Richard Feynman is a man to admire. A Nobel Laureate for good reason - he realized science wasn’t just about logical inference, deduction but really rested on the shoulders of something else - thinking from another point of view. His example from the video is illuminating - discovery, intelligence, advancement, creation - all depend on thinking from a different angle than usual.
It goes by many names; horizontal or lateral thinking - de Bono), thought experiments, creative thinking, thinking aside (Koestler’s term, read his Act Of Creation, still the best exposition on the fundamentals of scientific, artistic creativity).
“I like the escalator, man. Because the escalator cannot break. It just becomes stairs.”
Mitch Hedberg. Thinking Aside.
Synectics is another word for this. It is a method to teach people to be creative. I have written about it previously here and here. Ceci, n’est pas un pipe a la Magritte. The force of the surrealists in my opinion wasn’t as an artistic movement but rather as a challenge to the very conformity and ways of logical, blind thinking of our societies.
Intelligence at its most subtle and profound and most powerful is simply seeing patterns and fine wrot metaphorical thinking. It is something ChatGPT nor AI will ever be capable of. Putting one thing in the place of another.
“The mind is inherently embodied.
Thought is mostly unconscious.
Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical.”
― George Lakoff, Philosophy In The Flesh
Let me give you an example from Potok’s fine book - My Name Is Asher Lev. It’s a book about art and seeing the world in a different fashion and loosening the chains of conforming, comforting culture, religion and ideology.
Asher has a vision when seeing a long line of telephone poles stretching down the road. He sees them not as telephone poles but as crosses and crucifixions, a road to Calvary. It’s all the more revealing given Asher is an Hasidic Jew. But as an artist, he sees the world of form in a fluid fashion - nature creates itself. Things happen from the inside, out.
In the journey that is my life, I’ve become aware that our computers, our search engines, our information society has dampened the fire that is human creativity and creative thought.
I became interested in Synectics while attending a colleagues workshop on the topic at my university. I was amazed at how the young kids there, were so much more able to think laterally, to see things in a different light. Our task was to take a paper bag and see it as something different. It’s not a bag, it’s a …
Children can think aside better, they are less enculturated into set habits of thought. So in my opinion, we need to wake up the world of adults to see things differently, put ourselves more in others’ shoes, to challenge the sleepwalking the mind defaults to (it is a lazy thing - we need to ride that horse). We so much need more to follow Feynman’s calling - see things from a different point of view. We need to constantly be asking ourselves - What if? Mailer called it his best friend, his greatest asset - his shit detector. One just like Papa Hemingway had.
‘One of my big problems with the reductionists (materialists) is not so much that their method has not been extremely powerful. It has been superbly powerful. It is the hubris – the certainty that that’s all there is.’ Richard Noble
It’s a big problem, this closed box view of the world we live in. You know the one I’m talking about - the straight forward, atheistic, logical, Cartesian, rational view of the world. Things are made of pieces, and ever smaller pieces. We just need to test, verify and then we’ll be able to know how all the pieces work, go together. All life, all problems solved.
We fail to see the errors of our thinking, we march down dead end corridors and instead of seeing the problem of our thinking, just turn around and march down another dead end. We need to abandon the labyrinth altogether.
The pun and comedy itself are probably the best and oldest examples of how creative thinking reveals intelligence and is its crown and jewel. Seeing things from a different point of view, stirs the pot (and sparks the laughter) and enables us to open up and see the world differently, see new options.
Nature itself is embodied with this same ability. Think of how our immune system works when confronted with a new, novel virus. It doesn’t just keep ploughing ahead, doubling down, replicating cells that won’t work. No. It returns to the nucleus and turns off its sequencing error correction. It allows chance, mutation to happen - it thinks creatively. And then from those sequences produced it tests and chooses those sequences that will bind to the virus. The cure is really “thinking aside”.
So, I ask and throw the question out there. How do we create a society, a world where adults are filled with the potential and skill of lateral thinking? I think if we can do that, go there, we’ll create a much better world. A world more full of invention, holistic problem solving, compassion and wisdom.
And if we don’t, we all can sort of guess what is going to happen and sense the hell in a handbasket we’re swinging along with, steadily on our straight road of reasoning.
Thoughts
"Often we have to get away from speech in order to think clearly."
— R. S. Woodworth, Experimental Psychology
to two too =s 3
no thinking thin king
run on sentence life sentence
le mot juste
Ommm Ahhh Oh! Yeah shhhhhhhhhh
says the tired tire
wee wee wee all the way
to the small home hole
Ole Ole Ole cafe au lait O! Lay
lady lay……
springs sing
in the flower bed
every year why ear?
we’re here weir
damn it! damn it! damn it!
aswants the tin mad!
steeling a way
anyway,
something like that
3 eees
with ease
we do as we please
stuckkkkkkkkkkkkin
bloody place body face
two faced the mirror
or rathOR
saw themselves in two
two pieces suits you
ewe moo you and who
who who who who
hoots the unfoul owl
Ough! aaaH! Ouch!
we too two wake up
at a wake
who who who who
died? Lewis
carolled
no question to mark
the grave
question a quest
ask again, request
Hark! who who who
goes there
any way or
somewhere like that
cuz THAT
is how it goes
goes goes ooooooooos
around
another round please
the wait ‘er is over
we have time to
two all ready drunks
drink up get down
kup after hiccup
to ketchup
words aren’t enough
but they’re all
we hal ve
ah!!! So unfair there is
no fair where
we’re goinggoinggoingone
all sawn
see saw
in two pieces
who says.
Creative Thinking