50 days of observations, insights, and contemplations...
by Tyler Volk
Tyler Volk’s “Mind Watching” Series Table of Contents
Day 9 - Thinking about Thinking
Today I drove into Silver City and back. Drive, shop for food, and complete a dozen small errands that had accumulated during the ten days since the last trip—all told, an eleven hour trek. On the return drive through the mountains, the sky was poised to deliver a giant thunderstorm, so I sped to beat it. But only a few drops fell.
While driving, I considered how much trouble the results from thinking have caused people throughout history. I refer to discoveries made by thinking—specifically, scientific discoveries—that so often have led to realizations that were (and still can be) uncomfortable.
In the Copernican Revolution, we found out that the Earth was not the center of the universe but only one of nine (now eight) planets in orbit around the sun. Five hundred years after that, in what might be called a Cosmological Revolution, we realized that our sun is one of some hundred billion stars in a massive spiral galaxy that itself is only one of many billions of galaxies. We live on an infinitesimal “pale blue dot” in this known universe, and now the astrophysicists are talking about countless universes.
Turning to biology, Darwin’s best-seller arrived in 1859, The Origin of Species. The conscious life of educated humans has never been the same since. Humans are not the key crown of god’s art piece but only one among on the order of ten million species currently alive, one small twig on the tremendous branching system of evolution. And as the Evolution Revolution continues to inform us, it has become clear that most of the biosphere’s chemical action is fomented not by our animal relatives but by plants, fungi, algae, and multitudes of microscopic bacteria.
In physics, the Einsteinian and Quantum Revolutions of the twentieth century revealed how parochial is the world of our ordinary senses. Extended through instruments that can probe where our eyes and ears cannot, we have found that extremely large and small scales are so bizarre that we can not only see but barely conceptualize them, requiring mathematical equations that mimic their realities.
Science has provided us with wonderful insights. Yet it also has caused psychological wreckage by conflicting with traditional religion, the God-concept, and simplistic answers to big questions about life. The existential quicksand we have waded into through science has humbled us by revealing our limitations and insignificance in space and time. Ongoing legal battles in the U.S. over the teaching of evolution in schools makes it clear that the psychic traumas caused by the discoveries of science are not over yet.
The human self forms a kind of last frontier of mystery that is slowly being laid bare by neuroscience and cognitive science. Freud started this revolution, when he demonstrated the power of the unconscious. Today, scientists talk less about unconscious repression and more about the day to day normal, healthy unconscious processing that makes us who we are. But the overall direction of these discoveries is clear: the “I” is getting whittled away to become a cognitive function in the greater unconscious mind of a person, which determines experience and behavior. And as you’ve noticed, I, for one, am bothered.
One might claim that just as knowledge of gravity can enhance the experience of flowing water, the discoveries of the brain sciences can enhance how we experience reality. But I am not yet ready sit in introspection and gleefully chant “automaton . . . automaton . . . automaton . . . ”, or “neuro-robot . . . neuro-robot . . . neuro-robot.” Somehow that focus would only sting and ultimately be no better than the attempt to take refuge in repetitive chants about god or even gods.
We have to face the fact that thinking has given us the know-how to understand many complex systems as the quantitative interactions of their internal types of parts. This understanding—in my interpretation—has led to the concept that we are an algorithm, a cognitomaton, however sophisticated and complex, a neuro-robot that has what it calls consciousness. Thinking has once again gotten us into trouble. So what do we do?
We cannot go back to the pre-scientific era. Neither would most of us even want to. Just to avoid today’s discomfort of knowing I’m a neuro-robot, I wouldn’t trade my life now for that of someone five hundred years ago, who would have had a higher likelihood of unquestioned belief in an immortal soul. I’ll accept the existential discomfort to take the physical comfort of sophisticated knee surgery when I needed it, for I am probably now being able to walk well as a result. No, I would not want to go back.
Of course, we cannot go back. We have to move forward. So what are we to do? We could think about thinking itself.
Just having the thought that thinking has historically created trouble for us is already a form of thinking about thinking. Furthermore, neuroscience and cognitive science, with their analytic sights trained on the mind and brain, are engaged in thinking about thinking. But I wish to emphasize the need to bring thinking about thinking forward to a new level of intensity.
Think about the absurdity of the U.S. presidential debates and how the chicken-ass candidates agree to a format that basically rewards the skilled memorization of sound bites. It is pretty sad what we have to put up with, in America here, this exemplar democracy, in terms of watching these candidates actually “think,” at least in such formats.
Things are not much better in conversations I observe. Everybody is surely thinking. They get together, have conversations, and judge “You’re right about this,” or “You’re wrong,” and “Oh, that’s interesting”—so there is evaluation about life and thoughts. But often it does not go very deep. I have noted that even in the conversations of people with Ph.D.s, as professional thinkers, the interlocutors do not step back and say “Let’s examine the thought process tonight and inquire into the proper way of thinking as opposed to an illogical way of thinking.” And, really, here I am talking about me.
Driving back from town, pondering the lack of thinking about thinking in myself led again into the feeling of being molded by society, like a piece of clay, to just perform to be part of the system, to just employ thinking to better execute that part, a player in the overall play. Can thinking about thinking, which technically goes by the term “meta-thinking,” or more generally, “metacognition,” be a route to a more liberated state? And if so, how so?
Are we going to be a piece of asphalt put into place and then painted over with the large social pattern, to take our part as a white line that provides a certain direction, an ordering of the world as linearized geometry? Or can a process of thinking about thinking emerge at right angles from the side, like plants from the highway’s side, and create a process of organic growth that is wilder, crazier, and grows from a higher level of freedom? Even though the white line is there in our mind, a symbol of direction given by the social world, can this possibly freer process of metacognition like green plants lay on top, infiltrate, and influence the more robotic parts of ourselves? To enthusiastically delve into the thought process would be a worthy endeavor.
© 2024 by Tyler Volk
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