On Thu, 18 Sep 2003, [EMAIL PROTECTED] forwarded what
Harry Pollard [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>Salvador.
>
>As always, it all depends on what you mean by intuition.
>
>My view is that intuition is the result of unconsciously bringing
>separate and perhaps disparate thoughts together to reach a conclusion.
>
>In a note that didn't reach FW I pointed out that linear thinking (a b c
>d e) is all we have.(in spite of Van Vogt's "Worlds of Null-A").
>
>The next step would be network thinking, but I doubt it's possible -
>until it happens. Accomplished and practised thinkers may "linear think"
>so well that it looks more than it is - but I don't think we are out of
>linear mood yet.
Actually, pyschology demonstrates that this notion is an illusion.
I'll just sketch a couple of examples, which are probably familiar.
The truth is revealed by instances of physical brain function
disruption, which can be generated by strokes, or by radical
surgical intervention. The surgical instance is most impressive,
as in this case, the majority of the brain is fully severed into
left and right halves to stop massive epileptic attacks. As a
result, the patients become, at the intellectual, interpretive
level, two distinct entities which do not share any information,
despite the fact that because the lower brain is still (must
still be, for the patient to survive) intact, the patient percieves
themselves as a single unitary entity. Probing the behaviour of
such patients teases out the way the brain conspires to fool itself
that it is behaving rationally. As you are probably familiar,
when the patient's hands are placed in two boxes so they cannot
be seen, which contain two different objects, then the patient
is interrogated as to the content of the box which he can feel,
if the answer is to be spoken, the response will relate to one
box, but if it is to be written down, it will relate to the
other box, as speech is on one side of the brain, and writing
is on the other, and which ever side is to provide the answer
conveys only that which it knows (the sense data from each
hand goes only to one side of the brain). But if you try to
point out the discrepancies in the reponses, the patient is
found to have a surprising resistance to acknowledging the
disparity. It can be demonstrated that each side of the brain
uses every trick it can come up with to sneak access to the
knowledge of the other half, meanwhile denying that there is
any separation, flatly refusing to believe that two autonomous
"thought engines" are operating, even when the evidence is
indisputable. Why should this be? Because in reality this sort
of deceit is going on all the time in normal healthy individuals,
it is just that with considerable communication between the
hemispheres, the illusion is much more seamless and easy to
conceal.
The other sort of damage which reveals the same deviousness
occurs with stroke victims. Again, I'm sure you have encountered
the stories. When a part of the visual cortex is damaged, a
patient will draw pictures with one side of all the objects
missing, but won't realize that it is gone. Or will be unable
to acquire some piece of sensory information, but will aggressively
"eavesdrop" on themselves to acquire the information by
other means, while refusing to acknowledge that they are
doing so. The important point being that in these cases,
while their errors are glaringly obvious to all other observers,
they are utterly invisible to themselves.
These anecdotes, which I have only briefly indicated, point
to the systemic misdirection the mind uses to maintain
an illusion of a unitary self, whose behaviour is rational
and consistent. In fact, the reality is that loads and
loads of little semi-autonomous pieces of the brain are
always churning away, sensing, filtering, interpreting,
providing bits of information, and most importantly coming
to conclusions, outside of the purview of conscious
attention, which flits from "module" to "module", pulling
in bits of resultant items to sew together to provide an
apparent seamless, linear stream of awareness, with an
apparent logical, rational narrative justification to
hold it all together. But knowing what we now know about
how this mechanism works, it should be clear that this
narrative is essentially propaganda, a convenient myth to
keep the individual from collapsing into an existential
chaos of fractured identity. In truth, the brain works
massively in parallel, and is not linear at all.
-Pete Vincent
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