More thought on thought:
Here I go again, writing about pitching the subject rather than about the subject, but the temptation is too much. There is an article (Ian Leslie Non Cogito Ergo Sum ECONMIST vol. 403 no. 8784 May 12, 2012 page 6 of special section lifted from a sister journal INTELLIGENT LIFE) that takes the position that the way to win is not to think, at least not to think while under pressure.
Their key image is of a tennis match in which a critical point was made by a player who slapped a blistering curve his opponent had dished up with such withering accuracy it was unstoppable. The implication was that the man who had served defeated himself by getting self conscious about the game.
That sort of works in tennis. They say the Zen teaching is that if you are in the right frame of mind you won’t even know what the score is. I used to play tennis a bit, usually not very well, but at my best I lived in that zone. My body was lurching about smashing the ball hard and accurately without any conscious volition on my own part. A good tennis player will put a lot of spin on the ball. I never really got the hang of that. If I put topspin on it, it would just clear the net and then dive in a most gratifying manner, but usually I sent it over as hard as I could to the baseline with no spin – like a knuckle ball.
Actually I do better at almost anything if I remember to think. Aviation is the prime case. Usually it is just a matter of routine, making adjustments constantly but letting the bird do her work. On rare occasions things would not be routine. In that case, and it happened a number of times, the answer was to think like crazy. The true professionals don’t do it that way. It’s still a routine. The first thing the pilot does is to shout, “Checklist!” Then he and the copilot run through the relevant checklist for the problem. They don’t trust themselves to think clearly. I suppose it is a point for not thinking in crisis. Sort of a written Zen thing.
So here I am pitching an issue that requires enormous analytic effort on the part of anybody who wants to understand it. That’s a lot like hard work of course but people don’t mind that. The trouble is that apparently when they see where it is going they go into crisis mode and analysis is blown out of the window, leaving only the mental checklist of, “What do I believe.”
Any ideas would be most appreciated. Biff them off to info@nobabies.net.
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