Electrochemical Superstition

No parent would want a teacher to teach a science course using a textbook from, say, 1910.

And, in 2110, no parent will want a teacher to teach science using today’s textbook.

In teaching science, then, to avoid a version of the presentist fallacy, it’s important to retain a sense for what is fact—and how we know it’s a fact—what is supposition or hypothesis, and what is plain unquestioned assumption (which, pejoratively, we may call superstition). And textbooks are generally not good at this; they too often present science not as a creative process, but as a finished product, as dogma.

Here's one example. If I had to vote for the greatest illusion or superstition of our age, I would say it’s the illusion that the brain thinks. (Not that you don't need a brain in order to think, but that you think; the brain is an instrument. And a metaphor.)

Assume everything we know of the brain and neurons and neural activity is true—it isn’t, it can’t be, and there’s a lot we just don’t even pretend we know. Picture a vast network of electrochemical activity among neurons, impulses racing this way and that. Picture it down to the smallest activity of an ion across a membrane. Picture it in its trillion-connection complexity. And realize that, if you want to find, say, a thought or an emotion, there’s no there there.

Eventually, for instance, if only in a thought experiment, we could draw all the connections and interactions in a brain, down to the molecular, atomic, or subatomic level; give us a whiteboard large enough, sufficient time, and any tools we need. (Yes, indeterminacy and entanglement might make our comprehension impossible, but these just substitute scientific magic for the old fashioned kind.)

Let us chart the “action potentials” of neural impulses, and the movement and effects of neurotransmitter fluids. (Did you know that the impulse along an auditory nerve is the same—exactly the same—as the impulse along an optic nerve? Watching the impulse pass, you simply cannot tell if this chemical activity relates to vision or to hearing; the impulse is void of quality. Why do we suppose that following it down the rabbit hole of complexity into which it vanishes will yield insight?) What we won’t find is a single thought, emotion, or memory, although—and even this is supposition—we may find the correlates or material or organizational traces of these. We may well be able to look at a configuration of neurons or molecules or particles—now represented in marker on our whiteboard—and correlate some brain configuration with some emotional state or thought, but it should be clear that the configuration is not and can never be an emotion or a thought or anything else that is fundamental to human experience or value.

(We can successfully perform this same thought experiment, however, with a computer. In the computer, if we know how to read the code, we can discover exactly what’s stored there, what’s calculated there, and so on. That’s because the computer isn’t conscious, isn’t thinking, isn’t feeling, isn’t anything but an apparatus, despite our science fiction fantasies. What’s in the computer is what we put there. The computer’s “activity” may yield startling and counter-intuitive results; it may “solve” problems of complexity beyond that of smart human beings in many lifetimes. But the thinking behind this work doesn’t reside in the machinery. It is available through the ingenuity and creativity of the programmers.

When we say that the brain is a computer—unless we are speaking metaphorically—we are not only making a category error, we have things exactly backward. One aspect or set of aspects of the brain is computer-like, but let’s not forget that minds and brains existed for a long, long time before the computer, and that the computer existed in the work and minds of those, like Charles Pierce and Charles Babbidge, who imagined the computer before the technology existed that could bring it to reality.)

I’m not disputing the association and correlation of brain activity with thinking, perceiving, emoting, breathing, heart-beating, or running. You need a brain to do brain-associated things. A pianist needs a piano, and preferably a well-functioning one. But when we say, for example, that “the brain thinks,” we indulge a supposition that not only has not been demonstrated, we irrationally indulge a view that loads what is essentially an electrochemical flowchart with impossible hopes, dreams, and assumptions.

The consequences of this thinking—or should I say, this lack of thinking, this assuming—are dire. Where, in fact, are consequence, morality or ethics, creativity, or humanity in this picture? The answer is, nowhere.

None of this is to argue against brain research. Far from it. Someone near to me is recovering from a closed head injury, and I am in awe of and grateful to the doctors and researchers who have helped with his recovery and helped us to understand what has occurred and what is occuring. I wish them all speed and good fortune in learning more and more about how the brain works and, when necessary, how to help it heal. But medicine is not (or not necessarily) meaning.

To bring this back to the education of students in a school, we have to acknowledge that we do not serve them well if we freight them with our superstitions, no matter how fervently we believe them.

Three Kinds of Knowing

Accumulating knowledge is like building a collection, right? Each piece in the collection is much like any other. A fact about astronomy is much like a fact about history or writing technique or piano playing or wine tasting or empathetic listening. A degree of certainty or truth adheres to it or is apparent in it, and we accept it for our—growing, we hope—stockpile of things that we know. It can be digitized and stored in a computer and shared online.

Well, no. Knowledge is not singular. Knowing the names of stars is not like knowing how to play the piano or like knowing how to offer solace to someone in pain. Like intelligence, which we used to believe was one thing—measured on an IQ test, for example, but now seen as, at least, a multi-faceted collection of human faculties—knowledge comes in different forms. We can know in different ways. Waldorf and Steiner schools emphasize in particular three ways of knowing, the conscious development of each corresponding roughly with preschool, elementary school and high school.

Michael Polanyi called a first kind of knowing “tacit knowing”, knowing “more than we can say.” Clearly, infants—those without voices—know more than they can say. We can know how to cut a carrot, or the taste of the soup it makes, or how to play the viola, or how to solve a problem in geometry. We can describe these things in language, but the value, meaning, and even the truth of these activities—cutting, tasting, playing, solving—does not translate into language. These become apparent only when we learn to do these things ourselves. Without the experience of doing, often, knowing has little meaning.

You could write a manual describing what you do—nurse, stockbroker, artist—but, if you had to train someone to replace you, would you rather hand off instructions or offer an apprenticeship, some doing? Read a book on building a stone wall, and then claim that you know how to build one. Your aches and calluses will tell you another story. We learn much and know much through doing, and, often, doing precedes and informs our knowing. Hence, in Waldorf schools, the importance of “doing” in preschool, before we emphasize other forms of knowing.

A second kind of knowing is aesthetic knowing. Its value is apparent in contrast to our concept of something that is anaesthetic, or numbing. Aesthetic knowing is alive, awake, and sensitive. It is knowing in heart and gut (yes, the brain plays its role, but we experience our feelings in our hearts and lungs and guts). It is intuitive (“taught from within”). It is a form of knowing especially valuable for artists, musicians, clinical psychologists, theoretical physicists, and even advertising copywriters. It is a form of knowing that connects us powerfully to the world. And it develops in children most readily when they have separated from their parents and begun to comprehend the world around them for themselves. Hence, in Waldorf schools, the importance of beauty and feeling in the elementary school.

A third kind of knowing is knowing through thinking. By thinking, however, I mean a particular kind of thinking that attempts in Henri Bortoft’s phrase to “swim upstream”, reversing fragmentation, categorization, and specialization in order to recover wholeness. Thinking logically with given postulates, thinking algorithmically, is “downstream” thinking, the outcome determined by the input. It is powerful but dead, inherited from the creative insight of others. Recognizing the validity of postulates different from convention, however, involves insight of our own. This synthetic, living thinking can encompass or embrace analysis, logic, and critical thinking. But it seeks to go beyond them to recover or reach the origin of creative thought and imagination. And it develops in students who are wrestling not so much with the world around them as with their own identities in that world. Hence, in Waldorf schools, the importance in high school of the development of thinking.

These three ways of knowing are cumulative and integrative. We do not leave one for the next, but build on what comes before. As adults, our thinking is enriched if we also know how to do and to feel. All three forms of knowing are present earlier, too—small children learning to walk and talk (two of the most important forms of doing) can also feel and think. But by emphasizing one way of knowing at the appropriate time, allowing other ways to develop simultaneously but sleepily, we work in accordance with children’s growth away from their parents and into the world and themselves. We know in our hands, in our hearts, and in our heads. We know goodness, beauty, and truth. The more ways we know, the more value we find in life, and the more value we bring to those around us and to whatever we are called to do.

(I wrote this before hearing on NPR recently about memory studies that divide memory into “declarative” memory—clearly cognitive—and “non-declarative” memory, which sounds just like the memory associated with tacit knowing above. Two points about this: First, interesting that cognitive memory is given pride of place; that is, non-cognitive memory is not given its own name, but is simply called “non-declarative.” Second, interesting that memory associated with the heart isn’t even considered…)