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9 Mind, Life, and the Universe
Also, the mind is a beehive of holistic images. When thinking creatively, the
mind is searching through a forest of Gestalt images, and extracting deeply
embedded parts which are themselves meaningful images. New Gestalts may
be created by combining them, and these must be subdivided again to express
them in words.
We do the same when we think deeply about a subject and come up with
new ideas, or with new, more solid understanding of a topic. We are beholding
a large, perhaps hazy Gestalt: We bring it into sharp focus, and divide it into
convenient parts. It is likely that all creative thought is of this kind. From what
we know of the thinking of scientists, that is exactly what they do.
Many scientists over the centuries have commented on this. The French
mathematician Jacques Hadamard wrote a beautiful little book on the subject,
in which he records interviews with some of the greatest scientists in his day, and
asks them to describe their mindset in their creative moments. The common
thread running through all the reports tells of spending a certain amount of
time laboring to become very familiar with the problem at hand. Each scientist
tells of letting go of the problem at that stage and thinking of other matters.
Then, at the most unexpected time, the solution emerges in consciousness. 3
It is evident that the problem had been slowly incubating in the unconscious
mind: Vast, half-formed Gestalt images were being shifted, re-arranged, simplified, tentatively divided into parts and recombined. Gradually, a solution
was taking shape. For example, the mathematician Henri Poincaré tells the
following story: He had been working in vain for two weeks, searching for the
proof of a theorem. At that time he left on a geology excursion and temporarily
forgot about his problem. In the middle of the journey, he put his foot on the
step of the bus, and at that instant the critical idea came to him. He had no
time to check its accuracy, but felt a perfect certainty that it was correct, and
later verified it.
Symbols in Nature
If propositions are symbolic constructions which may exist in mind apart
from language, this suggests that there must be symbolic systems in the brain,
unrelated to human languages and developmentally prior to them. In other
words, it’s possible that there are symbolic mechanisms of a biological nature
which are fundamental to human activity. This idea is very much in vogue
today and is the focus of a great deal of research and debate.
In a purely biological context, what is a symbol? It plays the same role as
symbols play in any other context: A symbol is a place-holder. The letter x in a
9 Mind, Life, and the Universe
Also, the mind is a beehive of holistic images. When thinking creatively, the
mind is searching through a forest of Gestalt images, and extracting deeply
embedded parts which are themselves meaningful images. New Gestalts may
be created by combining them, and these must be subdivided again to express
them in words.
We do the same when we think deeply about a subject and come up with
new ideas, or with new, more solid understanding of a topic. We are beholding
a large, perhaps hazy Gestalt: We bring it into sharp focus, and divide it into
convenient parts. It is likely that all creative thought is of this kind. From what
we know of the thinking of scientists, that is exactly what they do.
Many scientists over the centuries have commented on this. The French
mathematician Jacques Hadamard wrote a beautiful little book on the subject,
in which he records interviews with some of the greatest scientists in his day, and
asks them to describe their mindset in their creative moments. The common
thread running through all the reports tells of spending a certain amount of
time laboring to become very familiar with the problem at hand. Each scientist
tells of letting go of the problem at that stage and thinking of other matters.
Then, at the most unexpected time, the solution emerges in consciousness. 3
It is evident that the problem had been slowly incubating in the unconscious
mind: Vast, half-formed Gestalt images were being shifted, re-arranged, simplified, tentatively divided into parts and recombined. Gradually, a solution
was taking shape. For example, the mathematician Henri Poincaré tells the
following story: He had been working in vain for two weeks, searching for the
proof of a theorem. At that time he left on a geology excursion and temporarily
forgot about his problem. In the middle of the journey, he put his foot on the
step of the bus, and at that instant the critical idea came to him. He had no
time to check its accuracy, but felt a perfect certainty that it was correct, and
later verified it.
Symbols in Nature
If propositions are symbolic constructions which may exist in mind apart
from language, this suggests that there must be symbolic systems in the brain,
unrelated to human languages and developmentally prior to them. In other
words, it’s possible that there are symbolic mechanisms of a biological nature
which are fundamental to human activity. This idea is very much in vogue
today and is the focus of a great deal of research and debate.
In a purely biological context, what is a symbol? It plays the same role as
symbols play in any other context: A symbol is a place-holder. The letter x in a