Well now, what I want to do is have a mutual brain-picking session, and I'm going to
 start the ball rolling by saying why I, as a philosopher, am interested in many things
 that you are all probably interested in professionally.
 Particularly what we're going to talk about, I suppose, is the problem of control, as exemplified
 in the ancient Latin question, "Quis custodia custodiae ipsos?"
 Who guards the guards?
 Now we know that we're living in an age when there's been an enormous proliferation of
 techniques for 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'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 the modern world,
 in 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
 the requirements, the recording, the endless red tape of the registrar's office and 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," but 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 can say, very often encounter the sort of character who's an American businessman,
 and he says, "Well, I'm a practical businessman. I believe in getting results and things done.
 All this thinking and highfalutin logic and nonsense is 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, you see, to get down to 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 always 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 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
 the basic standpoints of different cultures, I think we're in a better position to know
 where we are than if we only have one single line of sight. And therefore this has been
 my interest and my background. And arising out of this, there has come a further question
 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-ing it? In other words, are we going to foul our own nest as a result
 of technology? But all this gets down to the basic question is, really, what are you going
 to do if you're God? If, 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 nineteenth
 century the blind processes of nature--that was begging the question to call them blind--but
 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, say,
 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 have 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 things you want at all. Supposing
 just for the sake of illustration, you had the power to dream every night any dream you
 wanted to dream. And you could, of course, arrange for one night of dreams to be seventy-five
 years of subjective time, or any number of years of subjective time. What would you do?
 Well, of course, you'd start out by fulfilling every wish. You would have routes and orges
 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 would switch
 a bit and you'd soon find yourself involved in adventures and contemplating great works
 of art, fantastic mathematical conceptions. You would soon be rescuing princesses from
 dragons and all sorts of things like that. And then one night you'd 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, you'd say, "Ooh, wasn't that an
 adventure?" Then you'd think more and more far out ways to get involved and let go of
 control, knowing that you'd always come back to center in the end. But while you were involved
 in the dream, you wouldn't know 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
 which you have. And maybe that's what you're doing.
 But here's the difficulty, you see. The difficulty of 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 common sense. 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 has employed, which influence 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 is natural
 for a child to ask its mother, "How was I made?" It would be inconceivable for a Chinese
 child to ask, "How was I made?" It might ask, "How was I grown?" or "How did I grow?" But
 not, "How was I made?" as if I were an artifact, 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, we continued
 to think of the world in terms of a machine, in terms, say, of Newtonian mechanics, and
 later in terms of what we call quantum mechanics, although I find it rather difficult to understand
 how quantum theory is in any sense mechanics. It's much more like organics, which is to
 me a different concept. However that may be, it has percolated, 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 a 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 have 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 bitting. 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, that we don't know the origins of
 all this, it may 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,
 something like a Rorschach plot, 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, 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 sudden 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. A little out of
 focus, it's going to go bleh, and you've got goo. But we're always playing with the two.
 Because it's like the question is, 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.
 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. Have 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. And so we thing 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. Going, "chuh, chuh,
 chuh, chuh, chuh, chuh, chuh," 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.
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