December 7, 2018One of the miracles of human consciousness is our ability to talk about human consciousness. Admittedly, ensuing discussions on the subject are dicey.
We generally devote our astounding global brain power to just getting our little selves through the little day, so any discussion of how we happen to live this life wailing with possibility and what we should do about it becomes, well, dicey, because the discussion requires that we step back from our brains in order to explore their possibilities. Which is not a reason to avoid the discussion. Au contraire! It’s all the more reason, really, to exercise peripheral vision and wide-angle thinking, savor the view, and respond to it all in a new way.
Let’s plunge ahead by breaking it down into [1.] All the facets of the brain, and [2.] The information to which we have access and how may we best avail ourselves of it.
[1.] Facets of the brain. Don’t panic! This is not a neurological or physiological text. This is a boots-on-the-ground, trooper-to-trooper, survey of available portals. You’re probably familiar with some of these, but it doesn’t hurt anything to enjoy a quick bird’s eye scan of our plug-ins.
Start with smell. It’s ancient and fundamental, instant and irrefutable. And build from there. Taste. Touch. Hearing. Sight. (They say the human eye can perceive one photon!) Speech. Locomotion. Balance. Athleticism. Sex. Instinct. Intuition. Love. And all the miraculous autonomic functions that take care of operations when we’re out to lunch. Plus we have an opposable thumb!
And, oh yeah, Thinking. Thinking! Thinking is last on the list, as indeed it came last in our development, and we’re still trying to wedge it into the program. All the other parts operate splendidly without a lot of second-guessing. But Thinking, well, sheesh, it can give you a headache, and again, we’re still figuring it out: the how, when and what of Thinking.
What to think about is a question that we ought to ask more often. After all, we do have a choice. Don’t we? Broadly speaking, the content of Thinking can be divided into Thinking about me, and Thinking about other stuff.
A corollary question: should I think the same thoughts about me and other stuff over and over again? Or should I think new stuff? Any nascent, snuffled curiosity about thinking new stuff whooshes us to the shores of the information age, which is [2.] in our discussion.
[2.] Information. As denizens of this information age, we do need to process abstract information in order to live well. It’s an intimidating challenge, and we’re breathlessly trying to catch up. And failing.
Not so many centuries ago, in the Middle Ages, the sum of human knowledge was well defined. You could actually comprehend its limits. All the books in the world fit into one room probably smaller than your local DMV. The body of knowledge was growing, but at a barely discernible pace: it took over a millennium for the quantity of information to double.
Now, five or six centuries later, the scope and depth of human knowledge is beyond comprehension, and nobody even knows for sure how fast information is doubling. Some argue that the sum of human knowledge doubles every year. Some say it’s happening much faster.
However anyone measures it, we are awash in information, and we can’t imagine keeping pace with the waves of it all. It can drive you crazy, just maintaining basic literacy and currency in multiple fields of inquiry. Movies, politics, indie song writers, physics, art, insomnia, and tennis. History, theater, atheism, astronomy, fiction, law, football, economics, poetry, synchronized swimming, and geography.
You couldn’t cope with new production in the relatively minor discipline of sociology, even if it were your full time job. And what about banking, psychology, chemistry, metallurgy, the stock market, the Balkans, micro-dosing, and 3-D printing? And, oh yeah, baseball, Islam, agriculture, the Iberian peninsula, mining, solar energy, Judaism, basketball, robotics, coffee bean futures, pharmaceuticals, Christianity, sabermetrics, and wind power . . ?
Apologies to all those areas of expertise that haven’t been mentioned, not limited to glass blowing, Hinduism, fire tornado theory, quilting, serotonin vs. dopamine, ballistics, hermeneutics, the Etruscans, oncology, comedy, Timbuktu, corn syrup solids, and ballet.
By the way, interesting fact: Wikipedia contains almost six million articles in the English language version alone, and articles are accumulating at the rate of about two hundred per day. This is a beautiful problem.
Yet it is still a problem, and it’s a thousand problems, and the crushing onslaught of human knowledge might have doubled since yesterday morning. Nobody knows. And by the time anyone figures out how fast it’s doubling, it probably will have more than quintupled a bunch of times.
And also by the way, let’s agree that lots of people, for various reasons, don’t care about this problem. (They’re being driven crazy by other stuff, such as the insidious IFOS — Incuriosity Faux Omniscience Syndrome — so don’t worry, they’re not getting off easy.) And if you were an IFOS dupe, you would have already lost interest and quit reading.
Since you do care, as it’s the next paragraph and you’re still here, we have to ask: exactly what is the problem? Excellent question. Thank you.
The problem is that we want to understand the whirl of the world, and we can’t exactly “information our way” (if “information” were a verb) to understanding, because the waves of new knowledge rotate like crazed moons around our puny (albeit amazing) tennis ball brains — and these brains are not even fully available because we have to think ad nauseam about “me.”
And simply gathering information, even if we could do it 24/7, does not satisfy the abiding, surpassing urge to understand: information provides the building blocks but another kind of vision/integration confers the architecture of understanding.
As the rate of information increases, it’s particularly easy to get stupid-crazy and neglect to consider that thinking is slow. Thinking takes time. Thinking requires care and curiosity and, yes, it also requires those raw building blocks of new information called facts. But again — thinking is slow, and moreover thinking is the art of connecting facts.
It’s not a game of tennis.
People and cultures often treat thinking as if it were tennis, with responses to new facts and new ideas slammed around at body-speed with return-forehand-finality. While simultaneity and instantaneity elevate your tennis, the tennis model does not enhance the game of thought: just because you wallop a return thought doesn’t mean it enriches your understanding of anything.
In fact, thinking benefits by resisting the instant reactions that serve so well in tennis. Because thinking takes time, and benefits from connecting far-flung facts and experiences and fresh perception.
Paying attention to new facts and countervailing ideas from the gathering mass of information, and then connecting these new facts and ideas in new ways across seemingly disparate bodies of knowledge and experience is a lot more fun and alive and startling than thinking about “me” all the time.
Let’s pluck a couple of examples from the infinite tsunami of new information, and see where any of them may lead.
Example: The placebo effect: a growing number of studies indicate that patients’ belief in the power of a remedy is often as effective as the actual medical remedies themselves. The belief is so strong that patients have achieved complete recovery from knee injuries when they see the incision made by a surgeon — even though no surgical remedy was performed. The belief in the remedy was the only intervention!
Knowledge of the placebo effect is useful and captivating. (Profit-seeking pharmaceutical companies find the placebo effect supremely annoying.) Considered further, the placebo effect casts new light and new perspective on mind/body dualism, and suggests that the mind and the body are not separate functions as we usually construe them — because if mere belief in a cure can cure a medical problem, then obviously the mind and the body can work as one.
The placebo effect seems to work because of the power of our belief in medicine. The power of belief in a pill or an incision is so strong that chronic maladies can be cured not by chemistry or surgery but simply and purely by the belief itself. We believe that an external intervention works. Can the power of this belief in the external be internalized? So that we may cure ourselves more often? And how in the world can we learn to do that? Now, that’s something worth thinking about.
Example: The Better Angels of Our Nature, published in 2011, documents the homicide rate world wide over the centuries. Against all expectation, author Steven Pinker documents that in the Twentieth Century, even with two horrific world wars and the millions of deaths caused by Stalin and Mao and others, the homicide rate was the lowest in history.
For anyone paying attention to news and the human condition, it’s practically blasphemy to say that life is getting better. And of course the question is complicated, and problems abound everywhere you look. Yet if the goal is to understand what’s really happening, then it is critical to integrate big picture facts, including these: people are slaughtering people a lot less than they used to. And the rate of abject poverty in the world is declining. And other signs of progress abound but it might be too upsetting to list them all at once . . .
Example: Atlanta, Georgia, is west of the entire continent of South America. Look at a globe. It’s perfectly obvious. Okay, fine, you say — but why does this matter? It matters because you thought North America was right above South America. And you were wrong. And it’s plainly obvious: North America is almost entirely to the west of South America. In the interest of understanding what in the heck is going on around here, we have to be wary of the brain’s reflex to stack facts and make a pattern where none exists.
Example: Cross Species Pollination. Research biologist Carl Woese showed that species do not evolve only according to Darwin’s theory of survival of the fittest, but also by exchanging genetic information directly from species to species at the cellular level.
Such cross-species exchanges upend the suppositions that have undergirded biology for more than a century.
And such exchanges serve as a model for the cross-pollination of facts, broad information, and personal experience.
The fount of information is not going to stop. It’s going to accelerate. Let’s enjoy it. Let’s pay attention to the big parts and the little parts and let the infinite combinations form and lead us beyond, way beyond the circular preoccupations with “me.”
