“Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.” — Gloria Steinem
Thinking Generally
All of my work involves thinking, and I think everything we do involves thinking. Most of what living things do revolves around thinking of one kind or another, and there are more kinds of thinking than you can imagine.
We talk about intellect and emotion, and we wonder whether animals think. This is all too small-minded. Thinking includes larger ways to organize experience than what humans do using language. We need to expand our notion of thought beyond what we can talk about.
My mentor, Eugene Wigner, famously asked (Wigner 1960) why the rules of mathematics generate the laws of physics? That was a somewhat small question because physics is based on the idea that every effect has a cause, and mathematics is based on the idea that different expressions mean the same thing. This translates to the same basis, a conservation of structure, so naturally one can be used to model the other. But in truth, most things in physics do not have a closed mathematical form and we have to violate equality to get a useful answer.
A deeper question is what are the relationships that explain how things behave. As Wigner added, “it is useful… to abandon the idealization that the level of human intelligence has a singular position on an absolute scale… it may even be useful to consider the attainment which is possible at the level of the intelligence of some other species.” But we don’t have to go to the intelligence of other species; we are sufficiently ignorant about our own.
General Thinking
Anything that controls itself in a changing environment thinks in a rudimentary sense. From this point of view, a self-regulating machine “thinks,” even something as simple as a pendulum. From an observational point of view, wherever laws interact with laws, something is being decided. We must accept this as the prototype of thought. In this regard plants think and microbes certainly think.
There is a border at which the notions of feedback and control are vague. We can say viruses think, but their kind of thinking is more of an artificial intelligence. Their behavior evolves more mechanically than intentionally. We can say that beyond this border are mechanical things that react without intention. In that realm exist simple structures like rocks and minerals.
We now have purely mechanical contraptions that can perform nearly all the functions of thoughtful humans. Maybe we should not take our thoughtfulness for granted. Maybe humans who are not trying to think are not thinking. Or maybe what constitutes human thought goes beyond what we conceive of thinking to be.
Intellect
There is something mathematical about intellect even if it doesn’t appear so. Using your intellect is reminiscent of putting things in their natural order, somewhat like Wigner’s use of math to model the world. You use your intellect because you think it will reveal a conclusion in a series of steps, and that what is not obvious in a single step will become evident after several.
You will use the notion of “making sense” in a similar way that an equals sign appears in math. There are close associations between intellect, reason, logic, and mathematics but they are also subtly different. An intellectual conclusion is not a series of equalities, it’s a series of extensions. Each reasonable step includes something more. As a result, your conclusion is not equal to what you started with. And where math displays an “unreasonable effectiveness,” as Wigner said, reason is only reasonably effective in guiding our behavior. Why is that?
Emotion
I understand emotion as a necessary extension of intellect. Intellect looks at causes and their details while emotion considers effects in terms of the larger picture. And the way intellect and emotion consider things is quite different: intellect is objective while emotion is subjective. If intellect is logical, emotion is musical.
Where intellect builds a cause and effect model of how and why things are, emotion creates a framework with a righteous flavor. We put the righteousness on top of our emotional conclusions, so that the emotional impact is visceral. You feel it rather than think it.
One’s emotional picture is judgement-based, but these judgements are not intellectual, they’re feeling-based. Even if they’re unreasonable, they’re motivational. The steps in your emotional picture are blocks of positive or negative feeling based on who you are, how you’ve lived, and what you remember.
Emotional conclusions are not reasonable steps to judgement. They often lack sequence and logic, but they do form a structure that has big feelings on the bottom and little feelings on the top. This intuitive picture is historical and provides guidance. The mistake people make is identifying their emotional picture with a description of the outside world, with the truth.
Compared with cooking, intellect is like the ingredients and emotion is whether or not you like the result. Whether or not you like curry or beer does not provide a truth about either, it reflects your experience and perceptions. Impressions, conclusions, and reactions are more fluid than taste. You can change your reason for what you eat faster than you can change your attitude about oatmeal.
My point is that you need both. To have emotion without intellect is to judge every food on its immediate and unintegrated taste. To have intellect without emotion is like being a chef whose recipes are based only on chemistry, or an artist who mixes colors based on their wavelengths. You need taste and chemistry, color and wavelength, but even their combination is not enough.
Dreaming
Walter Tevis authored “The Man Who Fell To Earth,” and “The Queen’s Gambit” in which Beth, a chess prodigy, struggles with the death of her parents, prejudice, and a drug addiction. He says (Guy 2022),
“When I was young, I was diagnosed as having a rheumatic heart and given heavy drug doses in a hospital. That’s where Beth’s drug dependency comes from in the novel… Writing about her was purgative… I did a lot of dreaming while writing that part of the story.”
Dreaming is a third way of understanding and it is closer to emotion than intellect, but different from both. While intellect uses reason and emotion uses memory, dreams use association. It’s only at the intersection of all three that we build a stable and adaptable personality. And while both intellect and emotion draw on association, only dreams focus on associations primarily.
To learn to work with and find guidance in your dreams, talk to me.
