on moment you feel like you're a puppet you're just on the end of strings the
next minute you suddenly realize that everything that you are aware of is
inside your brain so it's all you and you get the two feelings go together
that I'm doing it all but it's doing me and this worries people when they get
this feeling because they don't know which to decide for and they don't see
how to put the two together 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
the Western model of the universe is politically and engineering or
architectural and therefore as one understands the operations of a machine
by analysis of its path by separating them into their original bits we have
fitted the cosmos and see everything going on in terms of bits bits of
information and I 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 bidding and so we think 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 thank you Joe Joe Joe Joe Joe Joe Joe like that 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 ho over through which the view was showing
not the problem that arises is this first of all very obviously everybody
knows I already need to mention it go to the science of medicine you get a
specialist who really understands the function of the gallbladder 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 gall bladder and so if he operates on the gall bladder he
may do so very knowledgeably about that particular area of the organism but he
does not foresee the unpredictable effects of this operation in other
connected areas because the human beings gall bladder is not a thing in the same
way as the a sparkplug 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
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 the shape it's like when you want
the photographic plate developing or suddenly all 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 the states have a problem of from the electronic
industry the catalogues of products regard being produced over the world by
the electronic industry who has read all the catalogs how do you know where
you've got a 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 thing sooner you become more
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 is this problem of the sort of
competition of consciousness of its how fast can you go
duty duty duty duty duty duty duty duty duty duty duty do and keep track of it
to see and say I'm a got a good memory I keep track of it and you say to you I
bet you you can't I'll go more complicated than you so you let
musicians do this my drummers you know and they get things
going and they start and they earn so long as they count and lots of musicians
do count it is crazy but they do and they can't 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 retaining we've got this gadget here that can and
we've got these marvelous mechanical memories and they will retain and
they'll go much more fancy they'll go this duty duty duty at a colossal period
like that you see what is the same no problem because you get something that
cannot do that
so we end up asking their 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 the comprehend situation
was 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 of 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 a
sans-serif graphic longhand or whatever kind of a you may write the human
recognizes instances as 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 microscope is all dust now so the public
the problem is this
in developing technology are we leaving out of consideration our strongest suit
which is the brain itself see we are the situation where the brain is still not
really worked out by even the most competent neurologists the puzzles them
they can't give a model of the brain in numerical or verbal language now you are
back 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 girdle theorem
that you can't have a a system 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
alright so you are the most complex thing that has yet been encountered in
the cosmos and you can't figure you are
now you is 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 or the mechanics of our own brains
what happens when we do that
well 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 we'd 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 are from 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 can come Z 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 Ilia for your excellent idea
and you moon around and you've got a blackboard and you look out the window
pick your nose and so on and your brain eventually hands is the solution to the
problem
and you immediately because you have technical knowledge you recognize that
as a solution but then naturally we'll go back and check it and you've worked
it budget 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 of those terms they won't agree with you but 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 the enormous amount
of carefully worked out scientific knowledge is trivial 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 let's
go
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've 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 only saying so that when you
walk and 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
re-evaluation a new respect for the organic type of organization which is
incomprehensible to technological thinking but which always underlies it
and that by itself doesn't work because after you bring the left foot up you
begin to bring up the right foot the analytics after GU comes prickles after
cripples comes loose 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 and then wide
like to probe him again used to say that them the academic world
today only values three kinds of intelligence verbal intelligence
mnemonic intelligence in other words would remembering and a computational
intelligence so that 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
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
oops 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 there for example is a way of from 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
the 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 have a brain in his head and the brain in its rump because
it was so big you know the caveman kept a dinosaur and when he went to bed at
night he counted on the tail with a club and it did scream at 8 o'clock in the
morning wait it's easy we're getting into that kind of saurian situation with
our technology which is gonna 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 you see so there always remains
in any human operation the basic essential 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 we ourselves disguised since like
daylight saving time 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 pale
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 gonna make a big
pitch is that Jim we've run into a cultural 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
gonna 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 custodiat 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 and 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 their requirements
the recording the in endless red tape of the registrar's office in 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 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 if not 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 could say very often encounter the
sort of character who was an American businessman and he says well I'm a
practical businessman I am I believe in getting results and things done all is
thinking and highfalutin logic and non senses 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 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 the East 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 particularly 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 this basic stand points 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 quest in 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 the
result of technology but all this gets down to the basic question is really
what are you going to do if your God is 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 then 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 what they want you ask a group of students to sit
down and write a solid paper of twenty 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 as he
wanted a whole 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 got tired of that after several nights you'd 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 you 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 let's say whew 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 you were going to 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 that you have
maybe that's what you're doing but the difficulty the difficulties 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 concepts
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 architectural it's natural for a child to ask its mother
how as I made it would be inconceivable for a Chinese child to ask how as I made
it might ask how as I grown or how did I grow but not how was I made is if I were
an architect 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 would
continue to think of the world in terms of the machine in terms of Newtonian
mechanics and later in terms of what we call quantum mechanics although I find
it rather difficult to understand how mountain theory is in any sense
mechanics it is much more like organics which is to me a different concept
however that may be it has percolated that 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 the machine by analysis of its parts by
separating them into their original bits we have bitted the cosmos and see
everything going on in terms of bits bits of information and the 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 bidding let's suppose you know
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 look we don't know
the origins of all this maybe 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 clock 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 water as the
outlines of continents and mountains is biological existences and all of them
wiggle and wiggling things are to human consciousness a little bit of amusement
because we want to figure it out and it is as if therefore some ancient
fishermen 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 this one 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 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 a looking at things through graph paper painted on
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 figurative and constructive 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 the in fact the 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 in the history of philosophy
and poetry and art we always find the interchange of two personality types
which I call prickles and boo the prickly people are advocates of
intellectual Porcupine ism they want a rigor they want to sigh statistics now
they have a certain clipped attitude in their voices and you know this very well
in academic circles forward and they accuse other people of being
disgustingly vague and miasmic and mystical but the vague miasma can
mystical people accused the prickly people would be 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 prickly you're up Casa cysts and if you're gooey you're a romanticist and
they're going back into medieval philosophy if you're prickly or
anomalous if you're gooey or a realist and so it goes but we know very well
that this natural universe is neither prickles nor go exclusively it's gooey
prickles and prickly goo and 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 outline sharply defined we look allowed of focus it's gonna be blue
there and you've got goo but we're always playing with the two because it's
like the question is and is the world basically stuff like matter or is it
basically structure well we find out of course today that in
science we don't consider the idea of matter of just any of their 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 comfortable something that can be designated as a
pattern so we never get to any basic stuff 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
to a physical facility which corresponds to sweeping a radar beam or a spotlight
over the environment the advantage of the spotlight as 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 use 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 its punctus 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 work 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 child will point at something and say to his 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 is pointed to an area say of funny pattern on a dirty wall and is
noticed a figure on it but the child doesn't have a word for it and says
what's that and the adults is oh that's just a mess because that doesn't count
for us as a thing so you come through this to the understanding what do you
mean by a thing very fascinating to our 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 well 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 think 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 grass of that
spotlight thank you Joe Joe Joe Joe Joe Joe Joe like this you see so we reduce
the infinite wiggliness of the world to in grasps or bits we're getting back to
biting you see the idea of the teeth to grasp the thought and so we thereby
describe the world any terms of things just as that fisherman could describe
his view by the number of net whole over through which the view was showing and
this has been the immensely and apparently successful enterprise of all
technological culture superbly emphasized by ourselves
you
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