The Western model of the universe is political and engineering or architectural.
 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.
 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 "ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch" 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.
 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 knowledgeably 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?
 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. You'll be ahead but only for a short time. So you see there's this
 problem of the sort of competition of consciousness, of its… How fast can you go? 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 that. And you say to you, I bet you you can't.
 I'll go more complicated than you. See musicians do this, well 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 at a colossal speed, like that, you see. But it's the same old
 problem. Because you've got something that can outdo that. So we end up asking, yeah.
 But supposing there were some other way of understanding things. 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. I hope you understand what I mean by that.
 We do do that. We have this curious ability of pattern recognition, which the mechanical
 systems have only in a very primitive way. Xerox have put out a machine which recognizes
 figures written in almost anyone's handwriting, provided their handwriting is fairly grade
 school and normal. But a computer has a terrible time trying to recognize the letter A when
 it's printed in, say, sans serif, gothic, longhand, or whatever kind of A you may write.
 The human recognizes instantly this pattern. But the computer is still at a disadvantage
 here. It seems to lack a kind of capacity I would call field organization, because it's
 all punctive, it's digital. It is like a newspaper photograph, you know, which when you look
 at it under a microscope is all dots. In developing technology, are we leaving out of consideration
 our strongest suit, which is the brain itself? See, we are at a situation where the brain
 is still not really worked out by even the most competent neurologists. It puzzles them.
 They can't give a model of the brain in numerical or verbal language. Now, you are that, you
 see. You are this thing. You yourself are this thing, which you yourself can't figure
 out. In the same way that I cannot touch the tip of this finger with the tip of this finger,
 I can't bite my own teeth. But I, who is attempting to touch the tip of this finger with this
 finger, am by the sheer complexity of my structure far more evolved than any system which I can
 imagine. This is in a way slightly akin to the Gödel theorem, that you can't have a
 system of, say, a logic which defines its own axioms. The axioms of any given system
 must always be defined in terms of a higher system. All right, so you are the most complex
 thing that has yet been encountered in the cosmos. And you can't figure you out. Now,
 suppose we're going to try to do that, and become, as it were, completely transparent
 to ourselves, so that we entirely understand the organization or the mechanics of our own
 brains. What happens when we do that? Well, you're back in the situation of God. When
 you're God, what are you going to do? When you're God, you know what you're going to
 do? You're going to say to yourself, "Man, get lost." Because what you want is a surprise.
 And when you've figured everything out, there won't be any surprises. You'll be completely
 bored. But on the other hand, a person, I would say, who is really functioning completely,
 is basically a person who trusts his own brains, and permits his brain to operate at a more
 optimal level. In other words, he knows how to think things out, but he makes his best
 discoveries without thinking. In other words, you all know very well the processes of creative
 invention. You've got a problem, you think it over, and you can't find out any answer
 to it, because the digital system of thinking is too simple, too clumsy to deal with it.
 It's more complex. There are more variables than can be kept in mind at one time. So you
 say, "I'll sleep on it." Or you go to the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton,
 Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, where they pay you to goof off, which is a highly excellent
 idea. And you moon around, and you've got a blackboard, and you look out of the window
 and pick your nose, and so on. And your brain eventually hands you the solution to the problem.
 And you immediately, because you have technical knowledge, you recognize that's the solution.
 But then, naturally, you go back and check it. And you work the bit-by-bit form of thinking
 on it, and see, now, does it come out in those terms? And if it does, everybody will agree
 with you, yes, that's the answer. But if it doesn't come out in those terms, they won't
 agree with you, because you haven't subjected it to the socially acceptable traditional
 form of analyzing knowledge. But here's the problem. It takes an awful long time to check
 these things out. It takes an awful long time to arrive at the solution which you've got
 like that, by a purely calculative process. Most of the situations of life are such that
 they don't wait for us to make up our minds. So that an enormous amount of carefully worked-out
 scientific knowledge is trivial. It's all very well, very finely worked out, but much
 too late. Because life presents you, life comes at you from all sides, all over everywhere
 at once. And the only thing you've got to deal with that is the thing inside here, in
 the skull. Now, I'm not saying this to put down all this marvellous work of calculation,
 brought to immense sophistication electronically and so on. Not at all, because actually you
 people are the first people to understand the limitations of your own kind of knowledge.
 And you're going to have to tell the politicians about this. They don't understand. They think
 that this kind of knowledge is the answer to everything. And I think most of you know
 it isn't. Which is not something, I repeat, against technology. It's only saying that
 when you walk, you put your right foot forward, and that's fine, but then you must put your
 left foot forward. So let's say that the great technological enterprise has been putting
 the right foot forward. But you must bring up the left foot. That is to say, bring up
 re-valuation and new respect for the organic type of organisation, which is incomprehensible
 to technological thinking, but which always underlies it. That by itself doesn't work,
 because after you bring the left foot up, you've again got to bring up the right foot.
 The analytic. After goo comes prickles. After prickles comes goo. And you have to keep this
 thing up. And I think our danger at the present time is that we are so heady, so delighted
 with the results of prickles, that we've got to let back a little bit of goo into the system.
 So now, what we've got to try and do is, I think, to work out a way of making the brain
 itself more efficient. And this is the thing that civilised education has neglected. Lynn
 White, I have to quote him again, used to say that the academic world today only values
 three kinds of intelligence. Verbal intelligence, mnemonic intelligence, in other words, good
 at remembering, and computational intelligence. He said it entirely neglects kinesthetic intelligence,
 social intelligence, and he had at least seven kinds of intelligence, I forget what they
 were. But it is this extraordinary capacity of the neural organisation, say, to engage
 in pattern recognition, and in solving instantly certain complex problems, without knowing
 how it does it. The trouble is, when you do something you don't know how to do, you've
 got a non-repeatable experiment, in a certain sense. In other words, you can't explain to
 someone else how to put it together. But you can do it, like you can open and close your
 hand without any knowledge of physiology. Do it every time. Whoops, I don't know how
 to do it. I just do it, you see. So we have an enormous potential of intelligence, of
 knowing how to do all sorts of things, which, to the extent that we are academically minded
 people, we won't allow ourselves to do, because we can't explain it. You know, for example,
 there's a way of cooling a brazing furnace. It's very simple. But engineers say it's theoretically
 impossible, it can't happen. It's like bees can't fly by the laws of aerodynamics, but
 they do. So the rather practical issue I come to is this, that technology, if it relies
 exclusively on linear thinking, is going to destroy the environment. It's going to become
 too complicated to handle. Man is going to be like the dinosaur, which had to have a
 brain in its head and a brain in its rump, because it was so big. You know, the cave
 man kept a dinosaur, and when he went to bed at night he'd clump it on the tail with a
 club and it'd scream at eight o'clock in the morning. Wake him up. It seems to me we're
 getting into that kind of saurian situation with our technology, which is going to lead
 us to extinction. So the question is, are we going to foul things up by insisting on
 using linear input information and controlling it as the dominant tool of controlling the
 world, or can we master all that, as we have done, and still use the linear input and analysis,
 but with a fundamental trust in our power to assimilate multiple input, although we
 really don't know how we do it. And my point is that you can't find an absolute which you
 can pin down, you see. So there always remains in any human operation the basic central thing,
 which you can't pin down because it's you, just as the teeth can't bite themselves. Now
 the assumption of Judeo-Christian culture is that man in his nature is sinful and therefore
 can't be trusted. The assumption of at least ancient Chinese culture is that man in his
 essential nature is good and therefore has to be trusted, because they say to us, if
 you can't trust your own basic nature, you can't really rely on the idea that you're
 untrustworthy. Therefore you're hopelessly fouled up. So this has amazing political and
 other consequences, this different assumption. If we say, no, we human beings are fallible
 and basically selfish and really, really fundamentally evil, and therefore we need law and order,
 we need a control system to put us in order, we thereby project these control systems into
 the church or into the police or into somebody, who are really ourselves disguised. See, it's
 like daylight saving time. Everybody could simply get up an hour earlier, but instead
 of doing that we alter the clock, because the clock is a kind of authority. And we say,
 well the clock says it's time for you to get up. And the Indian, Amerindians laugh at the
 pale faces because they say, pale face, he doesn't know when he's hungry until he looks
 at his watch. And so in this way we become clock dominated. And the abstract system takes
 over from the physical, organic situation. And this is my big pitch, if I'm going to
 make a big pitch, is that we've run into a cultural situation where we've confused the
 symbol with the physical reality, the money with the wealth, and the menu with the dinner.
 And we're starving on eating menus.


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