PREFACE

 

 

            We are but thinking reeds, but because we know, we are superior

            to the universe. Thought constitutes our greatness.

                                                                                          —Pascal

 

 

 

This is a book about our thinking. If we begin to think more actively, some stunning changes are possible: we can know ourselves better, we can have more options in life, we can distinguish fact from fiction and hype from hope, we can begin to think more decisively as we choose liferoads to walk down, and we can become more persuasive as we listen and talk to our fellow thinkers.

        We often define ourselves by our actions. In a way, we are what we do, but perhaps more than we realize, we are what we think. For instance, if people pretend to like someone whom they hate, is it their hateful thinking or their false acting (or both) that really represents what they are? “Whether a thought is spoken or not, it is the real thing and has power” (Herbert, 1987, p. 257).

    Five hundred years ago Leonardo da Vinci used an analogy that is being supported by research today: "Just as iron rusts unless it is used…so our intellect spoils unless it is kept in use."(Da Vinci, p.294). Dr. Arnold Scheible, director of the Brain Research Institute at UCLA, tells us: "If you decrease input you decrease structure. The brain is just like a muscle—use it or lose it." Indeed, "scientists are now discovering that the brain can grow and reorganize itself, within limits, past puberty and well into adulthood: (Sheppard, 2000, p.42).

        We have used our brain to explore the universe, and the sciences of physics and astronomy are now firmly established. But exploring our thinking will be more difficult. The neurosciences are still at an early stage, even though knowledge of the brain has leapt exponentially. We have already identified many of the neurotransmitters that control neural activity, and our ability to look inside the brain has progressed from anatomy to EEG to CAT to MRI to PET to MRS to PEPSI (proton echo-planar spectroscopic imaging). Even with these advances, unlike the DNA code in genetics, the brain code has not been deciphered. If we use physics as a measure, brain research may still be at the pre-Newtonian stage of knowledge.

        Complicating this puzzle is our brain’s enormous intricacy: Over a trillion cells compose it; 100 billion of them are neurons devoted to our thinking process. Each of these, on the average, reaches out to make thousands and thousands of other contacts. If we could walk along this marvelous labyrinth, the number of different journeys we could take may exceed the number of atoms in the universe! The neurons cannot communicate to quite that extent, but the number of real, potential pathways in the brain is still absolutely unimaginable! With such tremendous complexity, can our thinking brain even begin to comprehend itself?

        And that, perhaps, is the greatest obstacle of all: we are attempting to know our mind with our mind. That is like a pair of pliers trying to grasp itself. How can the instrument of thinking grasp itself? While this obstacle may seem theoretically insurmountable, practically we do experience the ability to reflect on our thought; and in an attempt to escape from this cyclic conundrum, we will frequently stress communicating our thinking in writing and in dialogue so that we can objectively analyze the results of our thinking. One of the best ways to understand what is in our mind is by looking at what comes out of it: our expressed thinking.

 

 

 

 

                                We are such stuff as thoughts are made on.

                                    adapted from Shakespeare                                        

 

In this book we encourage you to engage your mind and plunge into thinking. But first, let’s meet some powerful thinkers who have preceded us.

        Humans were speaking, and thus thinking, many millennia before the Sumerians, the Egyptians, and the Phoenicians learned to write their thoughts. The Greeks took their alphabet and burst forth into song, literature, philosophy, rhetoric, history, art, politics, and science. Corax of Syracuse, perhaps the first rhetorician, taught us how to use words to pierce into other minds. The sophists, skeptics, and cynics asked us to question everything, including our own questioning. Socrates probed and prodded the Athenians to think: “The unexamined life is not worth living,” he said. And he threw down to us the ultimate gauntlet: “Know thyself.” Plato was so caught up with Socrates and with the pure power of the mind that he thought we were born with ideas and that these innate ideas were as close as we could come to divinity. Plato’s pupil, Aristotle, sharpened his senses to make impressive empirical observations that climbed toward first principles; then he honed his mind into the absolute logic of the syllogism that stepped inexorably, deductively downward.

        The Roman rhetoricians Cicero, Tertullian, and Quintilian built massive structures of the mind and legal mentalities that rivaled Rome’s architectural vastness.

        The medieval thinkers, mental to a point that matched their ethereal goals, created mental structures mainly based on Plato, fortified with the logic of

Aristotle. Aquinas, in his Summa, forged an unmatched mental creation that, if one grants his premises, still stands as an unassailable mountain of the mind.

In contrast to much of this abstraction was the clean cut of Ockham’s razor,

slicing off unnecessary entities, and the welcome freshness of Anselm, who preempted Descartes by stating, “I doubt, therefore I know.”

        The Renaissance thinkers turned their minds and energies to earthly navigation, sidereal science, art, pleasure, and empire. Some of these thinkers, like Leonardo da Vinci, returned to the Greeks (Archimedes); some like Montaigne recovered rich ore in the Romans, sifted by the skepticism described on a medal around his neck: Que sais je? (“What do I know?”).

        No less rational, the British empiricists progressed from Locke’s Aristotelian focus on the senses (the mind as a tabula rasa), to Berkeley’s idea that we can be sure only of our perceptions to Hume’s radical skepticism.

        Hegel looked on all history as an idea unfolding, and Marx concretized and capitalized that idea.

        Twentieth century thinkers like Wittgenstein, Whorf, and Chomsky all enter the open, unfolding, and marvelous arena of the mind. They welcome us to come, enter with them, and think....

        Is anything more important than thinking? Is there anything important that is not connected with thinking?