The Act of Creation (90 page)

deus ex
machina
manifested its will; these gaps caused a kind of porousness
in the texture of reality through which destiny could infiltrate. In the
modern European's universe, our critics would say, the figure-background
relation in the porous texture is reversed.

 

 

In the magic world of the child, physical causation and abstract
categories play an equally subordinate and uncertain part, and cannot be
regarded as a test for contradiction. When a child makes contradictory
statements, for instance, 'the sun is alive because it gives light' and
'the sun is not alive because it has no blood', this is simply due to the
fact that the
word
'alive' was learned before the
concept
of aliveness was formed; it is a case, as so often found at that age, of
a symbol in search of a referent
. Piaget, from whose experiments
with a child of nine I have been quoting, emphasized that children are
apt to forget their previous judgements and then give a contradictory
one. Yet obviously the word 'alive' is used on each of the two occasions
with a different meaning, based on different criteria: in the first case
on the discrimination between hot and cold bodies (A and not-A), in the
second between bodies with and without blood (B and not-B). Thus there
is no contradiction between the two statements, only confusion regarding
the meaning of the word 'alive'; what the child intended to say was:
'the sun is alive in so far as it is hot, but not alive in so far as it
has no blood'. Implicit discrimination between contrasting alternatives
is often blurred in the explicit statements of the child owing to its
linguistic inexperience.

 

 

The child's attitude to its experiences is discriminatory within its
framework of relevant relations, and its apparent contradictions are due
partly to the fact that its scales of relevant values are different from
the adult's, partly to the inadequacy of its symbolic equipment. But
although the child
experiences
certain facts and relations as
mutually exclusive and reacts accordingly, the relational concept of
'contradiction' itself is only abstracted at a much later stage of
development; just as the child uses names before the name-thing relation
as such is abstracted.

 

 

There seem to be three stages in the emergence of the 'law of
contradiction'. The first is training the child to respond to the
commands 'Yes' and 'No' and their equivalents; the second is the child's
use of these symbols as levers to control the actions of others; the
third is the use of 'Yes' and 'No' with reference to
verbal
activities. Stein's daughter used the word 'Nein' at eighteen months
in answer to the question, 'Shall we take Hilde away?'. But when she
was asked 'Is this a doggie?' while the wrong animal was shown her,
she remained silent, then echoed 'doggie'. Four months later, however,
she began to contradict a wrong name by substituting the right one;
and another two months later -- at two years -- she firmly said 'No'
in denial of blatantly false verbal statements.

 

 

Thus we see that the principle of contradiction is applied to symbolic
activities precisely at the stage where symbolic relations as such
become relevant to the child and call out discriminatory reactions. Once
this stage has been reached the child uses 'No' not only to prevent
undesirable action, but to reject incorrect symbolic propositions. This
new verbal device is for the child a source of satisfaction comparable
to the discovery of the naming game. It is expressed by the frequent
use of antithetic statements which are characteristic for this age;
three-year-olds delight in phrases which sound as if they had been
borrowed from the Proverbs of Solomon: 'I am fast runner, not slow
runner', 'I not old boy, new boy', etc. The use of such paired antithetic
statements marks the beginning of the process of abstracting the relation
of mutual exclusion as such, followed by the other, now familiar, stages:
the gradual downing of the generalized relation; the implicit grasp
of the principle; and finally its explicit naming -- though this last
stage may never be reached. But regardless of whether or not the subject
is able to give a verbal definition of it, the principle of the mutual
exclusion of opposites previously discriminated as such, will enter as
an important rule of the game into all matrices of rational thought.

 

 

Thus the so-called 'laws of thought' in traditional logic are, from
the point of view of developmental psychology, merely the explicit
formulations of implicit relations, abstracted by the usual procedures
characteristic for all forms of learning. We may say that the principle of
contradiction exists a priori in the organization of the nervous system,
because the power to discriminate is built into that organization,
and contradiction is merely an epi-phenomenon of discrimination. But we
may also say that our judgements of what is a contradiction and what is
not are empirically derived, because the gradients of relevance along
which abstraction and discrimination proceed, are subjective and differ
according to individual and culture.

 

 

But this subjectivity does not detract from the great power which the
principle of contradiction exercises over the mind. And not only over
the human mind; the experimental neuroses which Pavlov induced in his
dogs testifies to it. The dog is trained to discriminate circles, or
nearly circular ellipses, from flat ellipses, the former signalling food,
the latter 'no food'. So long as the two types of signals are comfortably
distinguishable from each other, the dog shows no sign of strain. But when
intermediary forms are shown which could be interpreted as belonging to
one class or its opposite, experimental neurosis sets in: the dog goes
wild, then becomes apathetic, and seems to lose altogether its power of
discrimination; it goes emotionally and intellectually to pieces. One
might say that the dog has lost confidence in a world in which the law of
the excluded middle has ceased to operate, and A is no longer not not-A.

 

 

It appears that dogs are not only emotionally more stable and loyal,
but also more orthodox logicians than their masters. For the powers
of discriminatory judgement are more diluted on the level of symbolic
thought than in perception; and when thought is dominated by emotion
and faith, the Red Queen always scores against reasonable Alice, who
asserts that 'One can't believe impossible things'; whereas the Queen,
after a little practice, managed to believe 'as many as six impossible
things before breakfast'.

 

 

Which is, all things considered, quite a modest estimate.

 

 

 

NOTE

 

 

To
p. 613
. Once upon a time Lashley and Wade (1946)
tried to make a distinction 'between the "so-called generalization" which
means only a failure to observe differences and the generalization which
involves perception of both similarities and differences. The amorphous
figure, lacking in identity, is generalized in the first sense only.' The
quotation is from Hebb (1949, p. 27), who seemed to share Lashley's view,
although Lashley himself later dropped the distinction. The 'amorphous
figure' in the quotation refers to 'an irregular mass of colour or
a pattern of intersecting lines drawn at random'. Being amorphous it
does per definitionem lack identity, i.e., the prerequisites for the
formation of an object-concept; but it is nevertheless seen as some kind
of figure on a background that is discriminated. In fact, abstraction
without discrimination is a contradiction in terms. The abstracted
quality -- whether 'nose', 'doily', or 'sound of the tuning fork' is
always differentiated from non-nose and non-doily and no-sound. (If
the sound of the tuning fork is very weak, it will approach the limen
of no-sound; about the effect of simple gradients of intensity, see
Hebb (1958), p. 189; about pitch and octave gradients, see Osgood,
op. cit., p. 361. Since perception of intensity, pitch, etc. is part of
the animal's perceptual organization, they must influence the functioning
of the analyser-codes.)

 

 

 

 

 

XVI

 

 

SOME ASPECTS OF THINKING
Multi-Dimensionality
In the preceding chapter we have discussed the processes by which the
rules of the game of symbolic thought are acquired; let us now turn to
adult thinking and problem-solving.
Thinking is a multi-dimensional affair. The Sterns recorded all the
questions asked by their little daughter in the course of four days; but
the record gives us only the scantiest pointers to what went on in the
child's head. Perhaps one day a super-EEG will be constructed, which will
record all the thoughts -- or at least all verbalized thoughts -- which
the stream of consciousness carries through the subject's wired skull;
yet even such a record, far more complete than anything James Joyce could
dream of, would be but a poor pointer to the multi-dimensional patterns
underlying the linear stream. The oscillating curve on the gramophone
record needs a human auditory system to yield all the information it
contains. The super-EEG would record larger units of information -- entire
words; but it would still need a psychoanalyst or a Joyce-interpreter
to divine the meaning behind the meaning: the connotations of individual
words, their unconscious echoes, the motivation behind it all, the rules
of the patient's game, hidden to himself, and the memories which crop
up as landmarks in his internal, mental environment.
We must nevertheless try to sort out some of the dimensional variables
in this immensely complex, multi-dimensional activity; these variables
will then yield gradients of different kinds; for instance:

(1) Degrees of consciousness;
(2) Degrees of verbalization;
(3) Degrees of abstraction;
(4) Degrees of flexibility;
(5) Type and intensity of motivation;
(6) Realistic versus autistic thought;
(7) Dominance of outer or inner environment;
(8) Learning and performing;
(9) Routine and originality.

Each of these headings has been repeatedly discussed in various
contexts in various chapters. Most of them cut across the conventional
classifications of thought such as 'associative' versus 'directional'. All
variables are inter-dependent.
Now if variables depend on each other, there must be a function which
defines their inter-dependence -- a rule of the game. The question:
'If
y=f(x)
and x is 7, how much is y?' is meaningless unless I define
f. Similarly, if in the experimental laboratory the subject is given the
stimulus word: S='big' and is asked for the 'response', the question is
meaningless unless f is defined as 'synonyms' or 'opposites' or 'rhymes',
or whatever game is to be played.
One of the main contentions of this book is that organic life, in all its
manifestations, from morphogenesis to symbolic thought, is governed by
'rules of the game' which lend it coherence, order, and unity-in-variety;
and that these rules (or functions in the mathematical sense), whether
innate or acquired, are represented in coded form on various levels, from
the chromosomes to the structures in the nervous system responsible for
symbolic thought. The codes are assumed to function on the trigger-release
principle, so that a relatively simple signal-pattern releases complex,
pre-set action-patterns, as the referee's whistle initiates or stops
the activities of the football players. The rules are fixed, but there
are endless variations to each game, their variability increasing in
ascending order; this lends elasticity to habit, and gives rise to the
subjective experience of freedom of choice between alternate possibilities
of action. There is also an overall-rule of the game, which says that
no rule is absolutely final; that under certain circumstances they may
be altered and combined into a more sophisticated game, which provides
a higher form of unity and yet increased variety; this is called the
subject's creative potential.
Faced with the imaginary EEG record of the patient's stream of thoughts,
the only way of interpreting it would be to find out what game the patient
is playing at any moment, and why. This actually is the procedure of the
free-association method in psychotherapy: the patient's words provide the
record, and his dreams, it is hoped, will provide the interpretation of
the underlying patterns of his individual matrices of thought. We follow,
as we saw earlier on, similar methods in perceptual analysis: the sequence
of pressure-variations reaching the ear-drum must be dismantled, analysed,
and reassembled if we want to get at the underlying patterns of timbre,
melody, and speech. The stream of sounds, like the stream of thoughts,
yields its meaning only if the percipient knows the rules of the game.
The Experience of Free Choice
Let us consider some of the dimensions of thinking listed on
pp. 630-1
. Regarding consciousness I proposed to
make a distinction between the 'linear scale' of awareness on the one
hand, and hierarchic levels of consciousness on the other
(Book One,
VII
,
VIII
).
The former was to be regarded as a continuous gradient extending from
completely self-regulatory physiological processes, through more or
less automatized skills, to peripheral, and lastly, focal, awareness of
events; the latter to be represented by quasi-parallel layers of mental
organization -- comparable to geological strata -- which are discontinuous
and governed by codes formed at different stages of phylogenetic and
ontogenetic development. All this has been discussed at length in the
previous volume, and need not be recapitulated; but I must append two
additional points.

 

 

The first concerns 'linear' awareness. I have described, somewhat
perversely, awareness as that dimension of experience which diminishes
and shrinks away with the progressive automatization of a skill. For
'awareness' is an irreducible term, a black box like that other which
contains the power of organic life to extract energy and information from
its environment -- and, in fact, continuous with the latter. On the other
hand, the progressive automatization of motor skills, perceptual skills,
verbal and mathematical skills, is an observable and to some extent
even measurable factor of behaviour -- epitomized on its lowest level by
sensory habituation. Thus by expressing awareness by the inverse ratio of
the automatization of the ongoing process, a certain strategic advantage
is gained. Other things being equal (i.e. under stablized environmental
conditions), automatization manifests itself in predictable, stereotyped
performance, where the matrix has no degrees of freedom left for strategic
decisions, because these are made by pre-set feedback controls, and do not
require the attention of higher centres. Conversely, the less automatized
the skill, the greater the freedom of choice between alternatives,
to be decided on higher levels according to more complex feedbacks --
'loops within loops' -- from the outer and inner environment. Thus the
logic of the argument led first to a negative criterion of awareness as
the reciprocal of habit-formation, and now to the positive criterion
of awareness as being directly proportional to the degrees of freedom
of the centre controlling the activity to make alternative choices,
based on its estimate of the lie of the land. We must assume that the
higher in the hierarchy the centre is placed, the more vivid will be the
subject's experience of his 'freedom of choice'. Freedom of the will is
a metaphysical question outside the scope of this book; but considered
as a subjective datum of experience, 'free will' is the awareness of
alternative choices.