“Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.” — Gloria Steinem
|
Thinking Generally
All of my work involves thinking, and I think everything we do involves thinking. Most of what living things do revolves around thinking of one kind or another, and there are more kinds of thinking than you can imagine.
We talk about intellect and emotion, and we wonder whether animals think. This is all too small-minded. Thinking includes larger ways to organize experience than what humans do using language. We need to expand our notion of thought beyond what we can talk about.
My mentor, Eugene Wigner, famously asked (Wigner 1960) why the rules of mathematics generate the laws of physics? That was a somewhat small question because physics is based on the idea that every effect has a cause, and mathematics is based on the idea that different expressions mean the same thing. This translates to the same basis, a conservation of structure, so naturally one can be used to model the other. But in truth, most things in physics do not have a closed mathematical form and we have to violate equality to get a useful answer.
A deeper question is what are the relationships that explain how things behave. As Wigner added, “it is useful… to abandon the idealization that the level of human intelligence has a singular position on an absolute scale… it may even be useful to consider the attainment which is possible at the level of the intelligence of some other species.” But we don’t have to go to the intelligence of other species; we are sufficiently ignorant about our own.
General Thinking
Anything that controls itself in a changing environment thinks in a rudimentary sense. From this point of view, a self-regulating machine “thinks,” even something as simple as a pendulum. From an observational point of view, wherever laws interact with laws, something is being decided. We must accept this as the prototype of thought. In this regard plants think and microbes certainly think.
There is a border at which the notions of feedback and control are vague. We can say viruses think, but their kind of thinking is more of an artificial intelligence. Their behavior evolves more mechanically than intentionally. We can say that beyond this border are mechanical things that react without intention. In that realm exist simple structures like rocks and minerals.
We now have purely mechanical contraptions that can perform nearly all the functions of thoughtful humans. Maybe we should not take our thoughtfulness for granted. Maybe humans who are not trying to think are not thinking. Or maybe what constitutes human thought goes beyond what we conceive of thinking to be.
Intellect
There is something mathematical about intellect even if it doesn’t appear so. Using your intellect is reminiscent of putting things in their natural order, somewhat like Wigner’s use of math to model the world. You use your intellect because you think it will reveal a conclusion in a series of steps, and that what is not obvious in a single step will become evident after several.
You will use the notion of “making sense” in a similar way that an equals sign appears in math. There are close associations between intellect, reason, logic, and mathematics but they are also subtly different. An intellectual conclusion is not a series of equalities, it’s a series of extensions. Each reasonable step includes something more. As a result, your conclusion is not equal to what you started with. And where math displays an “unreasonable effectiveness,” as Wigner said, reason is only reasonably effective in guiding our behavior. Why is that?
Emotion
I understand emotion as a necessary extension of intellect. Intellect looks at causes and their details while emotion considers effects in terms of the larger picture. And the way intellect and emotion consider things is quite different: intellect is objective while emotion is subjective. If intellect is logical, emotion is musical.
Where intellect builds a cause and effect model of how and why things are, emotion creates a framework with a righteous flavor. We put the righteousness on top of our emotional conclusions, so that the emotional impact is visceral. You feel it rather than think it.
One’s emotional picture is judgement-based, but these judgements are not intellectual, they’re feeling-based. Even if they’re unreasonable, they’re motivational. The steps in your emotional picture are blocks of positive or negative feeling based on who you are, how you’ve lived, and what you remember.
Emotional conclusions are not reasonable steps to judgement. They often lack sequence and logic, but they do form a structure that has big feelings on the bottom and little feelings on the top. This intuitive picture is historical and provides guidance. The mistake people make is identifying their emotional picture with a description of the outside world, with the truth.
Compared with cooking, intellect is like the ingredients and emotion is whether or not you like the result. Whether or not you like curry or beer does not provide a truth about either, it reflects your experience and perceptions. Impressions, conclusions, and reactions are more fluid than taste. You can change your reason for what you eat faster than you can change your attitude about oatmeal.
My point is that you need both. To have emotion without intellect is to judge every food on its immediate and unintegrated taste. To have intellect without emotion is like being a chef whose recipes are based only on chemistry, or an artist who mixes colors based on their wavelengths. You need taste and chemistry, color and wavelength, but even their combination is not enough.
For more personal dreamwork, counseling, guidance, or psychotherapy…
Dreaming
Walter Tevis authored “The Man Who Fell To Earth,” and “The Queen’s Gambit” in which Beth, a chess prodigy, struggles with the death of her parents, prejudice, and a drug addiction. He says (Guy 2022),
“When I was young, I was diagnosed as having a rheumatic heart and given heavy drug doses in a hospital. That’s where Beth’s drug dependency comes from in the novel… Writing about her was purgative… I did a lot of dreaming while writing that part of the story.”
Dreaming is a third way of understanding and it is closer to emotion than intellect, but different from both. While intellect uses reason and emotion uses memory, dreams use association. It’s only at the intersection of all three that we build a stable and adaptable personality. And while both intellect and emotion draw on association, only dreams focus on associations primarily.
We commonly say that dreams are illogical, but that’s because we don’t understand their logic. Their logic is not factually causal, it’s emotionally associative. There is logic in our dreams, which is why they seem plausible at the time, and if you experience them as emotional explorations then you will more likely understand them.
When we explore something intellectually we consider alternatives. The most useful explorations lead us to new ideas. These are not the goals we hoping for, they’re new choices that might get us there, but about which we hesitate.
When we explore something emotionally we explore alternative feelings. The most useful emotional explorations are, naturally, unsettling since being settled is to feel one’s emotions are undisturbed. Being disturbing is an ancillary purpose of dreams, though it might be more accurate to call it a mechanism. Dreams follow Desmond Tutu’s suggestion that, “If you want peace, you don’t talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies.”
The primary purpose of dreaming is reorganizing one’s emotions. For this, dreams must have a modicum of reason or else they would lose their recognizable relevance, but they cannot be logical as that path is too narrow. If dreams are to expand your consciousness they must bring in what does not make sense. Rather than making sense, dreams suggest other forms of sense in all its meaning. It’s your intellect that “makes sense,” and your emotions that appraise the sense you make.
Dreams that leave you unsettled, as most do, open the doors to new considerations. Your ability to remember dreams is a measure of your openness to reconstructing your point of view, which is to say the adaptability of your personality. Where intellect may lead to new ideas, and emotions may lead to new feelings, dreams always lead to new visions.
Reconstruction
Meta-thinking creates opportunity but does not have intrinsic value. Not everything you can come up with is valuable. The value depends on the work produced. In the case of meta-thinking, it depends on the utility of your thoughts.
Consider science: how would you arrive at a breakthrough idea if you just followed existing reasoning? That is what so-called “normal science” does; it pursues well-defined but difficult problems looking for better solutions. Those solutions are not usually breakthroughs, though they can be if they resolve contradictions.
Gravity and quantum mechanics present contrary views of the world, the first is singular and continuous while the second is multiple and discontinuous. There is a branch of research called quantum-gravity but it has made no progress using normally-accepted tools.
Consider your life which probably consists of a combination of attitudes, obligations, and aspirations. You attempt to integrate these using tools that you’re familiar with but, as the meaning and importance of these things goes deeper, you’ll find your familiar tools are insufficient.
Yet, dispensing with your familiar tools is unattractive because alternatives make no promises and there are risks. The typical person in mid-life crisis adopts a juvenile approach similar to an adolescent: new toys, exciting relationships, new indulgences and social presentations. These are not new ideas, they’re familiar tools applied to and old problem, the problem of gaining wisdom.
The adolescent tools you used in your last metamorphosis are not designed to provide wisdom in later life. Most adolescents are looking for acceptance, not insight. The tools you need for insight will be unfamiliar, but unfamiliarity by itself is no guarantee of the right tools. The tools needed for unsolved problem are meta-tools: tools that extend your thinking, emotions, and associations.
As the old joke goes, “You can’t get there from here,” but you can get there from there. What I mean by “there” is a judicious attitude of exploration of novelty, creativity, and risk. Embrace ignorance, allow for failure, engage contradictions, and give yourself space. Go to the edge of things and, when you come back, remember what you thought, saw, and felt. Bring new impressions back to be processed. Think, feel, and dream more.
This is what I tell my clients and, if they’re at all willing, they’ll ask how? Some are unwilling, and they’ll reject me. They can’t disprove me so they’ll instead dislike me, and that’s their solution for the moment.
But if you want to go beyond your intellectual, emotional, and associative limits it’s really quite easy. Just give yourself space and apply your intentions. This is what leads monks and artists into seclusion. The realm of new thoughts is unquestionably a lonely place, and providing company is probably my highest role as a counselor.
I call myself a counselor because I am not curing a sickness. I don’t like the label “therapist” and I’m suspicious of those who wear it proudly. I only call myself a therapist if you need to call yourself dysfunctional, which can be a useful way of giving yourself space.
I avoid calling myself a friend because I’m not providing assurance or endorsement. Sometimes I call myself a consultant since I’m happy to consider new strategies. I mostly prefer not to call myself anything.
Fundamentally, I want to change people’s minds both because that allows me to witness inspiration and it can be inspiring to me. My solution to mid-life change, to which I’m rather late, is to accompany my clients on their journeys. Two witnesses are better than one.
“When we have a strong vision, it acts as a magnet, pulling us towards our goals and aspirations. This vision not only motivates us but also helps us make decisions and prioritize our efforts.”
— Gary Fox, trainer and coach (https://www.garyfox.co/)
References
Guy, M. (2022 Jun 8). “Is The Queen’s Gambit a True Story? The ‘Real’ Beth Harmon Revealed.” Regency Chess. https://www.regencychess.co.uk/blog/2022/06/is-the-queens-gambit-a-true-story/
Wigner, E. (1960 Feb) “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences.” Communications in Pure and Applied Mathematics 13(1). https://webhomes.maths.ed.ac.uk/~v1ranick/papers/wigner.pdf
Enter your email for a FREE 1x/month or a paid 4x/month subscription.
Click the Stream of the Subconscious button.