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