The Mind is Flat - Revision history

Robert.adlington: /* Epilogue: Reinventing Ourselves */

2025-07-16T09:47:53Z

Epilogue: Reinventing Ourselves

← Older revision		Revision as of 09:47, 16 July 2025
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	=== Epilogue: Reinventing Ourselves ===		=== Epilogue: Reinventing Ourselves ===

			* We are not driven by hidden, inexorable forces from a dark and subterranean mental world. Instead, our thoughts and actions are transformations of past thoughts and actions, and we often have considerable latitude, and a certain judicial discretion, regarding which precedents we consider, which transformations we allow. As today's insight or action is tomorrow's precedent, we are, quite literally, reshaping and reinventing ourselves thought by thought.
			* We are astonishingly inventive ad hoc reasoners, creative metaphor-machines, continually wielding together scattered scraps of information into momentarily coherent wholes.
			* Our culture can be viewed as a shared canon of precedents - things we do, want, say, or think - which create order in society as well as within each individual. By laying down new precedents, we incrementally and collectively create our culture.
			* But our new precedents are based on old, shared precedents, so that our culture also creates us. Considered in isolation, our selves turn out to be partial, fragmentary and alarmingly fragile; we are only the most lightly sketched of literary creations. Yet collectively we can construct lives, organizations and societies which can be remarkably stable and coherent.
			* Life is a game in which we play, invent the rules and keep the score ourselves
			* How then, are perceptual reorganizations, sudden insights, religious conversions, and conceptual and political revolutions possible? One answer is that memory is fragile; so that we can often end up starting again from scratch, and coming up with a different answer. We forget the old story and create a new one.
			* What counts as precedent can itself shift - and shift again. We hope to stumble towards better and better stories - but we can only create new stories by starting with the stories we have.

	[[Category:Consciousness]]		[[Category:Consciousness]]
	[[Category:Books]]		[[Category:Books]]

Robert.adlington: /* 11 Precedent Not Principles */

2025-07-16T09:38:15Z

11 Precedent Not Principles

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 === 11 Precedent Not Principles ===
 === 12. The Secret of Intelligence ===
 === Epilogue: Reinventing Ourselves ===
 [[Category:Consciousness]]
 [[Category:Books]]

Robert.adlington: /* 10. The Boundary of Consciousness */

2025-07-15T09:18:37Z

10. The Boundary of Consciousness

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 === 10. The Boundary of Consciousness ===
 === 11 Precedent Not Principles ===
 === 12. The Secret of Intelligence ===

Robert.adlington: /* 9. The Myth of Unconscious Thought */

2025-07-14T17:26:12Z

9. The Myth of Unconscious Thought

← Older revision		Revision as of 17:26, 14 July 2025
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	* When a solution suddenly pops out, we have a sense of sudden insight, but no idea how to explain where it came from. Without warning, order emerges from chaos. We have no sense of getting warmer or colder before insight suddenly hits us - we have a sense of floundering aimlessly, followed, if we are lucky, by what feels like a bolt from the blue of understanding. The problem is solved not by a sequence of steps, getting ever closer to the answer. Quite the opposite: the cycle of thought churns on and on, exploring different possible organizations with no sign of progress until, suddenly, and within a single step, it chances upon the solution.		* When a solution suddenly pops out, we have a sense of sudden insight, but no idea how to explain where it came from. Without warning, order emerges from chaos. We have no sense of getting warmer or colder before insight suddenly hits us - we have a sense of floundering aimlessly, followed, if we are lucky, by what feels like a bolt from the blue of understanding. The problem is solved not by a sequence of steps, getting ever closer to the answer. Quite the opposite: the cycle of thought churns on and on, exploring different possible organizations with no sign of progress until, suddenly, and within a single step, it chances upon the solution.
			* The phenomenon of sudden insight stems not from unconscious thought, but from the nature of the problem: searching for a meaningful interpretation with few helpful and unambiguous clues.
			* Solving difficult problems, whether mathematical, musical or of any other kind, is the very antithesis of a routine, specialized problem with a dedicated brain network: on the contrary, thinking about such problems will need to engage most of the brain.
			* What is special about such problems is that you can't solve them through a routine set of steps. You have to look at the problem in the right way before you can make progress.
			* Breaking out of mental cul-de-sacs is precisely what a break will give us. Starting afresh with a relatively clear mind is more likely to succeed than a mind filled with partial solutions and suggestions which, after an increasingly frustrating struggle, have clearly failed.
			* Unconscious problem-solving and unconscious thought of all kinds is a myth.
			* The flash of inspiration represents no more than the revelation of a new and promising direction to explore - it is the starting point for a long period of creation, perhaps even creative struggle.
			* Though you believe you can hold a conversation, listen to the radio, and drive at the same time, in fact you are rapidly switching back and forth between each task, and multitasking in this way will necessarily slow down your reactions to unexpected events on the road.
			* Now and again, thoughts do pop into our minds - names we have struggled to remember, things we have forgotten to do, and occasionally even insights into tricky problems with which we have been struggling. But this isn't the product of unconscious, background thought. It arises when we flip back to thinking about an old problem for a moment and, now free of the unhelpful mental loops which got us stuck in the first place, we see a solution that had evaded us before - or, in some cases, dimly suspect where such a solution might lie.
			* The flash of inspiration is perhaps better termed a flash of suspicion.

	=== 10. The Boundary of Consciousness ===		=== 10. The Boundary of Consciousness ===

Robert.adlington: /* 9. The Myth of Unconscious Thought */

2025-07-14T17:08:12Z

9. The Myth of Unconscious Thought

← Older revision		Revision as of 17:08, 14 July 2025
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	=== 9. The Myth of Unconscious Thought ===		=== 9. The Myth of Unconscious Thought ===

			* When a solution suddenly pops out, we have a sense of sudden insight, but no idea how to explain where it came from. Without warning, order emerges from chaos. We have no sense of getting warmer or colder before insight suddenly hits us - we have a sense of floundering aimlessly, followed, if we are lucky, by what feels like a bolt from the blue of understanding. The problem is solved not by a sequence of steps, getting ever closer to the answer. Quite the opposite: the cycle of thought churns on and on, exploring different possible organizations with no sign of progress until, suddenly, and within a single step, it chances upon the solution.

	=== 10. The Boundary of Consciousness ===		=== 10. The Boundary of Consciousness ===
	=== 11 Precedent Not Principles ===		=== 11 Precedent Not Principles ===

Robert.adlington: /* 8. The Narrow Channel of Consciousness */

2025-07-14T16:34:08Z

8. The Narrow Channel of Consciousness

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 === 8. The Narrow Channel of Consciousness ===
 === 9. The Myth of Unconscious Thought ===
 === 10. The Boundary of Consciousness ===

Robert.adlington: /* 7. The Cycle of Thought */

2025-07-14T08:57:58Z

7. The Cycle of Thought

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 == Part Two: The Improvised Mind ==
 === 7. The Cycle of Thought ===
 === 8. The Narrow Channel of Consciousness ===
 === 9. The Myth of Unconscious Thought ===

Robert.adlington: /* 6. Manufacturing Choice */

2025-07-14T07:39:07Z

6. Manufacturing Choice

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 === 6. Manufacturing Choice ===
 == Part Two: The Improvised Mind ==
 === 7. The Cycle of Thought ===

Robert.adlington: /* Epilogue: Reinventing Ourselves */

2025-07-14T07:14:35Z

Epilogue: Reinventing Ourselves

← Older revision		Revision as of 07:14, 14 July 2025
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	=== 12. The Secret of Intelligence ===		=== 12. The Secret of Intelligence ===
	=== Epilogue: Reinventing Ourselves ===		=== Epilogue: Reinventing Ourselves ===
			[[Category:Consciousness]]
			[[Category:Books]]

Robert.adlington: /* 5. Inventing Feelings */

2025-07-13T15:10:10Z

5. Inventing Feelings

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 === 5. Inventing Feelings ===
 === 6. Manufacturing Choice ===
 == Part Two: The Improvised Mind ==