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 let us say without verbal or numerical symbolism of the
situation in order to understand it I hope you understand what I mean ok 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 computer has a terrible time
trying to recognize the letter A when it's printed in say sans-serif
graphic longhand 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
active it's digital it is better like a newspaper photograph you know which when
you look at it under a microscope is all dust now so the problem the problem is
this
in developing technology are we leaving out 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 his finger with his finger am 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 girdle theorem that you can't
have a of say a logic which defines its own axioms the axioms of any given
system must always be defined in terms of a higher system all right so you are
the most complex thing that has yet been encountered in the cosmos and you can't
figure you out
now you suppose we're going to try to do that and become as it were completely
transparent to ourselves so that we could entirely understand the
organization on the mechanics of our own brains what happens when we do that
well you're in the WiiU you're back in the situation of God when you got what
are you gonna do when you God you know what you're gonna do you're gonna say to
yourself man get lost because what you want is a surprise and when you 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 he
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 in mind at
one time so you sell sleep on all you go to the Institute of Advanced Studies at
Princeton of behavioral sciences at Stanford where they pay you to goof off
which is highly a excellent idea and you move around and you've got a blackboard
and you look out the window and pick your nose and so on and your brain
eventually hands is the solution to the problem I knew immediately because you
have technical knowledge you recognize that for solution but then naturally
you'll go back and check it and you work bit by bit form of thinking
on it and see now does it come out in those tongues 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 as you haven't subjected it to the socially
acceptable traditional form of animal and 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've got like that by a purely
calculated process most of the situation's of life are such that they
don't wait for us to make up our mind so an enormous amount of carefully worked
out scientific knowledge is trivial they all very well very finely worked out but
much too late how's 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 they 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 that is to say bring up re-evaluation a new
respect for the organic type 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've again got to bring
up the right foot the analytic after GU comes prickles how the cripples don't do
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 cripples that we've got
to let back a little bit of dual 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 Lin
wide like to quote him again used to say that them the academic world today only
values three kinds of intelligence global intelligence mnemonic
intelligence in other words food remembering and the computation one
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 the neural organization but to say to engage
in pattern recognition and in solving instantly certain complex problems
without knowing how it does it 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 I
don't know how I do it I just do it you see so we have an enormous potential of
intelligence of knowing how to do all sorts of things which to the extent that
we are academically minded people we won't allow ourselves to do because we
can't explain you know the road for example is a way of cooling a brazing
furnace it's very simple but Engineers say it's theoretically impossible it
can't happen it's like bees can't fly by the laws of aerodynamics but they do
so the rather practical issue I come to is this that technology if it relies
exclusively on linear thinking is going to destroy the environment it's going to
become too complicated to handle man is going to be like the dinosaur which had
to have a brain in its head and a brain in its rump because it was so big you
know the caveman had kept up dinosaur and when he went to bed at night he'd
thump it on the table with a club and it did scream at 8 o'clock in the morning
wait it's easily we're getting into that kind of saurian situation with our
technology which is going to lead us to extinction so the question is are we
going to foul things up by insisting on using linear input information and
controlling it as the dominant tool of controlling the world or can we master
all that as we have done and still use the linear input and analysis but with a
fundamental trust in our power to assimilate multiple input although we
really don't know how we do it and my point is that you can't find an absolute
which you can pin down to see so there always remains in any human operation
the basic central thing which you can't pin down because it's you
just as the teeth can't bite themselves now the assumption of judeo-christian
culture is that man in his nature is sinful and therefore can't be trusted
the assumption of at least ancient Chinese culture is that man in his
essential nature is good and therefore has to be trusted because they say to us
if you can't trust your own basic nature you can't really rely on the idea that
you're untrustworthy therefore you are hopelessly fouled up so this has amazing
political and other consequences there's a different assumption if we say no we
human beings are fallible and basically selfish and really really fundamentally
evil and therefore we need law and order we need a control system to put us in
order we thereby project these control systems into the church or into the
police or into somebody who are really ourselves disguised since like daylight
saving time we everybody could simply get up an hour earlier but instead of
doing that we alter the clock because the clock is a kind of authority and I
would say well the clock says it's time for you to get up and the the Indian in
there Amerindians laughs at the pale faces because they say tell face he
doesn't know when he's hungry until he looks at his watch and so in this way we
become clock dominated and the abstract system takes over from the physical
organic situation and this is my big pitch if I'm going to make a big pitch
is that we run into a cow situation where we've confused the
symbol with the physical reality the money was the wealth and the menu with
the dinner and we're starving on eating menus
well now 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 I'm interested in many things that you were 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 Chris
custodia custodiet Ipsos who guards the guards now we we know that we're living
in an age when there's been an enormous proliferation
of techniques before 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've
we're failing that the process becomes of such a high degree of complexity that
we begin to feel that we're standing in our own way that everybody complains the
state of affairs in modern world in the technological world is so complicated
that nobody can understand it 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 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 in 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 and so the individual
increasingly feels himself obstructed by his own cautiousness
this is basically what it is now ah 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 now the very often encounter the
sort of character who was an American businessman and he says well I'm a
practical businessman I believe in getting results and things done all is
thinking and highfalutin logic and non senses of no concern for 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 to see to get down - what
are your basic assumptions what do you mean by the good life what do you mean
by consistency what do you 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 and of course for this purpose I was thought
that the Chinese were optimal and the Indians these Indians and that by
studying the ideas of these people by studying their life goals we could
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
particular different points of view thereby calculate its actual distance
from you so by looking at what we are pleased to call reality the physical
world from this basic standpoints of different cultures I think we're in a
better position to know where we are and if we only have one single line of
sight and therefore this has been my interest in my background and arising
out of this that 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 Angeles in 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 your 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 in it 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 safe control over genetic systems control over the nervous system
control over all kinds of systems well then but simply what do you want to do
with it but most people don't know what they want and I've never even seriously
confronted the question of 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 have the power to dream
every night any dream you wanted to dream and you could of course arranged
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 start out by
fulfilling every wish you would have routes and orgies and all the most
magnificent food and sexual partners and everything you could possibly imagine in
that direction when you've got tired of that after several nights you would
switch a bit and you'll soon find yourself involved in adventures and
contemplating great works of art and tastic mathematical conceptions you
would soon be rescuing princesses from dragons and all sorts of things like
that and then one night I say now look tonight what we're going to 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 good se rule wasn't that an adventure then you
would think more and more far out ways to get involved and let go of control
knowing that should always come back to Center in the end but while you were
involved in the dream you wouldn't know your company
come back to Center be in control and so eventually you would 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 a little amusing
the difficulty is 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 concept and whether you are a Jew or a Christian
or an agnostic or an atheist you are not uninfluenced by the whole tradition of
Western culture the models of the universe which it is employed which
influenced 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 architecture
you
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