A Puzzle
It is an old idea that the more pointedly and logically we formulate a thesis, the more irresistibly it cries out for its antithesis.
—Herman Hesse, The Glass Bead Game |
The observation that beliefs are not based on discovered truths but constructed from competing and often contradictory thoughts and considerations is uncontroversial, even trite, but dwelling on it raises a vexing epistemological problem. For if true it follows that essential to the development of a belief is the ability to ignore considerations which, while not without validity, are contrary to the belief being developed.
Imagine, first, a man faced with a decision who thinks through the respective advantages and disadvantages of each of two options and finds that these are not equal. That this imbalance is a substantive aspect of the decision he is faced with, which he has properly and comprehensively perceived, is doubtful. Reality is staggeringly, perhaps infinitely, complex and no one can claim to have perceived every possible aspect or to have extrapolated in minute detail every possible outcome of a given decision. But the imbalance, while the result of a limitation or blind spot in his perception, a bias, or chance factor, is the starting point of this and every decision and belief. By means of it and it alone are we immunised against a mentally debilitating awareness of the multiplicity and contradictoriness of all possible beliefs and able to start to draw together a few congruent thoughts that happen to be at hand. Before long the task develops its own momentum. Mental labour is invested in it, an investment which, as it increases, we will be increasingly unwilling to forfeit by rejecting the idea under development, just as the longer we consider a given idea, the more familiar, and therefore the more appealing, it will become. The prospect of starting all over again, on the other hand, of returning to a state of complete uncertainty, constitutes a subliminal disincentive to critiquing the emerging belief too rigorously. And for these reasons, and simply by a convenient association of ideas with that idea already salient in our mind, considerations that support our emerging conclusion begin to suggest themselves readily, while equally valid considerations that do not support it are, like stars against the sun, lost in the glow of growing certitude. Soon, our hypothetical man says that he knows, with reasonable certainty, what he should do... All this takes time to explain but of course for the especially decisive it may happen in a synaptic lightning flash. But now consider the plight of a second man, faced with the same decision as the first, but for whom the foregoing problem is a personal preoccupation. He constructs a persuasive argument but his intellectual flexibility leads him into a kind of treason against his own ideas: He not only remains aware of the opposing considerations our first man conveniently ignored and cannot forget them—he actively and capably seeks out ideas contrary to his conclusion. He destroys his argument, experimentally, indifferently, and constructs its equally persuasive and equally hollow antithesis only to face the same problem as before. Such experiences teach him to mistrust his own mind because of, not in spite of, its flexibility. He sees that such a mind is in real danger: It is capable of persuasively rationalizing the wrong decision. He may begin to feel that all his thoughts are like polygons that can be assembled into almost every kind of polyhedra (cube, pyramid, octahedron) except for the one definitive and utterly impossible polyhedron which is a tidy tessellation of all the constituent parts. He may begin to feel that asking himself which of his conclusions is correct is as meaningless as asking himself whether a correct polyhedron is one built from triangles or one built from pentagons. Starting from the reasonable postulates that, firstly, analyzing the complexity of a problem and formulating its solution are two distinct mental activities, and secondly, that reality is infinitely complex, I think it can be argued that unusually perceptive and analytical minds are at a great disadvantage. To find a solution to a problem, a mind must bring the ordering force of intellect to bear on the results of its analysis of that problem, but this will not be possible if it is aptitude for perceiving the complexity of the problem exceeds its aptitude for finding a solution. It is said that the optimal point from which to view a movie is a distance equal to the diagonal length of the screen. If the complexity of our world exceeds human intelligence (which it surely does) then for each mind there must be an optimal level of perceived complexity beyond which it is impossible to function effectively; an optimal distance from reality… It is as though the problems faced in life were puzzles whose complexity varied according to the perceptiveness of the solver. So long as your aptitude for solving problems is greater than your capacity to perceive the complexity of the problems you are solving you will be able to complete all the puzzles life sets before you. Or else you will face puzzles whose complexity confounds you and find scant comfort in the knowledge that your failure to solve a single one of them is the result of an aptitude, a crippling and completely unprofitable aptitude, for perceiving their complexity. |