Beyond the Sorting Machine

The limits of logic and what lies beyond

In today’s world, there are fewer greater compliments than saying someone is a good thinker. When someone is being emotional about something, we might tell them to be more rational. Our culture places extremely high value on logic and well-reasoned arguments, and for good reason.

Logic and the methods of thinking that flow from logic have conquered much of the world. Advances in every field have led to technological achievements that would have been considered fantasy or magic in any previous age. In many ways, science has conquered almost everything.

But this victory comes at a cost. One of the biggest costs is that we are unfamiliar with and uncomfortable with other valid modes of thinking and knowing. Let’s think a bit more about that.

When we tell someone to think about something, solve something, or to figure it out, we are almost invariably talking about rational thought. In fact, even “feeling” language (“I feel like…”, “it seems to me…”, etc.) often masks rational analysis. While reason is a powerful tool, it has some important limitations.

The fundamental operation of reason is a discrimination engine: it simply says A or not-A or that A belongs or does not belong to category X. It is a sorting function, nothing else and nothing more. Reason excels at tasks like:

• This is a bird and that is not-a-bird

• This thing is like that thing

• This leads to that (maybe because of that other thing)

Reason draws boundaries and distinctions; can sort, measure, and categorize; and excels at finding and applying consistent rules. That’s it—all the libraries of science, all the knowledge of every scientific discipline, every rule of logic, and, in fact, everything going on inside every computer, are simply that and nothing more: a sorting of like with like. Even probabilistic reasoning, heuristics, and stochastic models rest on this simple foundation.

From this root, a great and wondrous tree has grown. One of the minor mysteries of the human experience is how beautiful complexity can emerge from simplicity. To return to those computer chips, you probably know they are processing “nothing more than 1’s and 0’s” and using simple logic gates like AND, OR, and NOT—and think of the power and the depth of experience you’ve had with these not-so-simple machines.

Logic and rational thought are like that, as well. Even though every use of logic is a simple technique of sorting, I’m sitting inside a cooled building, it’s raining outside and I’m dry, and am writing this on a machine that is checking my spelling as I go along. All of this, and much more (in fact, very likely the fact that I’m even still alive) is due to the victory of rational thought over the vicissitudes of nature.

But what might be missed in all of this, what might have been almost irrevocably lost for our society, is that rational thought has some serious limitations and blind spots. We are told that reason conquers everything and that everything is explainable by the rational mind. If something appears unexplainable then we either have bad data (maybe someone is lying) or maybe we just haven’t thought about it long enough and hard enough with the right tools.

The only way to make this lie stick was to make us forget that there are other ways of knowing, other ways of thinking and being, and that they are valid. Once again, the secrets are hidden in plain sight—right in the words we use and in their history.

The word rational relates to the concept of division. (The rational numbers, for instance, are numbers that can be expressed as a ratio—quite literally cut or divided into parts.) It’s not by chance that the sword has featured in many traditions as a symbol of intellect or intelligence. The cutting and dividing power of the blade mirrors that of the mind.

The word analysis means to break something into its parts (from the Greek ana, ‘up’ or ‘throughout’, and lysis, ‘loosening’ or ‘breaking up’.) This works well if something can be understood by understanding its components and parts—even the complex chemistry of a French sauce reduces down to components and their interactions and transformations.

But, just for a moment, allow yourself to wonder. Allow yourself to ask “what if.” What if:

• Something exists that is not really explainable as an aggregate of its parts?

• What if distinctions are not clear? What if boundaries blur?

• What if a thing is neither the same nor different, but something else entirely?

• What about paradoxes? What if something can be both A and not-A at the same time? (And if you point out that this question properly lies outside the classical bounds of reason, then you see why I’m writing this.)

• What about things that can only be experienced, and modes of knowing that don’t fit into a rational box?

• What about emotions and feelings? Yes, your brain gets a rush of neurotransmitters when you hold a puppy, but why?

• What if there are other kinds of truth—maybe embedded in myth and story—that point to something that caresses rational thought, teases around the margins, but maybe goes somewhere else entirely?

• What about spiritual or mystical experience that is, by definition, ineffable?

What if and what about, indeed. What if these other ways of knowing hold equal value, and, in denying them, we are denying the essential?

In my next post, I’ll dig into a few of these other ways of knowing and will soon share some ideas for your own explorations.