0:06 well now what I want to do is have a
0:09 mutual brain picking session and I'm
0:14 gonna start the ball rolling by saying
0:21 why I as a philosopher I'm interested in
0:22 many things that you were all probably
0:29 interested in professionally basically
0:32 what we're going to talk about I suppose
0:38 is the problem of control as exemplified
0:42 in the ancient Latin question Chris
0:46 custodia custodiet Ipsos who guards the
0:59 guards now we we know that we're living
1:07 in an age when there's been an enormous
1:11 proliferation of techniques before
1:15 subjecting every kind of natural process
1:18 outside the human skin and now
1:21 increasingly inside the human skin to
1:27 some form of rational control and as we
1:30 succeed in doing this it also becomes
1:34 apparent that we've we're failing that
1:37 the process becomes of such a high
1:40 degree of complexity that we begin to
1:43 feel that we're standing in our own way
1:48 that everybody complains the state of
1:50 affairs in modern world in the
1:52 technological world is so complicated
1:57 that nobody can understand it and nobody
2:02 really knows what to do that for example
2:06 you want to run a small business and you
2:09 find you run into such enormous legal
2:11 hassles that you need so many
2:12 secretaries to do
2:15 paperwork that you can hardly do the
2:17 business that you're trying to run a
2:20 hospital but that you have to spend so
2:22 much time making records and writing
2:24 things down on paper that you don't have
2:27 much time to practice medicine that
2:29 you're trying to run a university and
2:34 the requirements the recording the in
2:36 endless red tape of the Registrar's
2:38 Office and the administration building
2:41 is such that the actual work of research
2:45 and teaching is seriously hampered and
2:47 so the individual increasingly feels
2:51 himself obstructed by his own cautiousness
2:51 cautiousness
2:57 this is basically what it is now ah to
3:00 explain myself first of all because most
3:03 of you are strangers to me I am a
3:05 philosopher who has for many years been
3:09 interested in the mutual fructification
3:13 of Eastern cultures and Western cultures
3:19 studying oriental ideas not in the
3:22 spirit of saying to the West you ought
3:26 to be converted to oriental ideas but in
3:29 the spirit of saying you don't
3:31 understand the basic assumptions of your
3:34 own culture if your own culture is the
3:38 only culture you know everybody operates
3:41 on certain basic assumptions but very
3:44 few people know what they are you can
3:47 say very often encounter the sort of
3:49 character who was an American
3:51 businessman and he says well I'm a
3:53 practical businessman I am I believe in
3:55 getting results and things done all is
3:57 thinking and highfalutin logic and non
4:00 senses of no concern to me now I know
4:03 that the practical basic assumptions the
4:07 metaphysics of that man can be defined
4:11 as pragmatism as a school of philosophy
4:13 but it's bad pragmatism because he's
4:19 never thought it through and so it's
4:21 very difficult to see to get down - what
4:23 are your basic assumptions what do you
4:25 mean by the good luck
4:28 what do you mean by consistency what do
4:33 you mean by rationality the only way of
4:35 finding out what you mean by these
4:37 things is by contrasting the way you
4:40 look at something by the way it's looked
4:43 at in another culture and therefore we
4:46 have to find cultures which are in some
4:50 ways as sophisticated as our own but as
4:53 different from our own as possible and
4:55 of course for this purpose I was thought
4:59 that the Chinese were optimal and the
5:03 Indians the East Indians and that by
5:06 studying the ideas of these people by
5:08 studying their life goals we could
5:11 become more aware of our own it's the
5:14 old principle of triangulation you don't
5:16 establish the situation of a particular
5:19 object unless you observe it from two
5:20 particularly different points of view
5:23 and thereby calculate its actual
5:29 distance from you so by looking at what
5:32 we are pleased to call reality the
5:35 physical world from this basic stand
5:38 points of different cultures I think
5:39 we're in a better position to know where
5:42 we are and if we only have one single
5:45 line of sight and therefore this has
5:48 been my interest in my background and
5:50 arising out of this there has come a
5:52 further question which I would call the
5:57 problems of human ecology how is man to
6:01 be best related to his environment
6:04 especially in circumstances where we are
6:06 in possession of an extremely powerful
6:09 technology and have therefore the
6:12 capacity to change our environment far
6:13 more than anyone else has ever been able
6:19 to do so are we going to end up not by
6:20 civilizing the world but by Los Angeles
6:24 in it in other words are we going to
6:26 foul our own nest as a result of
6:29 technology but all this gets down to the
6:31 basic question is really what are you
6:36 going to do if your god if in other
6:39 words you find yourself in charge
6:41 of the world through technological
6:47 powers and instead of leaving evolution
6:51 to what we used to call in the 19th
6:55 century the blind processes of nature
6:57 that was begging the question to call
7:01 them blind but in in it at any rate we
7:02 say we're not going to leave evolution
7:04 anymore to the blind forces of nature
7:06 but now we're going to direct it
7:09 ourselves because we are increasingly
7:13 developing safe control over genetic
7:15 systems control over the nervous system
7:20 control over all kinds of systems then
7:23 simply what do you want to do with it
7:26 but most people don't know what they
7:29 want and I've never even seriously
7:31 confronted the question of what they
7:36 want you ask a group of students to sit
7:41 down and write a solid paper of 20 pages
7:45 on what is your idea of heaven what
7:48 would you really like to happen if you
7:50 could make it happen and that's the
7:52 first thing that starts people really
7:54 thinking because you soon realize that a
7:55 lot of the things you think you would
7:58 want are not things he wanted all
8:00 supposing just for the sake of
8:02 illustration you have the power to dream
8:04 every night any dream you wanted to
8:11 dream and you could of course arranged
8:18 for one night of dreams to be 75 years
8:21 of subjective time or any number of
8:25 years of subjective time what would you
8:29 do well of course you'd start out by
8:33 fulfilling every wish you would have
8:37 routes and orgies and all the most
8:42 magnificent food and sexual partners and
8:44 everything you could possibly imagine in
8:46 that direction when you've got tired of
8:50 that after several nights you would
8:51 switch a bit and you'd soon find
8:53 yourself involved in an adventure
8:57 and contemplating great works of art
9:00 fantastic mathematical conceptions you
9:02 would soon be rescuing princesses from
9:04 dragons and all sorts of things like
9:05 that no one I could say now look tonight
9:07 what we're going to do is we're going to
9:10 forget this dream as a dream then we're
9:18 going to be really shocked and when you
9:20 woke up from that one you'd say whew
9:24 wasn't that an adventure then you would
9:27 think more and more far out ways to get
9:31 involved and let go of control
9:33 knowing that should always come back to
9:35 Center in the end but while you were
9:37 involved in the dream you wouldn't know
9:38 your company you were going to come back
9:41 to Center be in control and so
9:43 eventually you would be dreaming a dream
9:45 in which you found yourselves all
9:47 sitting around in this room listening to
9:49 me talking all involved with the
10:03 and maybe that's what you're doing but
10:07 here's the difficulty you see the
10:10 difficulty is control are you wise
10:16 enough to play at being God and to
10:19 understand what that question means
10:23 we've got to go back to metaphysical
10:26 assumptions underlying Western common
10:29 sense and whether you are a Jew or a
10:33 Christian or an agnostic or an atheist
10:36 you are not uninfluenced by the whole
10:40 tradition of Western culture the models
10:42 of the universe which it is employed
10:46 which influenced our very language the
10:48 structure of our thought the very
10:53 constitution of logic which are going
11:04 the Western model of the universe is
11:09 political and engineering or
11:13 architectural it is natural for a child
11:17 to ask its mother how as I made it would
11:20 be inconceivable for a Chinese child to
11:24 ask how was I made it might ask how was
11:27 I grown or how did I grow but not how
11:29 was I made as if I were an artifact
11:32 something put together something which
11:36 is a construct but all Western thought
11:38 is based on the idea that the universe
11:42 is a construct and even when we got rid
11:45 of the idea of the constructor the
11:48 personal God continued to think of the
11:53 world in terms of a machine in terms say
11:55 of Newtonian mechanics and later in
11:57 terms of what we call quantum mechanics
12:01 although I find it rather difficult to
12:04 understand how quantum theory is in any
12:08 sense mechanics it's it's much more like
12:10 organics which is to me a different
12:14 concept however that may be it has
12:17 percolated you see into the roots of our
12:19 common sense that the world is a
12:23 construct isn't artifact and therefore
12:27 as one understands the operations of a
12:30 machine by analysis of its parts by
12:34 separating them into their original bits
12:40 we have bitted the cosmos and see
12:42 everything going on in terms of bits
12:46 bits of information and I found that
12:49 this is extremely fruitful in enabling
12:53 us to control what's happening after all
12:55 the whole of Western technology is the
12:58 result of bidding let's suppose you know
13:01 you want to eat a chicken you can't eat
13:03 the whole chicken at once you have to
13:05 bite it you have to reduce it to bits
13:08 but you don't get a cut-up fryer out of
13:10 an egg
13:14 it doesn't come that way so what has
13:18 happened is this but we don't know the
13:20 origins of all this it's maybe go back
13:24 thousands of years the way we develop
13:26 the art of thinking which is essentially
13:31 calculus is this the universe as it
13:33 comes in nature the physical universe is
13:36 something like a Rorschach blood it's
13:46 all Wiggles we who live in cities I'm
13:48 not really used to this because we build
13:49 everything in straight lines and
13:51 rectangles and so on wherever you see
13:52 this sort of thing you know human beings
13:54 have been around because they're always
13:56 trying to straighten things out
14:00 but nature itself is clouds its water as
14:02 the outlines of continents as mountains
14:07 is biological existences and all of them
14:12 wiggle and wiggly things are to human
14:20 because we want to figure it out and it
14:24 is as if therefore some ancient
14:28 fisherman one day held up his net and
14:30 looked at the world through the net
14:34 he said my just think of that there I
14:37 can see the view and it's one and that
14:40 peak of that mountain is one two three
14:44 four five six holes across and the base
14:48 is one two three four five holes down
14:53 now I've got its number see and so the
14:55 lines of latitude had longitude the
14:57 lines of celestial and terrestrial
15:00 latitude and longitude the whole idea of
15:04 a matrix of a looking at things through
15:09 graph paper painted on printed on
15:12 cellophane is the basic idea of
15:15 measurement this is the way we calculate
15:18 we break down the wiggliness of the
15:21 world into comprehensible countable geometrical
15:23 geometrical
15:27 and thereby figurative and constructed
15:30 in those terms and this is so successful
15:33 up to a point that we can of course come
15:36 to imagine that this is the way the
15:42 physical world really is discrete
15:49 discontinuous full of points in in fact
15:55 a mechanism but I want to just put into
15:58 your mind the notion that this may be
16:01 the prejudice of a certain personality
16:05 type you see in in the history of
16:08 philosophy and poetry and art we always
16:10 find the interchange of two personality
16:16 types which I call prickles and goo the
16:21 prickly people advocates of intellectual
16:26 poppin ism they want a rigor they want
16:28 precise statistics and they have a
16:30 certain clipped attitude in their voices
16:32 and you know this very well in academic
16:34 circles where there are people who are
16:39 always edgy like that and they accuse
16:42 other people of being disgustingly vague
16:46 and miasmic and mystical but the vague
16:48 miasma can mystical people accused the
16:50 prickly people of being mere skeletons
16:52 with no flesh on their bones and they
16:55 say to you you just rattle you're not
16:57 really a human being you know the words
17:00 but you don't know the music and so
17:03 therefore if you belong to the prickly
17:04 type you hope that the ultimate
17:07 constituent of matter is particles if
17:09 you belong to the gooey type you hope
17:10 it's waves
17:14 if you prickly you're a classicist and
17:17 if you're gooey you're a romanticist and
17:18 they're going back into medieval
17:20 philosophy if you're prickly or a
17:22 nominalist if you're gooey you're a
17:26 realist and so it goes but we know very
17:29 well that this natural universe is
17:31 neither prickles nor goo exclusively
17:34 it's gooey prickles and prickly goo
17:39 and you see it all depends on your level
17:41 of magnification if you've got your
17:43 magnification on something so that the
17:46 focus is clear you've got a prickly
17:50 point of view you've got structure shape
17:53 clearly outline sharply defined a little
17:55 out of focus it's gonna go blue there
17:59 and you look goo but we're always
18:03 playing with the two because it's like
18:08 the question is is the world basically
18:10 stuff like matter or is it basically
18:15 structure well we find out of course
18:17 today that in science we don't consider
18:20 the idea of matter of just any of there
18:22 being some sort of stuff because
18:26 supposing you wanted to describe stuff
18:28 in what terms would you describe it
18:30 you always have to describe it in terms
18:32 of structure something comfortable
18:34 something that can be designated as a
18:37 pattern so we never get to any basic
18:42 stuff it seems to me that this way of
18:49 thinking is based on a form of
18:51 consciousness which we could best call
18:56 scanning the capacity to divide
19:00 experiences into bits is somehow related
19:06 to a physical facility which corresponds
19:09 to sweeping a radar beam or a spotlight
19:13 over the environment the advantage of
19:16 the spotlight as it gives you intensely
19:24 floodlight
19:30 by comparison has less intensity but if
19:33 you examine say this room were in total
19:36 darkness and you use the spotlight very
19:40 thin beam and you scan the room with it
19:43 you would have to retain in memory all
19:46 the areas over which it passed and then
19:48 by an additive process
19:50 would make out the contours of the room
19:53 and it seems to me that this is
19:57 something in which civilized man both in
20:00 the east and in the West has specialized
20:04 in a method of paying attention to
20:07 things which we call noticing and
20:09 therefore it's highly selective it picks
20:13 out its Punk t'v it picks out features
20:15 in the environment which we say are
20:18 noteworthy and which we therefore
20:23 register with a notation be it the
20:26 notation of words the notation of
20:29 numbers or such a notation say as
20:37 algebra or music so that we notice those
20:41 things only those things for which we
20:48 have notation when a child very often
20:51 child will point at something and say to
20:54 its parents what's that and they're not
20:59 clear what the child is pointing to the
21:01 child has pointed to something which we
21:04 consider is not a thing
21:07 the child has pointed to an area say of
21:13 funny pattern on a dirty wall and as
21:16 noticed a figure on it but the child
21:18 doesn't have a word for it and says
21:20 what's that and the adult says oh that's
21:26 just a mess because that doesn't count
21:30 for us as a thing you've come through
21:32 this to the understanding what do you
21:35 mean by a thing it's very fascinating to
21:40 ask children what do you mean by a thing
21:44 and they don't know because it's one of
21:45 the unexamined suppositions of the
21:53 well everybody knows what an event is
22:03 because a thing is a think it's a unit
22:05 of thought like an inch is a unit of
22:09 measurement and so we thing the world
22:11 that is to say in order to measure a
22:14 curve you have to reduce it to point
22:17 instance and apply the calculus so in
22:20 exactly the same way in order to discuss
22:23 or talk about the universe you have to
22:25 reduce it to things but each thing or
22:29 think is as it were one grasp of that
22:34 spotlight thank Jen Joe Joe Joe Joe Joe
22:39 Joe Joe like this you see so we reduce
22:46 the infinite wiggliness of the world to
22:49 grasps or bits we're getting back to
22:52 biting you see the idea of the teeth to
22:57 grasps of thought and so we thereby
23:03 describe your world in terms of things
23:06 just as that fisherman could describe
23:12 his view by the number of net whole /
23:15 through which the view was showing and
23:18 this has been the immensely and
23:22 apparently successful enterprise of all
23:25 technological culture superbly
23:43 the Western model of the universe is
23:49 political and engineering or
23:54 architectural and therefore as one
23:56 understands the operations of a machine
23:59 by analysis of its parts by separating
24:05 them into their original bits we have
24:09 bitted the cosmos and see everything
24:12 going on in terms of bits bits of
24:15 information and I found that this is
24:18 extremely fruitful in enabling us to
24:22 control what's happening after all the
24:24 whole of Western technology is the
24:29 result of bidding and so we thing the
24:31 world that is to say in order to measure
24:33 a curve you have to reduce it to point
24:37 instance and apply the calculus so in
24:39 exactly the same way in order to discuss
24:42 or talk about the universe you have to
24:45 reduce it to things but each thing or
24:49 think is as it were one grasp of that
24:54 spotlight thank Joe Joe Joe Joe Joe Joe
25:00 Joe Joe like this is he so we reduce the
25:05 infinite wiggliness of the world to
25:08 grasps or bits we're getting back to
25:11 biting you see the idea of the teeth to
25:17 grasps of thought and so we thereby
25:23 describe your world in terms of things
25:26 just as that fisherman could describe
25:31 his view by the number of net whole /
25:37 through which the view was showing but
25:42 the problem that arises is is this first
25:45 of all very obviously everybody knows I
25:47 already need to mention it go to the
25:49 science of Medicine
25:53 you get a specialist who really
25:54 understands the function of the
25:58 gallbladder and he studied gall bladders
26:00 gall bladders gall bladders ad infinitum
26:02 and he really thinks he knows all about
26:06 it but whenever he looks at a human
26:07 being he sees him in terms of gall
26:11 bladder and so if he operates on the
26:13 gall bladder he may do so very
26:16 knowledgeably about that particular area
26:19 of the organism but he does not foresee
26:21 the unpredictable effects of this operation
26:21 operation
26:24 in other connected areas because the
26:27 human beings gall bladder is not a thing
26:31 in the same way as the a sparkplug in a
26:34 car can be extracted and a new one
26:40 replaced because the system isn't the
26:44 same there is a fundamental difference
26:47 between a mechanism and an organism
26:59 mechanism is assembled you add this bit
27:02 to that bit to that bit to that bit but
27:08 an organism grows that is to say when
27:12 you watch in a microscope a solution in
27:15 which crystals are formed you don't see
27:17 this thing of little bits coming in
27:18 coming and coming and joining each other
27:22 and finally making up a shape you see a
27:24 solution where well it's like when you
27:26 watch a photographic plate developing a
27:29 suddenly all the whole area which you're
27:33 watching seems to organize itself to
27:37 develop to make sense moving from the
27:40 relatively simple and gooey to the
27:44 relatively structured and prickly but
27:51 not by addition so then
27:54 if we are trying to control and
27:58 understand the world through conscious
28:01 attention which is a scanning system
28:03 which takes in everything bit bit bit
28:08 bit bit bit bit bit bit what we're going
28:10 to run into is that if that's the only
28:14 method we rely on everything is going to
28:17 appear increasingly too complicated to
28:25 manage so that you get for example let's
28:28 take the problem of the electronic
28:33 industry the catalogs of products that
28:36 are being produced over the world by the
28:38 electronic industry who has read all the
28:41 catalogs how do you know where you've
28:43 got a something you're working on
28:44 whether it's patented or not
28:47 who else has taken out a patent has
28:48 anybody had time to read all the catalogs
28:49 catalogs
28:53 nobody has they're just voluminous and
28:54 it's exactly the same in almost any
28:56 other field there's an information
28:58 explosion like a population explosion
29:01 how on earth are you going to scan all
29:06 that information yes of course you can
29:08 get computers to help you in this
29:14 direction but by Parkinson's Law the
29:16 soon sooner you become more efficient in
29:19 doing this the more the thing is going
29:20 to develop so that you will have to have
29:22 more efficient computers still to
29:26 assimilate all the information you'll be
29:30 ahead but only for a short time so you
29:34 see this is problem of the sort of
29:40 competition of consciousness of it's how
29:43 fast can you go duty duty duty duty duty
29:45 duty duty duty duty duty duty do and
29:47 keep track of it to see and say I'm a
29:48 got a good memory I can keep track of
29:51 that and you say to you I bet you you
29:53 can't I'll go more complicated than you
29:55 so you let musicians do this where
29:58 drummers you know and they get things
29:59 going and they start and they and so
30:01 long as they count and
30:05 some musicians do count it's crazy but
30:07 they do and they can't count count and
30:09 they out complicate each other to the
30:11 point where you can't retain it any
30:17 longer in memory so you say okay if I
30:18 can't retain it we've got this gadget
30:23 here that can and we've got these
30:25 marvelous mechanical memories than they
30:28 will retained and they will go much more
30:30 fancy they'll go this duty duty duty at
30:33 a colossal speed like that you see but
30:38 is the same old problem because you get
30:46 something that can outdo that so we end
30:53 up asking yeah yeah but supposing there
30:55 were some other way of understanding
30:58 things let's go back from the spotlight
31:02 to the floodlight to the extraordinary
31:07 capacity of the human nervous system to
31:09 comprehend situations instantaneously
31:14 without analysis I'll just say without
31:17 verbal or numerical symbolism of the
31:19 situation in order to understand it I
31:24 hope you understand what I mean we do do
31:29 that we have this curious ability of
31:34 pattern recognition which the mechanical
31:36 systems have only in a very primitive
31:39 way Xerox have put out a machine which
31:43 recognizes figures written in almost
31:45 anyone's handwriting provided their
31:48 handwriting is fairly grade-school and
31:53 normal but computer has a terrible time
31:56 trying to recognize the letter A when
32:03 it's printed in say sans-serif gothic
32:06 longhand or whatever kind of a you may
32:09 write the human recognizes instantly
32:12 this pattern but the computer is still
32:14 at a disadvantage here
32:18 it seems to lack a kind of capacity I
32:21 would call field organization because
32:25 it's all funked if it's digital it is
32:28 but that that that like a newspaper
32:30 photograph you know which when you look
32:36 at it under a microscope is all dots now
32:47 so the problem the problem is this in
32:54 developing technology are we leaving out
32:58 of consideration our strongest suit
33:08 see we are at a situation where the
33:12 brain is still not really worked out by
33:15 even the most competent neurologists it
33:20 puzzles me they can't give a model of
33:23 the brain in numerical or verbal
33:28 language now you are that you see you
33:30 are this thing you yourself are this
33:31 thing which you yourself can't figure
33:36 out in the same way that I cannot touch
33:38 the tip of this finger with the tip of
33:42 this finger I can't bite my own teeth
33:45 but I who is attempting to touch the tip
33:48 of this finger with this finger am by
33:50 the sheer complexity of my structure far
33:55 more evolved than any system which I can
33:58 imagine this is in a way slightly akin
34:04 to the girdle theorem that you can't
34:10 have a of say a logic which defines its
34:13 own axioms the axioms of any given
34:15 system must always be defined in terms
34:19 of a higher system all right so you are
34:21 the most complex thing that has yet been
34:25 encountered in the cosmos and you can't
34:30 now you is suppose we're going to try to
34:35 do that and become as it were completely
34:36 transparent to ourselves so that we
34:38 could entirely understand the
34:40 organization on the mechanics of our own
34:50 brains what happens when we do that well
34:51 you're in the wheel you're back in the
34:54 situation of God when you're God what
34:56 are you gonna do when you're God you
34:57 know what you're going to do you're
34:59 gonna say to yourself man get lost
35:03 because what you want is a surprise and
35:05 when you figured everything out there
35:06 won't be any surprises you'll be
35:20 but on the other hand a person I would
35:24 say who is really functioning completely
35:27 he is basically a person who trusts his
35:36 own brains and permits his brain to
35:40 operate at a more optimal level in other
35:43 words he knows how to think things out
35:45 but he makes his best discoveries
35:50 without thinking in other words you all
35:53 know very well the processes of creative
35:56 invention you've got a problem you think
35:58 it over and you can't find out any
36:03 answer to it because the digital system
36:06 of thinking is too simple too clumsy to
36:07 deal with it
36:10 it's more complex there are more
36:13 variables than can be kept in in mind at
36:18 one time so you say I'll sleep on or
36:21 you'll go to the Institute of Advanced
36:24 Studies at Princeton of behavioral
36:26 sciences at Stanford where they pay you
36:30 to goof off which is highly excellent
36:33 idea and you moon around and you've got
36:35 a blackboard and you look out the window
36:37 and pick your nose and so on and your
36:40 brain eventually hands you the solution
36:46 to the problem I knew immediately
36:48 because you have technical knowledge you
36:51 recognize that's a solution but then
36:53 naturally you'll go back and check it
36:57 and you work the bit-by-bit form of
36:58 thinking on it and see now does it come
37:01 out in those terms and if it does
37:03 everybody will agree with you
37:05 yes that's the answer but if it doesn't
37:07 come out in those terms they won't agree
37:10 with you because you haven't subjected
37:12 it to the socially acceptable
37:15 traditional form of animal and analyzing
37:20 knowledge but here's the problem it
37:22 takes an awful long time to check these
37:24 things out
37:27 it takes an awful long time to arrive at
37:29 the solution which you've got like that
37:33 by a purely calculative process most of
37:35 the situation's of life are such that
37:37 they don't wait for us to make up our
37:40 minds so that an enormous amount of
37:42 carefully worked out scientific
37:47 knowledge is trivial they all very well
37:50 very finely worked out but much too late
37:53 how's life presents you life comes at
37:54 you from all sides
37:58 all over everywhere at once and the only
38:00 thing you've got to deal with that is
38:13 I'm not saying this to put down all this
38:17 marvelous work of calculation brought to
38:19 immense sophistication electronically
38:21 and so on not at all because actually
38:23 you people are the first people to
38:25 understand the limitations of your own
38:28 kind of knowledge and you're going to
38:30 have to tell the politicians about this
38:35 they don't understand they may think
38:36 that this kind of knowledge is the
38:39 answer to everything and I think most of
38:44 you know it isn't which is not something
38:47 I repeat against technology it's only
38:51 saying that when you walk you put your
38:54 right foot forward and that's fine but
38:56 then you must put your left foot forward
38:59 so let's say that they did a great
39:01 technological Enterprise has been
39:04 putting the right foot forward but you
39:08 must bring up the left foot that is to
39:17 say bring up revaluation a new respect
39:21 for the organic type of organization
39:23 which is incomprehensible to
39:25 technological thinking but which always
39:31 that by itself doesn't work because
39:34 after you bring the left foot up you've
39:37 again got to bring up the right foot the
39:41 analytic after GU comes brickel's after
39:44 cripples comes do you have to keep this
39:48 thing up I think our danger present time
39:59 is that we are so heady so delighted
40:03 with the results of cripples that we've
40:05 got to let back a little bit of goo into
40:07 the system
40:17 well now what we've got to try and do is
40:21 I think to work out a way of making the
40:25 brain itself more efficient and this is
40:30 the thing that civilized education has
40:36 neglected Lyn white like to quote him
40:41 again used to say that the academic
40:44 world today only values three kinds of
40:48 intelligence verbal intelligence
40:50 mnemonic intelligence in other words
40:53 good remembering and computational
40:56 intelligence said it entirely neglects
40:58 kinesthetic intelligence social
41:00 intelligence and he had at least seven
41:01 kinds of intelligence I forget what they
41:05 all were but it is this extraordinary
41:18 to say to engage in pattern recognition
41:24 and in solving instantly certain complex
41:34 the trouble is when you do something you
41:37 don't know how to do you've got a non
41:40 repeatable experiment in a certain sense
41:42 in other words you can't explain to
41:49 someone else how to put it together but
41:50 you can do it like you can open and
41:51 close your hand without any knowledge of
41:54 physiology do it every time
41:55 whoops I don't know how I do it I just
42:03 do it you see so we have an enormous
42:07 potential of intelligence of knowing how
42:11 to do all sorts of things which to the
42:13 extent that we are academically minded
42:15 people we won't allow ourselves to do
42:20 because we can't explain you know there
42:25 for example is a way of cooling a
42:31 brazing furnace it's very simple but
42:33 Engineers say it's theoretically
42:34 impossible it can't happen it's like
42:36 bees can't fly by the laws of
42:47 aerodynamics but they do so the rather
43:08 on linear thinking is going to destroy
43:17 the environment it's going to become too
43:20 complicated to handle man is going to be
43:22 like the dinosaur which had to have a
43:23 brain in its head and a brain in its
43:26 rump because it was so big you know the
43:28 caveman kept up dinosaur and when he
43:31 went to bed at night he had hump it on
43:33 the tail with a club and it did scream
43:41 at 8 o'clock in the morning it seems to
43:42 be we're getting into that kind of
43:45 saurian situation with our technology
43:58 so the question is are we going to foul
44:04 things up by insisting on using linear
44:12 input information and controlling it as
44:16 the dominant tool of controlling the
44:21 world or can we master all that as we
44:25 have done and still use the linear input
44:27 and analysis but with a fundamental
44:30 trust in our power to assimilate
44:35 multiple input although we really don't
44:39 know how we do it and my point is that
44:41 you can't find an absolute which you can
44:44 pin down you see so there always remains
44:48 in any human operation the the basic
44:51 central thing which you can't pin down
44:56 because it's you just as the teeth can't
44:59 bite themselves now the assumption of
45:04 judeo-christian culture is that man in
45:07 his nature is sinful and therefore can't
45:12 be trusted the assumption of at least
45:14 ancient Chinese culture
45:16 is that man in his essential
45:20 is good and therefore has to be trusted
45:24 because they say to us if you can't
45:28 trust your own basic nature you can't
45:31 really rely on the idea that you're
45:35 untrustworthy therefore you are
45:43 hopelessly fouled up so this has amazing
45:46 political and other consequences this a
45:51 different assumption if we say no we
45:55 human beings are fallible and basically
45:57 selfish and really really fundamentally
46:00 evil and therefore we need law and order
46:03 we need a control system to put us in
46:06 order we thereby project these control
46:08 systems into the church or into the
46:10 police or into somebody who are really
46:13 ourselves disguised see it's like
46:20 daylight saving time everybody could
46:22 simply get up an hour earlier but
46:25 instead of doing that we alter the clock
46:27 because the clock is a kind of authority
46:30 and I would say well the clock says it's
46:32 time for you to get up and the the
46:35 Indian America more Indians laugh at the
46:37 pale faces because they say pale face he
46:38 doesn't know when he's hungry until he
46:40 looks at his watch
46:44 and so in this way we become clock
46:50 dominated and the abstract system takes
46:55 over from the physical organic situation
46:59 and and this is my big pitch if I'm
47:02 going to make a big pitch is that we've
47:06 run into a cultural situation well we've
47:09 confused the symbol with the physical
47:12 reality the money with the wealth and
47:15 the menu with the dinner and we're
47:17 starving on eating menus hopping on
47:20 eating menus having on eating menus
47:22 having on eating menus having on eating
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