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Long before the conscious mind reached its conclusions the body had perceived what was happening and was already responding to it.
The essential point is whether what we ‘see’ is paralysed by focussed attention, such as the left hemisphere applies, or freed up by attention to the field as a whole, as is the case in the right hemisphere.
The key point to remember is that what is capable of being retained in the centre of our field of awareness is very limited indeed, and when we use only what we see there to construct our view of reality we go wrong.
Part of the power of the unconscious mind is its capacity to deal with numerous different elements simultaneously – and, even more importantly, to see their interconnexions one with another.
Even if they manifest as cognitive, they are embodied, in the sense that they are both informed by and inform the motion of our limbs, our breathing and pulse, the emotion of our heart and gut and mind, together with alert perception, and intelligent insight, all manifest in interaction with, rather than abstraction from, the world. Such intuitions are highly context-sensitive, responsible and responsive, not random or wilful; they are the fruit of disciplined attention to the world over time.
Well, we are much more than our conscious selves; it is variously estimated that around 99% of all that our brains take note of never needs to break into conscious experience.
Experience, as in chess, changes what you see when you look, and how you relate it to what you remember having seen.
Statistics cannot substitute for the human being before you; statistics embody averages, not individuals.
Prejudices cannot be done away with: they are replaced only with other prejudices, sometimes better, sometimes worse, and we should bear in mind that the more historically unusual they are, the less we have to go on in assessing their accordance with reality.
It is not our duty to be without prejudices, but to be aware of them – including the prejudice against prejudice – and examine them unremittingly, abandoning one prejudice in favour of another if we find the first does not accord with experience.
The knowledge is drawn from general experience in advance of the situation, not from the particulars of the actual situation; which does not in itself make it unintelligent, imperceptive or factually wrong. In fact it would be foolish – indeed impossible – not to draw conclusions from experience to date.
Groupthink is the danger. Groupthink will lead people to mistrust both their senses and their intuitions.
To have no particular predilections is impossible. The difference is not between those who have such predilections and those who don’t, but between those who know they have them and those that are ignorant that they have. And these are the dangerous ones: those that think they lack prejudice.
So prejudices are not necessarily wrong. What is wrong is to be biased in any individual case by your prejudice.
As far as hemispheres go, stereotypes are aggregates of experience, and depending on how you look at them, could be associated more with either hemisphere. Their genesis requires pattern recognition and social sensitivity (more typical of the right hemisphere); their application may involve conclusions that have been jumped to (more typical of the left hemisphere).
reasoning pushes people not towards the best decisions but towards decisions that are easier to justify.
Moreover, there is considerable evidence that, when reasoning is applied to the conclusions of intuitive inference, it tends to rationalize them rather than to correct them.69
We should never dismiss reason, but then we should never just dismiss intuition, either. We need them to work together, since reason guided by intuition is better than reason that disregards it; and intuition that is not dismissive of reason is better than intuition that is. We need as many ways of getting hold of reality as we can.
Most expertise, to the extent that it involves prediction at all, is about choosing the right next move, not the ultimate outcome.
In an uncertain world, good decisions require ignoring part of the available information. The more noise in the observations, the more likely a simple heuristic will outperform more flexible strategies.93 Complex problems do not always require complex solutions.94
We would expect people to take less risky-sounding options as they get more experience of life, and that is indeed the case:
Our findings present intuitions and logical reasoning not as two competing forces (which usually act in opposition) but as two complementary sources of human rationality.’
Quantification’, writes Muller, ‘is seductive, because it organises and simplifies knowledge. It offers numerical information that allows for easy comparison among people and institutions. But that simplification may lead to distortion, since making things comparable often means that they are stripped of their context, history, and meaning.’133
In lieu of real progress, the progress of measurement becomes a simulacrum of success …
Intuitions evolve in our movement and engagement with the world and with one another, not in detachment and stasis. Common sense is the ultimate embodied skill that is acquired effortlessly through experience, and, to be effective, it needs to be protected from the gaze of analysis.
Reason’s progeny are abstraction, precision and linearity; intuition’s progenitors are embodiment, the intrinsically imprecise, and complexity.
It cannot be too often repeated: from intuition one can pass on to analysis, but not from analysis to intuition.
What separates insight from analysis is that it is seen ‘at once’, not arrived at through a chain of distinct steps.
In the ultimate sense we have no absolutely certain knowledge at all, and a careful reliance on intuition is absolutely indispensable in daily life and in all intellectual pursuits.
He wrote: ‘the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars’.24 In short, insight precipitates a new Gestalt.
We need to see it – but then to see it differently. For that, we must no longer be presented with it as it is. The delicate process of re-imagining needs to be protected from potentially interfering perceptions.
That phrase is of the deepest significance to the argument of this book. It captures the idea that the creative imagination neither ‘just’ sees nor ‘just’ creates, but brings the new into existence through the combination of both, so rendering the authorship of what emerges ambiguous.
And this is how we bring all our world into being: all human reality is an act of co-creation. It’s not that we make the world up; we respond more or less adequately to something greater than we are. The world emerges from this dipole. We half perceive, half create.
In summary, a great work of art does not itself originate in consciousness at all, though the disposition to receive it may often be preceded by an act of conscious effort or will. It is the fruit of an encounter with a form, often at first indistinct, in a realm outside of consciousness.
Our current perceptions are governed by past perceptions and preconceptions; yet these too are always influenced reciprocally, if more weakly, by the new perception, the new experience.
Areas of the brain are not independent modules, but interact reciprocally, using dense forward and backward projections, as well as hierarchical and parallel strategies, and reciprocal cross-connexions, in an unimaginably complex awareness of the world we experience.
Every closing down of potential into an actuality – itself a necessary, even fruitful step – is by the same token a limiting of reality to what has been selected.
Many experts, institutions, and industries have an interest in keeping the status quo advice, and these interests create a bias in its favour …
When the data don’t fit a study’s assumptions, the preferred response is to review the assumptions, not struggle to make the data say something they – clearly – don’t.
Come to think of it, there is no safe level of living, but nobody would recommend abstention.
I have spent a little time on this because it so beautifully exemplifies two things germane to my overall argument: that true science is not at fault, but is brought into disrepute by the arrogant claims of those who speak in its name, claims which often flatly contradict the evidence; and that balance and harmonisation are less important in a left hemisphere-dominated culture than linear thinking.
Somebody memorably described life as a sexually transmitted terminal disease. Nothing in this world is safe: the art of life is balancing risk with richness.
In all processes there is a balance to be struck. There is always such a thing as enough. One rarely hears, however, of an administrative body concluding that it has now done enough. Once invented, it carries on pushing in the same direction, marching to the same slogan, even if the reason for adopting the slogan no longer applies – and currently there are few mechanisms for stopping its progress. This is not just a problem in science, of course: it is a prevailing problem of modern life.
Bohr’s greatest insight into the deep nature of the universe was that contraria sunt complementa: contraries fulfil one another.
Graspings: wholes and not wholes, convergent divergent, consonant dissonant, from all things one and from one thing all.
It says many things at once: that a deep understanding of the nature of reality comes in glimpses, or graspings – moments of insight; that, in that insight, all is neither simply single, nor simply manifold, neither simply whole, nor simply not whole, neither simply like nor simply unlike, each thing working with, and by the same token working against, the others; that the One and the Many bring one another forth into being, together generating the reality that has this structure at its core; and that despite (or, in light of all this, perhaps because of?) the nature of this multiplicity, all
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Nothing, like Being, is no thing.
A boundary can become the pivotal point of connexion (since boundaries are necessary to give identity, and thereby to make connexion possible at all); or it can become the point of separation, where there is no longer reciprocal influence and interaction.
‘Stay with the contradiction. If you stay, you will see that there is always something more than two opposing truths. The whole truth always includes a third part, which is the reconciliation’.33
Opposites genuinely coincide while remaining opposites. Some philosophies tend to collapse into the monism that opposites are identical; others into the dualism that opposites remain irreconcilable and are merely, at most, juxtaposed.34 The important perception is that opposites not only co-exist, but give rise to and fulfil one another (‘sunt complementa’), and are conjoined (like the poles of a magnet) without any intervening boundary, while nonetheless remaining distinct as opposites. And indeed the more intimately they are united, the more, not the less, they are differentiated.
