Reply to Geanina on System 1 vs System 2 thinking

When I was young several people have told me the same thing under different forms:“You think too much, just do it!” or “Stop trying so hard!”. None of them were particularly learned or critical thinkers but instinctively they were on to something. When it comes to the workings of the human mind there’s no live conscious monitoring & controlling over the mechanism of problem solving, but there’s certainly such a thing as “getting in your own way”. Powering our cognition there’s an immense organic/self-organizing parallel process of pattern completion — linking the shape of the problem with the shape of the desired outcome — that goes on under the radar of conscious awareness & conscious intervention. I’m not denying the importance of orienting oneself & making choices based on consciously held reasons, which should oftentimes precede all that intuitive dynamics. Nor am I denying the conscious validation & vetoing that often comes after. The common intuition though — under which the vast majority of people are working — is that there’s this ego entity inside that’s controlling the permutations to arrive at the solution, which is wrong. The sense of conscious ego control is something that’s implemented after the fact on top of all that unconscious jazz. And while I agree that it does serve important esthetic, moral, social functions, the ego paradigm (willful, effortful, individualistic, zero sum..) is showing its malignant sides both at the level of social interaction but also at the level of individual wellbeing & productivity.

There’s a condition in gymnastics called “having the twisties” that happens to seasoned athletes turning them back into uncoordinated amateurs. Simone Biles famously retreated from the last Olympics mid competition because of the twisties. What appears to be happening is that — given a lot of practice — the superficial logico-serial cognition gathers the ability to chunk and monitor in real time the analogue twists & turns that are normally governed by the deep intuitive parallel system of coordination, thus generating a kind of destructive interference. The gymnast cannot stop herself from messing with her effortless intuitive abilities. What follows is a very tricky period of “trying to unlearn”, to disengage thinking and fall back into grace, as Christian mystics called it, or mushin like Zen practitioners refer to it. Something akin to the twisties happens in all domains of life — from art creation, writing essays, debating, maintaining personal relationships, making sex, falling asleep, etc. And the various culturally evolved insights into our deeper nature — like the traditions out of which grace & mushin have come out — are part of a natural drive towards reestablishing the Garden of Eden, the inner harmony we’ve lost in our egoic willful forceful turn.

“The centipede was happy, quite, Until a toad in fun Said, “Pray, which leg goes after which?” This worked his mind to such a pitch, He lay distracted in a ditch, Considering how to run”, Alan Watts

So when I see an extraordinary individual — be it a gymnast or wordsmith— my sense of their brilliant display would be better described by “manifesting grace” rather than “volition”, “choice” or “decision”. Given our current individualistic culture tho, we tend to welcome this view like cats facing a bucket of water. I off course see it in myself but i’m starting to come to terms with this view, perhaps forced by its indisputability.

After I read your reply and decided to write back, a nebulous general shape of what I needed to say rose out of the dark depths (although I hope my response makes sense *I didn’t logically decided* what needs to be said here). Then as I stared at the cursor blinking on the white page various introductory words just started presenting themselves to me. Very often I have the vague outline of what I want to convey but not the words, so I raise my eyes and stare out the window and, eventually, words pop up on the stage of my conscious theater. I had always worked like that — finding my way instinctively through language space — but up until into my 30’s I lived with the impression that I consciously “willed” every sentence and word. The sense that there’s a conscious ego making & controlling the process is an afterthought, a functional illusion. Seemingly paradoxically I’m all for the institutions of merit & blame, for holding people accountable for the good and the bad — but this is a tangent.

Coming back to grace, that’s why “shower thoughts” work — all sorts of thoughts, questions & solutions forming by themselves when the ego is relaxed & has no volition to resolve any problem. That’s why science & mathematics is ridden with instances where great leaps were made as the ego was busy focused on other things.

“Why is it I always get my best ideas while shaving?”, Albert Einstein

“At the moment when I put my foot on the step [boarding a bus] the idea came to me, without anything in my former thoughts seeming to have paved the way for it”, Henry Poincare

Or even when the ego wasn’t there at all, like in the dreams of Niels Bohr where the atomic model presented itself, or James Watson’s where the double helix structure showed itself (although Watson rejected the value of dream insights, but that’s not what I’m arguing for here).

“I saw in a dream a table where all the elements fell into place as required. Awakening, I immediately wrote it down on a piece of paper [..] Only in one place did a correction later seem necessary”, Dimitri Mendeleev

That also explains why the ego, try as it might, cannot stop thoughts when in meditation. It’s because the conscious ego never was in control of thinking to begin with. They’re in relationship and they’re part of something bigger.

You said,

“I’m not convinced that growth happens just inside system 1 nor I believe that system 1 is the only driver for growth. Do successful people ‘flow ‘ like you say? Yes, they do, but from my experience most have a very good understanding of the elements in system 2 before they get transferred to system 1 and become autonomous.”

I agree. A lot of avenues are closed, or better said *inexistent* for a feral child who hasn’t had the opportunity to internalize & integrate the System 2 architecture of constraints which the rest of us got from being around other people who use language. A naked System 1 (a feral kid without language) cannot invent a computing machine like a System 2 (like Alan Turing) can. And not just any S2 can do that either — I can’t — because S2 has its own kind of development allowing for increasing functionality. And very importantly, like Boston University computational neuroscientist Yohan John says, you can’t really parse these faculties at the level of the brain. These two terms S1/S2 reflect a relatively clear outward manifestation but the underlying reality at the implementation level is very murky and you can’t neatly delineate between them at the anatomical nor functional level. Like I said, when we talk about S2 it’s possible that we’re actually talking about “S1 + added constraints in its dynamics”.

I’m all for growth in both forms of thinking, but defining & strengthening S2’s architecture of constraints too much risks veering from beneficial growth to blocking your spontaneous relevant creativity, impeding you from thinking outside the box. That’s malignant growth.

“The ‘wisdom’ in system 1 is not always accessible to everyone, and when it is , without a good logical understanding of what you’re trying to convey it remains just wisdom inside your mind which leads to cynicism (i.e Someone else turns it into tangible results, you’d say, ‘I already knew that , it’s not rocket science ,etc’)”

I like this, well said.

“An unconstrained system1 can possibly be seen in children, it’s indeed valuable but I cannot imagine growth would rely entirely on it. It may dangerously lead us into delusion, assuming we’re all ‘gods’ and everything there is to know it’s already within us”

Right. I’m not calling for S1’s that are unconstrained by the S2 “virtual machine”. I’m calling for a new perspective on how S2 really works (namely *powered by S1*, which has implications for how we should approach learning) and seeing how it can turn malignant.

“Moreover, if this was the case without a clear route to how you’re going to achieve this wisdom and where it’s going to take you if you do, it’s incredibly demoralising and deterministic in some sense”

I’m keen on people developing a healthy S2 as a necessary part of the complete human. I also don’t think a human lacking S2 can be said to be wise. According to my preferred definition wisdom has the ability to tackle motivations. You can be very knowledgeable and blindly serve bad motivations, you can be extremely intelligent and caught up in bad motivations, you can also be rational in the service of bad motivations, thinking logically about how to more efficiently plunder the African continent. I see wisdom as the crown jewel of the mind, the only faculty that can fully turn the mind on itself and harmonize it with itself & the environment. But it emerges at the interaction of knowledge, intelligence, rationality, vision, insight, intuition & the imaginal. Without S2 you can’t model yourself and see your motivations, grasp their consequences, find new ways of being — so no wisdom.

For the past years I’ve started to see rationality as “incredibly demoralizing and deterministic in some sense” :)

If you turn yourself into an über-S2 — like many people already are predisposed from genetics (functional autists) or have become through participating in this mechanistic hyper-rational culture — the most important aspects of the world will fade out of existence and you’ll only see out of & live into your S2’s symbolic diagrammatic overlay. You’ll be traveling abstract maps instead of concrete territories. Siri & Alexa are attempts to strip away the S2 regularities from the humans and implement them in silico. We’re not far from the day when they’ll reply “Oh no! I’m so sorry for your mother. I’m lost for words..” when users will tell them that their mothers had an accident. Nonetheless Siri & Alexa will have absolutely no idea what having an accident means, or pain, death or what a mother is. A mother is *not the definition* in the dictionary, i.e a sign defined by its relationships with other signs. Sadly many people are striving hard to become more like Siri & Alexa, chalk full of abstractions — signs & relations between signs. Captivated by the presentation they eat the menu instead of the dinner, like Watts used to say.

I was talking with someone (who happened to be a fan of rationalist, self described autist & AI researcher Joscha Bach) and he was telling me that I’m naive & confused for talking about animal rights because animals don’t have rights (with which I agree) and animals are unthinking automatons without self-awareness. He was so confused by his rationalist education & rationalist culture that his reasoning fringed idiocy. What he needed was *not* better definitions in his S2 dictionary, although that would certainly help, but what he needed would’ve been affection & a dog to play with when he was a kid.