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 block.
 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.
 Whenever 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, is water, is the outlines of continents, is mountains,
 is biological existences, and all of them wiggle.
 And wiggly things are to human consciousness a little bit of a nuisance because we want
 to figure it out.
 And it is as if, therefore, some ancient fisherman one day held up his net and looked at the
 world through the net.
 And he said, "My, just think of that.
 There I can see the view, 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.
 Now 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 figure it and construct it 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 fact, a 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 the history of philosophy and poetry and art, we always find the interchange
 of two personality types, which I call prickles and goo.
 The prickly people are advocates of intellectual porcupinism.
 They want a rigor.
 They want precise statistics.
 And they have a certain clipped attitude in their voices.
 And you know this very well in academic circles, where there are people who are always edgy
 like that, and they accuse other people of being disgustingly vague and miasmic and mystical.
 But the vague, miasmic and mystical people accuse the prickly people of being 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 are prickly, you're a classicist.
 And if you're gooey, you're a romanticist.
 And going back into medieval philosophy, if you're prickly, you're a nominalist.
 If you're gooey, you're a realist.
 And so it goes.
 But we know very well that this natural universe is neither prickles nor goo 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 outlined, sharply defined.
 If you're a little out of focus, it's going to go bleh, and you've got goo.
 But we're always playing with the two.
 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 there 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 countable, something that can be designated as a pattern.
 So we never get to any basic stuff.
 But for all that, we go back and find out what are we doing when we do this.
 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 is 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 used the spotlight,
 a 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, it's punctive, 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 words, 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 a child will point at something and say to its 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 has pointed to an area, say, of funny pattern on a dirty wall, and has noticed
 a figure on it, but the child doesn't have a word for it, and says, "What's that?"
 And the adult says, "Oh, that's just a mess, because that doesn't count for us as a thing."
 You come through this to the understanding, what do you mean by a thing?
 It's very fascinating to ask 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.
 so we "thing" the world, that is to say, in order to measure a curve
 you have to reduce it to point instants, 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 going "tsh, tsh, tsh, tsh, tsh, tsh, tsh" like this, 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 hole through which the view was showing.
 And this has been the immensely, and apparently successful, enterprise of all technological
 culture, superbly emphasized by ourselves.
 But the problem that arises is this.
 First of all, very obviously, everybody knows, I hardly need to mention it, go to the science
 of medicine, you get a specialist who really understands the function of the gallbladder,
 and he's studied gallbladders, gallbladders, gallbladders 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 gallbladder, and so if
 he operates on the gallbladder he may do so very knowledgably 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 being's gallbladder is not a thing in the same way
 as a spark plug 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 thing of little bits coming and coming and coming and joining each other
 and finally making up a shape.
 You see a solution where, well, it's like when you watch a photographic plate developing,
 but 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, 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, let's take the problem of the electronic industry.
 The catalogues of products that are being produced over the world by the electronic
 industry.
 Who has read all the catalogues?
 How do you know where you've got 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 catalogues?
 Well, 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 sooner you become more efficient 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. So you see this is a problem of the sort of competition of consciousness,
 of its… how fast can you go, dooty dooty dooty dooty dooty dooty dooty dooty dooty
 and keep track of it, you see? And say "I've got a good memory, I can keep track of it."
 And you say to you "I bet you you can't, I'll go more complicated than you." See
 musicians do this, we're drummers, you know, and they get things going and they start…
 and so long as they count, and lots of musicians do count, it's crazy, but they do. And
 they count, 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 retain it, we've got
 this gadget here that can. And we've got these marvelous mechanical memories and they
 will retain it. And they'll go much more fancy, they'll go this dooty dooty dooty
 dooty dooty at a colossal speed like that, you see. But it's the same old problem. Because
 you've got something that can outdo that. Let's go back from the spotlight to the floodlight,
 to the extraordinary capacity of the human nervous system to comprehend situations instantaneously,
 without analysis. That is to say, without verbal or numerical symbolism of the situation
 in order to understand it.


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