Thinking mistakes
David Bohm knew that thought was a system. Which simply means that one thought is affected by another thought even if they seem unconnected. And it means that if we make thinking errors, as we do, then the whole of our thought can become infected with error and unreliable no matter how careful we are.
Two great quotes by David Bohm on Twitter this morning from Bob Marshall:
“…a form of free dialogue may well be one of the most effective ways of investigating the crisis which faces society, and indeed the whole of human nature and consciousness today.”
“Moreover, it may turn out that such a form of free exchange of ideas and information is of fundamental relevance for transforming culture and freeing it of destructive misinformation, so that creativity can be liberated.”
I want to invoke McGilchrist too and the Divided Brain. We have a hemisphere that is locked into perception of the undivided world as it unfolds and a hemisphere that makes that whole into a structured set of parts. Using that structure and all its classification and logical reasoning we can discover ways in which our perception is misleading: how neat is that? But the corollary is that we sometimes need to accept that our logical thought has led us to conclusions that simply don’t fit with our perceptions of the unfolding of the world. How do we know which one is “right”: well, there’s the rub.
David Bohm is giving his deeply lived answer in these quotes. By all accounts he was as wonderful a person as you could meet. We need to discuss, no, we need to have a dialogue, in which we seek for our thinking mistakes to free ourselves from destructive misinformation. Much of what we hold dear is, or will turn out to be, destructive misinformation. Sorry about that. For instance:
“I struggle to put into words the sense of shame this has brought our profession. It is a disgrace, a scandal, and the biggest public health issue of our time, an iatrogenic infection harming millions.” Dr Des Spence
I happen to think it (addictive mental health pharmaceuticals) is not actually the worst thinking error even in the medical domain. You can tell when the thinking system is unhealthy because there is a lack of balance between trying to correct our perceptions and trying to correct our thinking. There is not, and there CANNOT BE, a reference point from which to work to be sure we are right, to be certain. And if we work from a belief that there is then that is a massive thinking error before we even start trying to become clear. Here in this quote authority is that reference point:
The traditional healthcare world is NOT interested in prevention. I am not sure why. They are interested in guidelines and control as if that will prove they are correct. More and more I find guidelines and those who write them bullies. Dr Steven Horwitz
Some people go to social processes, to consensus and the wisdom of crowds to try and get round this issue. My response here is, yes sometimes that is a good idea. It is perfectly possible, even quite commonly observed, however, for one person to hold the key to recognising a thinking mistake that everyone else is making. We live in a very conformist society where people take their perception bearings from the people around them. Thinking mistakes do not respect democracy. We can see the key we are looking for here however: we have to want to understand our thoughts more than we want to belong, or to be regarded by others as right, or all the status things that get attached in Stalinist systems. We also do “middlemind” where so long at there are extremists to both sides of us we must be acceptable moderates!
My own default setting is an internal reference point, and intuition about how a thinking system works. I have got as far as having an internal celebration each time I manage to accept that I am often wrong and that I am able to recalibrate my thoughts. The important thing is the balance we mentioned earlier: I can both use my perception to correct my thinking and my thinking to correct my perception. On a good day.
A day out with the engineers
I used to hang out with serious engineers. When I was a lad I worked on a friend’s farm and if the combine harvester needed mending we mended it. Recounting that story at interview got me my first job as a seismic engineer, where often field crews worked in remote locations. There is a generation of real, big-system engineers just passing away, and many of them grew up on farms in the mid-west where the culture and the practical necessity was to sort things out yourself.
Nowadays I am often rude about engineers, especially the ones who believe that engineering skills can sort social and political problems. The people who believe in social media connecting people without it also isolating them. And I have to invoke Marshall McLuhan “Every extension is also an amputation”. There is no such thing as an unalloyed engineering free lunch.
But back to the grand old men of engineering. They knew that they were using models of how big systems worked (power distribution systems, telephone systems, nuclear power stations, etc.) and that their designs always had a leap of faith between the idea and the execution. That leap of faith, to my mind, is the expression of that same balance between perception and thinking. Those guys knew that their thought could only take them so far.
And here’s the geeky bit. Do you know what a SCBRF machine is? Oh, well it’s a Short Cycle Run Break Fix machine. It means that if you want to make progress with an engineering problem/system then run it, break it, fix it as often as is practical, the more frequent the better. That is, lets not pretend we know the answer to this, lets go and find the answer.
Raising our sights a little, think for a moment about the EU as a system. It is a political system overarching the national political systems, and I for one amongst millions am completely fed up with poor commentary on how it might work as such and how corrupt it is and what the alternatives might be. From the perspective we are taking here, however, the perception question is “does this political system deal effectively with transnational issues within the EU and between the EU and the rest of the world?” Without claiming any expertise here, I would say it is many years now since the EU has been an effective mechanism in sorting out issues that have to be sorted. I would cite the migration crisis and the economic crisis exposed by Greece as examples. Of course if you can’t say “hooray I’ve broken it!” you can’t have even a Long Cycle Run Break Fix machine, you just have to pretend you understand.
There is a big gap between the attitude of EU officials and those old-school engineers. I don’t hear anyone saying that their leap of faith in applying EU mechanisms is showing that the mechanisms need to be re-engineered as logically they must all the time. I understand that the people who created the US constitution had the firm expectation it would be re-written after a hundred years. We neither have those old-school self-reliant engineers any more nor do we understand the nature of trying to build and apply solutions.
Philosophically, the reason why we lose these skills is we forget that our descriptions of the world are just that, particular ways of carving up reality into pieces that we name and join back together again. When our mechanisms are too ambitious we become over-invested in them and the world we have built gets mistaken for reality because you have to buy into it to have a place in society. We cannot ask with any neutrality “does the EU work?”. But we must!
A day out with the bankers
My last blog was challenged by a colleague: what can this mean?: “There is just a raft of stuff out there and it is all just stuff.”. I was once unfairly confined with a lovely chap who was manager of a bank branch: not the wheeling and dealing sort of irresponsible banker but its old-fashioned opposite. For family reasons I volunteered to drive a joint hire car in Portugal, because he was nervous to do the driving. So he knew in endless detail what had happened in the past and what we needed to do next and often that didn’t help me navigate the traffic. In fact after a week I was short of hair.
Some people need to have a grip on a “raft of stuff” without any need to organise it by relevance, though it may get recited in chronological order taking as long as the original events. I think it is called sensory reality, when the objects in the environment and the events of the day are just that. I suppose the metaphor might be those dreadful conveyor belts of consumerist crap on TV game shows.
If everything is sort of independent and separate in its existence, then it is not immediately obvious how thinking errors play. And there is a sort of administrative organiser like my branch manager who are really good keeping track of “stuff”: great to have when they are needed. However, the separateness of the stuff does not occur in the other hemisphere of our brain: there everything is connected and just flows. So the “givenness” of stuff, the stuffness of it, is a social construct completely buried out of awareness. When the stuff comes down the conveyor belt on the game show, the audience are wetting themselves for the participants to remember, and win, the high value items. But why? Forgive me if I am forty years out of date!
Suppose that for bankers and Japanese fishermen whales are just stuff that swims in the sea and that has economic value if caught. How can the thinking error in that position be brought to their attention?
Rhizomes and reality
The world works in ways of its own. The heart has its reasons that reason knows not of. We laugh at King Canute but every day we try to get our reality to stick on the world. Almost the definition of neurosis.
One way to think about thinking errors is that they are places where the structure of our thinking does not map onto the structure of the world. This is why we might worry about rhizomes. How do connections work? In the world? And in our thoughts? Is language and logic treelike and naturally ordered? Or does it have weird and wonderful multi-dimensional linkages? Is language ours to order? Or is it a highly evolved innate capacity? And do whales talk to each other, and what do they talk about?
One example. Consider this quote:
Humans are in mutually beneficial and mutually dependent relationships with many different microbes. We are symbiotic, inextricably woven together, in a complex pattern far beyond our capacity to comprehend. Sandor Katz
We fight a war against germs and against MRSA and hospital infections. It is a war we cannot win because it is essentially against ourselves. Our only defence against harmful bacteria is the protective effect of other bacteria. We are symbionts, holobionts, but we do not act on what is still a theoretical, intellectual understanding.
This thinking error, the error of human exceptionalism, that somehow we can transcend the ecosystem that supports us can be seen to infect all our thinking. We think deep down that we keep ourselves safe by keeping the bad guys out. From IT security to the Mexican border, the same totally insane thinking stemming from a simple misconception about who we are. People from the least sophisticated to the most powerful or with the most PhD’s all mired in error.
From our connectedness, the rhizome theme, we understand who we are, and from who we are we can understand our connectedness. This is the same pattern as the two hemispheres, and Gregory Bateson said we need to keep close to the way that nature thinks. Only keep going back and forth to achieve the necessary balance. Stand still and you are done for.
So one final point for this blog. What is the connection between the microbes important to human health and questions of IT security? They are there of course in the metaphors of viruses and worms that invade computer systems. But on a deeper level they are there in our thinking patterns. Everywhere we try to create border, boundaries, walls and fences. We tell ourselves that this is this and that is that, this is inside and that is outside. But I saw a cartoon of Trump in a prison yard with the caption
“The only wall that will keep America safe”.
