agnostic, or an atheist, you are not un-influenced by the whole tradition of Western culture: the models of the universe which it has employed, which influence our very language, the structure of our thought, the very constitution of logic—which are going into, say, computers. The Western model of the universe is political and engineering, or architectural. It’s natural for a child to ask its mother, “How was I made?” It would be inconceivable for a Chinese child to ask, “How was I made?” It might ask, “How was I grown?” Or “How did I grow?” But not “How was I made,” as if I were an artifact, something put together, something which is a construct.
But all Western thought is based on the idea that the universe is a construct. And even when we got rid of the idea of the constructor, the personal God, you continue to think of the world in terms of a machine, in terms, say, of Newtonian mechanics, and later in terms of what we call quantum mechanics—although I find it rather difficult to understand how quantum theory is in any sense mechanics. It’s much more like organics, which is—to me—a different concept.
However that may be, it has percolated, you see, into the roots of our common sense that the world is a construct; is an artifact. And therefore, as one understands the operations of a machine by analysis of its parts, by separating them into their original bits, we have bit-ed the cosmos and see everything going on in terms of bits—bits of information—and have found that this is extremely fruitful in enabling us to control what’s happening. After all, the whole of Western technology is the result of bit-ing.
Let’s suppose you want to eat a chicken. You can’t eat the whole chicken at once. You have to bite it, you have to reduce it to bits.
But you don’t get a cut-up fryer out of an egg. It doesn’t come that way. So what has happened is this: That—we don’t know the origins of all this; it may go back thousands of years—the way we develop the art of thinking, which is essentially calculus, is this: the universe as it comes—in nature, the physical universe—is something like a Rorschach blot.
It’s all wiggles. We, who live in cities, are not really used to this because we build everything in straight lines and rectangles and so on. Wherever you see this sort of thing you know human beings have been around, because they’re always trying to straighten things out.
But nature itself is clouds, is water, is the outlines of continents, is mountains, is biological existences—and all of them wiggle. And wiggly things are to human consciousness a little bit of a nuisance, because we want to figure it out. And it is as if, therefore, some ancient fisherman one day held up his net and looked at the world through the net.
He said, “My, just think of that! There I can see the view, and that peak of that mountain is one, two, three, four, five, six holes across. And the base is one, two, three, four, five holes down.
Now I’ve got its number.” See? And so the lines of latitude and longitude—the lines of celestial and terrestrial latitude and longitude, the whole idea of a matrix, of looking at things through graph paper printed on cellophane—is the basic idea of measurement. This is the way we calculate.
We break down the wiggliness of the world into comprehensible, countable, geometrical units, and thereby figure it and construct it in those terms, and this is so successful—up to a point!—that we can, of course, come to imagine that this is the way the physical world really is. Discrete, discontinuous, full of points; in fact, a mechanism. But I want to just put into your mind the notion that this may be the prejudice of a certain personality type.
You see, in the history of philosophy and poetry and art we always find the interchange of two personality types, which I call prickles and goo. The prickly people are advocates of intellectual porcupineism. They want a rigor, they want precise statistics, and they have a certain clipped attitude in their voices.
And you know this very well in academic circles, where there are people who are always edgy like that. And they accuse other people of being disgustingly vague and miasmic and mystical. But the vague, miasmic, and mystical people accuse the prickly people of being mere skeletons with no flesh on their bones.
And they say to you, “You just rattle! You’re not really a human being. You know the words but you don’t know the music.” And so, therefore, if you belong to the prickly type you hope that the ultimate constituent of matter is particles.
If you belong to the gooey type you hope it’s waves. If you’re prickly you’re a classicist, and if you’re gooey you’re a romanticist. And—going back into medieval philosophy—if you’re prickly you’re a nominalist, if you’re gooey you’re a realist.
And so it goes. But we know very well that this natural universe is neither prickles nor goo exclusively; it’s gooey prickles and prickly goo. You see, it all depends on your level of magnification.
If you’ve got your magnification on something so that the focus is clear, you’ve got a prickly point of view, you’ve got structure, shape, clearly outlined, sharply defined. When you’re a little out of focus it’s gone bleeagh, and you’ve got goo. But we’re always playing with the two.
Is the world basically stuff, like matter, or is it basically structure? Well, we find out, of course—today, in science—we don’t consider the idea of matter, of there being some sort of “stuff”. Because supposing you wanted to describe stuff: in what terms would you describe it?
You always have to describe it in terms of structure, something countable, something that can be designated as a pattern. So we never get to any basic stuff. But for all that we go back and find out: what are we doing when we do this?
It seems to me that this way of thinking is based on a form of consciousness which we could best call “scanning.” The capacity to divide experiences into bits is somehow related a physical facility which corresponds to sweeping a radar beam, or a spotlight, over the environment. The advantage of the spotlight is [that] it gives you intensely concentrated light on restricted areas. A floodlight, by comparison, has less intensity.
But if you examine… say, this room were in total darkness, and you used the spotlight—very thin beam—and you scanned the room with it, you would have to retain in memory all the areas over which it passed. And then, by an additive process, you would make out the contours of the room. And it seems to me that this is something in which civilized man, both in the East and in the West, has specialized.
In a method of paying attention to things which we call “noticing.” And therefore it’s highly selective, it picks out—it’s punctive—it picks out features in the environment which we say are noteworthy, and which we therefore register with a notation—be it the notation of words, the notation of numbers, or such a notation, say, as algebra or music. So that we notice those things—only those things—for which we have notation. When a child—very often, a child will point at something and say to its parents, “What’s that?” And they’re not clear what the child is pointing to.
The child has pointed to something which we consider is not a thing. The child has pointed to an area, say, of funny pattern on a dirty wall and has noticed a figure on it. But the child doesn’t have a word for it and says, “What’s that?” And the adult says, “Oh, that’s just a mess.” Because that doesn’t count, for us, as a thing.
You come through this to the understanding: “What do you mean by a thing?” It’s very fascinating to ask children, “What do you mean by a thing?” And they don’t know, because it’s one of the unexamined suppositions of the culture. What do you mean by an event? Everybody knows what an event is, but nobody can say.
Because a thing is a think. It’s a unit of thought, like an inch is a unit of measurement. And so we thing the world—that is to say, in order to measure a curve you have to reduce it to point instance and apply the calculus.
So in exactly the same way, in order to discuss or talk about the universe, you have to reduce it to things. But each thing, or think, is, as it were, one grasp of that spotlight going “Tcha, tcha, tcha, tcha, tcha, tcha, tcha, tcha,” like this, you see? So we reduce the infinite wiggliness of the world to grasps—or bits; we’re getting back to biting, you see; the idea of the teeth—to grasps of thought.
And so we thereby describe the world in terms of things just as that fisherman could describe his view by the number of net-hole through which the view was showing. And this has been the immensely, and apparently successful, enterprise of all technological culture, superbly emphasized by ourselves. But the problem that arises is this: First of all, very obviously, everybody knows—I hardly need to mention it—go to the science of medicine.
You get a specialist who really understands the function of the gall bladder, and he studied gall bladders, gall bladders, gall bladders, ad infinitum. And he really thinks he knows all about it. But whenever he looks at a human being he sees him in terms of [a] gall bladder.
And so, if he operates on the gall bladder he may do so very knowledgably about that particular area of the organism, but he does not foresee the unpredictable effects of this operation in other connective areas, because the human being’s gall bladder is not a thing in the same way as a spark plug in a car can be extracted and a new one replaced. Because the system isn’t the same. There is a fundamental difference between a mechanism and an organism which can be described operationally.
A mechanism is assembled; you add this bit to that bit to that bit to that bit. But an organism grows, that is to say, when you watch—in a microscope—a solution in which crystals are forming, you don’t see this thing as little bits coming and coming and coming and joining each other and finally making up a shape. You see a solution where, well, it’s like when you watch a photographic plate developing.
Suddenly, the whole area which you’re watching seems to organize itself, to develop, to make sense. Moving from the relatively simple and gooey to the relatively structured and prickly. But not by addition.
So then: if we are trying to control and understand the world through conscious attention—which is a scanning system which takes in everything bit, bit, bit, bit, bit, bit, bit, bit, bit—what we’re going to run into is that if that’s the only method we rely on, everything is going to appear increasingly too complicated to manage. So that you get, for example—let’s take the problem of the electronic industry; the catalogs of products that are being produced over the world by the electronic industry. Who has read all the catalogs?
How do you know where you’ve got something you’re working on, whether it’s patented or not? Who else has taken out a patent? Has anybody had time to read all the catalogs?
Nobody has. They’re just voluminous. And it’s exactly the same in almost any other field.
There’s an information explosion like a population explosion. How on earth are you going to scan all that information? Yes, of course you can get computers to help you in this direction, but by Parkinson’s law, the sooner you become more efficient in doing this, the more the thing is going to develop so that you will have to have more efficient computers still to assimilate all the information.
You’ll be ahead, but only for a short time. So you see? This is a problem of the sort of competition of consciousness, of its “how fast can you go?”—“Doo-dee-doo-dee-doo-dee-doo-dee, doo-dee-doo-dee-doo-dee-doo-dee, doo-dee-doo-dee-doo-dee-doo-dee,” and keep track of it, you see?
And say, “I’ve got a good memory, I can keep track of that.” And you say to you, “I bet you you can’t. I’ll go more complicated than you.” See? Musicians do this.
Drummers, you know? And they get things going, and they start, and so long as they count—and lots of musicians do count; it’s crazy, but they do—and they count, count, count, and they out-complicate each other to the point where you can’t retain it any longer in memory. So you say, “Okay, if I can’t retain it we’ve got this gadget here that can.” And we’ve got these marvelous mechanical memories, and they will retain it.
They’ll go much more fast. They’ll go this “Doo-dee-doo-dee-doo-dee-doo-dee” at a colossal speed, zzhwit, like that, you see? It’s the same old problem.
Because you get something that can out-do that. So we end up asking… yeah. But supposing there were some other way of understanding things.
Let’s go back from the spotlight to the floodlight: to the extraordinary capacity of the human nervous system to comprehend situations instantaneously without analysis, that is to say, without verbal or numerical symbolism of the situation in order to understand it. I hope you understand what I mean by that; it’s clear. We do do that.
We have this curious ability of pattern recognition which the mechanical systems have only in a very primitive way. Xerox have put out a machine which recognizes figures written in almost anyone’s handwriting—provided their handwriting is fairly grade-school and normal—but a computer has a terrible time of recognizing the letter ‘a’ when it’s printed in, say, sans-serif, gothic, long hand, or whatever kind of ‘a’ you may write. The human recognizes, instantly, this pattern.
But the computer is still at a disadvantage here. It seems to lack a kind of capacity I would call “field organization,” because it’s all punctive, it’s digital, it’s “dot-dot-dot-dot-dot-dot-dot-dot,” like a newspaper photograph, you know? Which, when you look at it under a microscope, is all dots.
So the problem is this: in developing technology, are we leaving out of consideration our strongest suit, which is the brain itself? See, we are at a situation where the brain is still not really worked out by even the most competent neurologists; it puzzles them. They can’t give a model of the brain in numerical or verbal language.
Now, you are that, you see? You are this thing. You yourself are this thing which you yourself can’t figure out.
In the same way that I cannot touch the tip of this finger with the tip of this finger, I can’t bite my own teeth. But I, who is attempting to touch the tip of this finger with this finger, and by the sheer complexity of my structure, far more evolved than any system which I can imagine, this is in a way slightly akin to the Gödel theorem: that you can’t have a system of, say, logic, which defines its own axioms. The axioms of any given system must always be defined in terms of a higher system.
Alright, so you are the most complex thing that has yet been encountered in the cosmos. And you can’t figure you out. Now, suppose we’re going to try to do that and become, as it were, completely transparent to ourselves so that we entirely understand the organization, or the mechanics, of our own brains.
What happens when we do that? Well, you’re back in the situation of God. When you’re God, what are you going to do?
When you’re God you know what you’re going to do; you’re going to say to yourself, “Man, get lost!” Because what you’ll want is a surprise. And when you’ve figured everything out there won’t be any surprises. You’ll be completely bored.
But on the other hand, a person, I would say, who is really functioning completely is basically a person who trusts his own brains, and permits his brain to operate at a more optimal level. In other words, he knows how to think things out, but he makes his best discoveries without thinking. In other words, you all know very well the processes of creative invention: you’ve got a problem, you think it over, and you can’t find out any answer to it because the digital system of thinking is too simple, too clumsy, to deal with it.
It’s more complex, there are more variables than can be kept in mind at one time. So you say, “I’ll sleep on it.” Or you go to the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton or Behavioral Sciences at Stanford where they pay you to goof off. Which is a highly excellent idea.
And you moon around, and you’ve got a blackboard, and you look out of the window and pick your nose and so on, and your brain eventually hands you the solution to the problem. And you immediately—because you have technical knowledge—you recognize that’s the solution. But then, naturally, you go back and check it.
And you work the bit-by-bit form of thinking on it and say, “Now, does it come out in those terms?” And if it does, everybody will agree with you: “Yes, that’s the answer.” But if it doesn’t come out in those terms they won’t agree with you because you haven’t subjected it to the socially acceptable, traditional form of analyzing knowledge. But here’s the problem: it takes an awful long time to check these things out. It takes an awful long time to arrive at the solution which you got, phht, like that, by a purely calculated process.
Most of the situations of life are such that they don’t wait for us to make up our minds. So that an enormous amount of carefully worked out scientific knowledge is trivial. They’re all very well, very finely worked out, but much too late because life presents you—life comes at you from all sides; all over, everywhere at once.
And the only thing you’ve got to deal with that is the thing inside here, in the skull. Now I’m not saying this to put down all this marvelous work of calculation, brought to immense sophistication electronically and so on. Not at all—because actually, you people are the first people to understand the limitations of your own kind of knowledge.
And you’re going to have to tell the politicians about this. They don’t understand it. They think that this kind of knowledge is the answer to everything, and I think most of you know it isn’t.
Which is not something—I repeat—against technology. It’s only saying that when you walk, you put your right foot forward, and that’s fine, but then you must put your left foot forward. So let’s say that the great technological enterprise has been putting the right foot forward.
But you must bring up the left foot; that is to say, bring up revaluation—a new respect—for the organic kind of organization, which is incomprehensible to technological thinking, but which always underlies it. That, by itself, doesn’t work, because after you bring the left foot up, you begin to bring up the right foot, the analytic; after goo comes prickles, after prickles comes goo. You have to keep this thing up, and I think our danger at the present time is that we are so heady, so delighted with the results of prickles that we’ve got to let back a little bit of goo into the system.
Well now, what we’ve got to try and do is, I think, to work out a way of making the brain itself more efficient. And this is the thing that civilized education has neglected. Lynn White—I have to quote him again—he used to say that “the academic world today only values three kinds of intelligence: verbal intelligence, mnemonic intelligence”—in other words, remembering—“and computational intelligence.” He said it entirely neglects kinesthetic intelligence, social intelligence; and he had at least seven kinds of intelligence, I forget what they all were.
But it is this extraordinary capacity of the neural organization, say, to engage in pattern recognition and in solving, instantly, certain complex problems without knowing how it does it. But the trouble is when you do something you don’t know how to do, you’ve got a non-repeatable experiment in a certain sense. In other words, you can’t explain to someone else how to put it together.
But you can do it like you can open and close your hand without any knowledge of physiology. Do it every time. Whoops!