The End of the Thinker — EFF 1.2
Look at the man, the thinker, lost in his thoughts; this is humanity today, facing a tremendous crisis.
Man, the Thinker
“I think, therefore I am” proclaimed Rene Descartes, a French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist. He was one of the most influential thinkers of 17th century Europe who set the tone for the age of Reason and defined the primary tool for scientific revolution — the power of thought. This radical proposition became a fundamental tenet of the Western approach to knowledge and with it the power of thought took on a formal role in the exploration and representation of knowledge. The famous sculpture The Thinker by Auguste Rodin captures this centrality of thought in the civilisational cycle that began in Europe with the scientific revolution.
Sri Aurobindo observes:
“The intellect does not consider that it knows a thing until it has reduced its awareness of it to the terms of thought, not, that is to say, until it has put it into a system of representative mental concepts… It is true that the mind gets its knowledge primarily by various kinds of impressions… but these are taken by the developed intelligence only as data and seem to it uncertain and vague in themselves until they have been forced to yield up all their content to the thought and have taken their place in some intellectual relation or in an ordered thought sequence.” 1
There are all kinds of thoughts passing through the human mind — habitual, random, reactive, obsessive, imaginative, dreamy, delusional, goal oriented, rational, conceptual, mathematical, abstract, ideative, inspired or visionary. Descartes brought this realm of thought into sharp focus and developed practical methods for organsing the movement of thought using a coordinate system. A similar coordinate system was independently and simultaneously developed by Pierre de Fermat but Fermat did not publish his work and eventually, the framework came to be known as the Cartesian coordinate system.
In these days when we see graphs everywhere representing various aspects of reality plotted on different axial movements, we take it for granted as if it is quite natural and simple; but it was not so before the advent of the Cartesian coordinate system. The coordinate system was a major revolution in the development of the power of logical thought and mathematics as it formally integrated Euclidean geometry and algebra. The invention of the Cartesian system enabled the development of mathematical equations to describe functions with high degree of precision and lead to the development of the Calculus by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in the 17th century. Using Calculus Newton discovered and described the laws of motion and universal gravitation demonstrating Calculus as a game changer. This riveted and completed Copernican Revolution which began in the 16th century with the proposition of Nicolaus Copernicus concerning the movement of the heavenly bodies where he put the earth on an orbit around the sun. Galileo Galilei built further on Copernican views with experimental scientific observations to prove the new cosmology but he lacked a sophisticated mathematical language to capture his ideas with precision. It was the turn of Isaac Newton with the help of Calculus to complete the Copernican Revolution with an accurate mathematical model of a new cosmology with its universal laws. With this development, scientific revolution was firmly in place with its formal toolkit and methodology — hypothesis, experimental validation and mathematical modeling. All of them put the power of thought on a formal track with rigor and precision that was unheard of till then. As a mathematical language Calculus empowered scientists to describe the physical world and empowered engineers to build technology with an accurate predictability that was impossible till then. Thus, mathematics became the universal language for science and technology with physics as its crown prince.
While mathematics remained the most reliable tool to organise thought with logical, structural integrity and physics was thriving on mathematics, science built its solid foundation upon experimental validation which brought other fields like astronomy, chemistry, and biology into a higher degree of logical rigour. When psychology emerged as a field of scientific investigation by the pioneering works of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, in the 20th century, the complexity of human psyche turned out to be way beyond the mathematical tools and modeling techniques. So the power of reason had to depend on abstract pattern recognition and hypothetical reasoning but it was not precise or mechanically repeatable. Since science has some certainty in the field of physics and chemistry, and that is where its greatest precision and mastery, science tries to reduce everything into more dependable and measurable physical or chemical phenomenon. Thus we have now chemistry and neuroscience providing more reliable and measurable patterns while studying psychology and consciousness in general. However, cosmology and psychology remain as twins who are yet to meet with a common scientific framework.
Reductionism of science
Science reduces everything into physics and chemistry as they are the most tangible and measurable branches of science. Rather, physics is the primary science and everything else is a derivative. So from physics comes Chemistry and Chemistry drives both Biology and Psychology. So we have learned to alter psychology by altering body chemistry. To do so science is tracing out the precise chemical molecules or neural firing patterns responsible for our psychological states. So we talk of Adrenaline, Estrogen, Dopamine, Oxytocin, Serotonin, Testosterone or the firing patterns of the brain neurons when dealing with our psychological states.
We can see that, in its search for deeper truth, the current scientific methodology reduces the complexity of the whole into fundamental building blocks. It cuts the whole into stand-alone parts that seem to interact and generate complex systems.
Sri Aurobindo observes the action of our mind:
In packets she ties up the Indivisible;
Finding her hands too small to hold vast Truth
She breaks up knowledge into alien parts…2
The very nature of the mind is to recognise stable patterns, discarding fine variations, and name these stable patterns as fixed standardised units and then organise such patterns and their interactions into greater wholes through their logical interaction process. The whole reality is so infinitely and overwhelmingly complex in its countless and many-layered movements, the mind has to reduce the complexity into manageable bits of seed patterns. This is one of the fundamental limitations of the mind, it cannot see the whole, it can only see the parts and then put these pieces together like a jigsaw puzzle to describe the whole.
Sri Aurobindo writes:
Incapable of the soul’s direct inlook
She sees by spasms and solders knowledge-scrap,
Makes Truth the slave-girl of her indigence,
Expelling Nature’s mystic unity
Cuts into quantum and mass the moving All; 3
* * *
Impatient of enigma and the unknown,
Intolerant of the lawless and the unique,
Imposing reflection on the march of Force,
Imposing clarity on the unfathomable,
She strove to reduce to rules the mystic world. 4
Science relying on the power of thought and its reductionist knife is forever in search of the most fundamental building blocks of the universe and its generative process to explain the complexity. Whether it is God Particle or the Gene or the neurons or the chemicals the science is looking for a seed pattern, an algorithm at the heart of complex systems.
The foundations are in the mechanics of physics and at the heart of physics reside mathematics, the most rigorous logical constructs of thought. Through the lens of Artificial Intelligence, we are now looking at the world, including ourselves, in terms of intelligent and complex systems running on the foundations of some intelligent algorithms capable of learning and adapting to the changing environment. Life appears to be running on algorithms, a machine nevertheless even if it is intelligent.
Reason and Science can only help by standardising, by fixing everything into an artificially arranged and mechanised unity of material life. 5
Mechanisation of life
When science established itself in the 17th and 18th century with the triumphant victory of its new cosmology, the world was getting increasingly looked upon as a clockwork machine with predictable movements. With science came technology and with technology the industrial revolution riding on steam engines and machine tools building up factory production systems. The factory system put people on the production lines and made them part of the huge machinery of production where people are objects with a specific skill set. To produce people with the required skill set the entire education systems were developed that followed factory production method where children were fed to the education system in batches and processed and made into engineers, doctors, lawyers etc and fed to the production and consumption system. Agrarian societies became industrial societies going through the educational and industrial production system and to keep the system going the society was redefined as a consumer market. Industrialisation and consumerism came to be seen as modernisation and progress and behind it was the laborer-consumer identity of the masses who can be educated or rather programmed into willing servitors of the system. The end result of all scientific discoveries eventually turned into utilitarian products for consumption. Sri Aurobindo wrote about this development:
A bullock yoked in the cart of proven fact,
She drags huge knowledge-bales through Matter’s dust
To reach utility’s immense bazaar. 6
With industrialised mass production and abundance of consumer goods, it was necessary to find ways to sell them all to keep the system going and thus emerged advertising in the 18th and 19th century to persuade the masses. In the 20th century, the methods became increasingly sophisticated with growing understanding of human psychology. One of the fundamental tenets of advertising is that you don’t address the rational intelligence or the conscious mind, instead, you address the subconscious, the drives, and impulses beneath the surface and programme the masses through pleasurable sensations. Now, in our 21st century socially networked and hyperlinked society, everyone with a mobile phone is traceable and through it, their thoughts and actions have become programmable much more efficiently than ever before. Every ‘Like’ received on Facebook is seen as a Dopamine dose and increasingly sophisticated ways of programming the masses is now a routine. Such a mass programming validates itself through big data and crunching the big data goes into the hands of algorithms and the AI completing the process of mechanisation.
The Artificial Intelligence is a product of our power of thought, an extension of our inner faculty of thinking. Just as a car is an extension of our legs and a telescope is an extension of our eyes, AI is an extension of our power of thought, immensely amplified. With Artificial Intelligence rapidly replacing human thought process we heading towards AI driven world where intelligent machines are making decisions for us and we are moulding ourselves into the groves set by the machine intelligence. The power of human thought is becoming obsolete right in front of our eyes as machines are outperforming humans in more and more fields that were otherwise considered a human privilege. This trend will only increase and both manual and cognitive labour is being handed over to robots and AI.
The problems created by the power of thought cannot be resolved by more thinking.
In other words, more thinking is no more a roadmap to the future of humanity. The proclamation of Rene Descartes, “I think, therefore I am”, must to be revisited to redefine our existence as a species.
What are we if we put aside our power of thought?
It is here, at this critical junction where the power of thought has to be transcended, we come across Sri Aurobindo who explored and mapped the realms of consciousness that lies beyond the power of thought. He wrote:
“It is in inner silence a greater consciousness dawns.”
Sri Aurobindo begins where the power of thought ends.
Bibliography
- Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-supramental-thought-and-knowledge
- Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Little Mind
- Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Little Mind
- Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Little Mind
- Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/22/the-divine-life
- Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Little Mind
