"KNOWING WHAT WE DON'T KNOW THAT WE KNOW"

"KNOWING WHAT WE DON'T KNOW THAT WE KNOW"

A Sermon by the Rev. Bruce Clear

Sunday, February 9, 2003

All Souls Unitarian Church

Indianapolis, Indiana

Let me begin with a quote taken out of its context. I'll place it in context a little later, giving you the person and the occasion about which it refers. I start with it out of context simply because I think the feeling behind what is said is a universal feeling regardless of the context; and for my purposes this morning the feeling expressed is more important than the reason these feelings were expressed. Here is what the person said:

"Suddenly, unexpectedly, I had this incredible revelation. It was so indescribably beautiful; it was so simple and elegant. I couldn't understand how I'd missed it and just stared in disbelief for twenty minutes. Then during the day, I'd walk around... and I'd keep coming back to my desk looking to see if it was still there. It was still there. I couldn't contain myself, I was so excited. It was the most important moment of my working life."

Hold that quote loosely in your mind for a while. Actually, it is your mind, and it is my mind, that I would like to talk about for a while.

The title of that Oscar-winning movie, A Beautiful Mind, has always interested me. Regardless of the story line of the show, the title incorporates an intriguing quandary. The aesthetic sense of beauty seems initially to have nothing to do with the rational, almost mechanical, function of the mind.

We think of the mind in some ways like we think of a computer. It processes information, and does so quickly. It is designed, when it works right, to lead us to rational conclusions. The quality of what it produces is directly linked to the quality of what it is given to process: garbage in, garbage out. Its efficiency allows it to be a multi-tasking tool, capable of getting more things done than we may imagine. The way a rational mind operates is fairly mechanical - again, like a computer - making judgments based upon objective standards and criteria.

This is understandably impressive, but in what sense can we call a mind "beautiful"? "Beautiful" is an aesthetic category, and it would seem aesthetics has little to do with the process of knowing and thinking and processing information. A typical example of the mind at work at its best is processing mathematical information: two plus two equals four. There may be something impressive about that process, there may be something useful and practical, but how is it "beautiful"? This is the kind of thing a mind is supposed to do, and there is not much more aesthetics about it, when it works right, than can be found in an internal combustion engine that works. It does what it is supposed to do in a very predictable way.

But it seems to me that this is a strongly superficial view of the mind, for there is so much more to it, and much of it, I would argue, has a stunningly aesthetic dimension.

For example, one function of the mind is for us to make moral judgments of right and wrong. Is this function a mechanistic or practical function, much like a computer? Or is there something deeper? Does it seem strange to consider moral judgments to be a subject of aesthetics?

One dimension of moral judgment is to process information, of course. We want to know the consequences of behavior, and evaluate the impact of that behavior on ourselves and others. In doing so, though, something even more subjective, even aesthetic, is happening. There is behavior that may disgust us, offend and horrify us. There is other behavior that may inspire and motivate us to follow it, bringing feelings of warmth and compassion and sympathy. Whether the behavior motivates or repels us, our judgments emerge from emotions that are deeply felt, not just thought about.

Consider our mind's reaction to a work of art that repels us and a work of art that elevates and inspires us - it doesn't matter whether that art is graphic or musical or theatrical. Then consider our mind's reaction to the equation "two plus two equals four." It seems to me that our moral judgments are based far more on the first model, the aesthetic model, than on the latter, the rational model. We make judgments far more on what feels right than what we conclude to be right.

And where do those emotions come from? They come, it seems, from our intuitions, some innate sense within us. Our intuitions are those insights we have, that knowledge we have, that we can't articulate why we have it. They are the strong conclusions from feeling and from experience, far more than conclusions of the rational mind.

One social psychologist, Jonathan Haidt of the University of Virginia, suggests that moral judgments are made in this aesthetic manner, and our rationalization of those judgments come later. He says, "moral judgment involves quick gut feelings, or affectively laden intuitions, which then trigger reasoning." In other words, we use our reason to justify our feelings, rather than rational justifications coming first, when it comes to making moral judgments. And this leads him to ask, "Could human morality really be run by moral emotions, while moral reasoning struts about pretending to be in control?"

I use this example of moral judgments as an entré into the idea of human intuition: the capacity to know things that we don't really know why we know them or even sometimes that we know them.

Our brain is indeed an amazing organic machine. What fascinates me is not so much what it does with the information we know, but more so how we seem to deal with things that we didn't even know that we knew.

It is amazing how much of our ordinary life is lived doing things that we can't articulate how we do them or why we do them, but we know they are right and that they work. Try to explain to someone how to ride a bicycle or why a particular piece of music is powerful. Sometimes we just know things and don't know how we know.

Human beings have an amazing knack for making quick intuitive judgments. That is not to say we are always right, but when we are it is astonishing how we can sometimes be so right without knowing why.

Here is an example of our quick, inexplicable efficient intuitive abilities. In a simple experiment at Harvard University, videotapes of teachers were made and a pool of students were shown a mere thirty second excerpt from the tapes, and then asked to evaluate the teacher. Those evaluations based on thirty second videos were compared with the end-of-semester evaluations by students who took the entire course, and the rapid evaluations were remarkably similar to ones completed by those who took the entire course. What is it in us that allows us to make such quick intuitive evaluations?

Or listen to this very curious anecdote about determining the gender of chickens, as told by David Myers in his book on Intuition:

"Poultry owners once had to wait five to six weeks before the appearance of adult feathers enabled them to separate (male from female chickens). Egg producers wanted to buy and feed only females, so they were intrigued to hear that some Japanese had developed an uncanny ability to sex day-old chickens. Although even poultry farmers can't tell male from female in a newly hatched chick, the Japanese experts could do it in a glance. Hatcheries elsewhere then gave some of their workers apprenticeships under the Japanese experts, with feedback on their accuracy. After months of training and experience, the best Americans and Australians could almost match the Japanese, by sexing 800 to 1,000 chickens per hour with 99 percent accuracy. But don't ask them how they do it. The sex difference, as any chicken sexer can tell you, is too subtle to explain."

I don't want to stretch these examples beyond credulity, but it seems to me these chicken sexers are relying on something more akin to aesthetic feeling than they are to rational conclusions. This process has more in common with the aesthetic process of moral judgment than it does with the rational process of "two plus two equals four."

Ever since I was quite young I have wondered about what it means when we say people are "smart." It seem that many people identify "smart" or "intelligence" with the academic sort of intelligence. For them, "smart" seems to mean how much a person knows in the sense of how much a person has consciously learned. But that sense of "smart" has seemed to me far too limiting.

A person who knows thoroughly about a particular subject, for example, can be said to be "smart" on that subject, but if that person is miserable in his or her relationships, if that person lacks the skills to get along with other people, if that person is miserable in life and can't find happiness in any personal venue, to what extent can we consider that person "smart"? Their seem to be a wide variety of types of intelligence - social intelligence, emotional intelligence, spiritual intelligence, as well as academic intelligence. And who is to say that a person with well honed academic intelligence is more intelligent than one who has cultivated parenting intelligence?

I speak of this intelligence, of being "smart," because it seems to me much of that is a function of intuition - knowledge that we have but can't understand or explain. There are many smart people who cannot articulate the nature of their intelligence. Take for example a master chef, a skilled physician, and an expert auto mechanic. These three people have something very much in common, it seems to me. Because of years of vast experience in their fields, they are able to leap intuitively to productive conclusions without consciously knowing the reasons for making that leap. The master chef may have a educated hunch that adding such and such an ingredient is what is needed to perfect the dish. The skilled physician may act based more on experience than on running specific tests, make an educated guess that a certain condition could be causing the symptoms. And an expert mechanic can listen to an engine and make a pretty good guess - before running tests - about what might be causing the problem.

In each case, these experienced people have honed their intuitions enough to be able to suggest - without knowing exactly why they suggest it - what needs to be done next. They know something that they can't quite explain why they know it. That professional sense of intuition is what separates, it seems to be, a good chef or doctor or auto mechanic from an excellent one.

And again, it seems to me that so much of this intuitive skill resembles a sense of aesthetics. An artist on canvass takes from the endless array of data in the world and arranges it together to create something that expresses meaning. The meaning that is communicated is created from the intuitive ideas within him or her. Likewise, the chef creates the culinary art, the physician interprets the meaning of an illness and the auto mechanic understands what the car's symptoms mean simply on the basis of knowing, through experience, what can't be easily communicated as knowledge.

When eighty-three Nobel Prize Laureates in science and medicine were interviewed, seventy two of them (or almost 90%) attributed some of their success to intuition. Michael Brown, the 1985 Nobel winner for medicine put it this way:

"We felt at times there was almost a hand guiding us. We would go from one step to the next and somehow we would know which was the right way to go, and I really can't tell how we knew that."

Many who have finely-tuned their expertise and practical skill over years of practice seem aware of intuition as being part of the package of wisdom. Intuition based on long-time experience carries with it that aesthetic sense of creating some meaning out of parts of the world that are not self-evidently meaningful. The mathematician Henri Poincaré once observed that "It is by logic that we prove (things, but) it is by intuition that we discover (them)." In other words, logic is used primarily to justify insights that come to us intuitively.

And speaking of mathematics, I have a story to tell from that field. I have used the phrase "two plus two equals four" as a symbol for the more rational, somewhat mechanical, rather than intuitive, function of the mind. And yet, it seems there is a strong basis for the intuitive mind, and aesthetic mind, in the field of mathematics as well.

Pierre de Fermat was a seventeenth century mathematician with a certain sense of intellectual sport. He enjoyed creating mathematical problems and puzzles to challenge his colleagues. His various problems were all eventually solved, except for the last one, which became known as his "last theorem." He published the problem in a book, and claimed , somewhat cryptically, "I have a marvelous demonstration of this proposition," but then he chose not to give the answer, again challenging his colleagues. My source details the problem, but I don't even begin to understand it, let alone a solution. The problem and the solution, fortunately, are not relevant to my story.

For the next 300 years, the problem remained unsolved, though countless mathematicians accepted the challenge to do so. In 1908, there was a prize offered to anyone who could solve it - the prize amounted to $2 million in today's money. The prize was not collected.

It wasn't until fairly recently that the puzzle was solved. Princeton mathematician Andrew Wiles had spent thirty years trying to find the solution. Later, he wrote, "I was so obsessed by this problem that for eight years I was thinking about it all the time - when I woke up in the morning to when I went to sleep at night." When the moment came, though, and when the solution entered his conscious mind, it was unexpected - it seemed to come out of the blue. Heree is how he described it:

No doubt you recognize that as the quote I opened with, which I offered out of context. In context, I find it interesting that it turns out to be about math. All the passion expressed in the quote concerns numbers. Words like "beautiful" and "elegant" are words of aesthetics. To say, "I couldn't contain myself, I was so excited," are words of raw emotion. The insight came from intuition, based on years of devoted experience with math, and there are no clear lines drawn between intuition and logic, between aesthetics and rationality, between emotion and deduction.

What struck me in this quote was the way it demonstrates the overlapping of so many important human qualities - our rational mind and our unconscious mental intuitions, our emotional nature and our aesthetic, even artistic, sense of beauty. It is impossible to dissect the event described and say, "this is the part that was intellectual, and that was the part that was emotional, and here was the part that was beautiful," and so forth. It is an interdependent whole human experience. Helen Keller, perhaps the world's greatest expert on what she is about to say, once said, "The best and the most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt by the heart."

There is another category of intuition, of knowing what we don't know that we know, that is less obvious but also worthy of our consideration. There are times when people just seem to know, intuitively, that there is a danger ahead, or there is an opportunity before them, or this is the right time to act, or this is the time to change course. There is no way to be certain in such circumstances, but some people seem to have highly-honed skills at knowing opportunities and perils.

Perhaps the most frequently observed circumstances is parent and child, or more commonly mother and child. Perhaps the bond is so close that it cannot be adequately articulated. All of us know stories that illustrate this. I once witnessed a mother in one end of the house begin screaming for her son, at the other end of the house, to stop playing with the electrical outlet. Sure enough, that is what he was doing. More recently I heard the story of a mother who deliberately kept her child from playing in the back yard on the day and time he routinely would play. She didn't quite know why she kept him inside. The weather was fine - no impending storms. But at that very time, it turned out that a large dead tree in the backyard toppled over and fell on the child's swing set.

There are other examples in our common experience have a familiar ring. We recall an old friend we hadn't thought about for ten years, and in the next day or two we hear from them or about them and wonder what caused their name to come to our mind so recently. Or, we are introduced to someone and immediately have a creepy feeling that he or she is untrustworthy, or even dangerous. If asked why we feel this, we could not articulate an explanation: "its just a feeling," we might say. And down the road we discover that by his actions the person has justified those feelings, maybe even ended up in jail. And then there are those simple times in a library or a bookstore when you seem drawn to a particular book, but you can't explain why simply by reading the cover. When you finally read it, it has a powerful positive influence in your life - a book you'll never forget.

All of us have these intuitions, these "gut feelings" from time to time. Some people have them stronger than others, some people have them more frequently than others, and some people have them more reliably than others. I am simply suggesting that it is not unreasonable to give them enough credibility so as not to dismiss them simply because they cannot be initially proven.

I do not want to suggest that intuition is infallible. It is not. I am not here to address the question of professional psychics who make a living demonstrating amazing acts of intuition. I am more concerned with the common human experience we all seem to share in varying degrees. And again I say, as powerful as it may be, it is not infallible. We know that many people have intuitions of a plane crash, and they almost never come true. For many of us, our intuitions make us feel that planes are more risky than cars, but the facts, we all know, prove otherwise. (In fact, more than four times as many people die at railroad crossings than die in airplanes). It is not uncommon for our intuitions to lead us astray - especially in judging other people or in judging our own competencies. In controlled studies, it was found that most people have a 50-50 chance, even odds, in intuiting that someone is telling a lie.

The point is not to put all of our eggs in the single basket of intuition, but rather not to be afraid of our intuitions, and to accept them as a crucial part of ourselves, and part of the process of knowledge not apart from it. As David Myers wrote, "Sometimes an ounce of intuition trumps a pound of pondering." We can know things that we don't really know that we know - and sometimes we ought to pay attention.

The poet Frederick Scott said it this way in verse:

My mind and ear at times have caught,

From realms beyond our mortal reach,

The utterance of eternal thought

Of which all nature is the speech.

The role of our intuition is, I believe, a vital part of accepting ourselves. This has, in fact, played an important role in the story of Unitarianism. Our history includes a healthy and creative tension, going back to the early 1800s, between the Unitarian rationalists who were suspicious of knowledge not received through science, and Unitarian transcendentalists, who believed the most important knowledge comes to us through insight, or intuition, and that we are tapped into the mysteries and secrets of the universe.

Religion, after all, is our natural human response to the fact that we don't know everything. We turn to religion to accept the fact that there is so much we do not consciously know. This is true whether the religion is rationalist and humanist, or whether the religion is superstitious and supernatural. In each case we face the limitations of our exact knowledge. Intuition is what allows us to explore beyond the boundaries of what we know for certain.

Psychologist George Miller makes this point by telling about two cruise ship passengers leaning against the ship's rail, staring at the sea. "There sure is a lot of water in the ocean!" said one. "Yes," said the other, "and we've only seen the top of it."

Intuition is a portal through which we can explore beneath the surface of what we know, and get a tentative hold on what we don't know that we do know.