On the Tao Of Physics#5

This is the mail I wote after having gone through Sankara's replies. It is mostly concerned with instinct and the origins of Epiphany.

Hi,

How you doing man. Project fine?STM still not bankrupt eh???

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I feel everybody is born with it. Everybody can perceive things which cannot be justified by reasons of logic, but just we feel it.

If u remember Alchemist, we have something similar saying that nature always gives us signals. We need to listen to them. If we regularly overlook it, we feel the signals have stopped comin...... Along these lines.
What I feel is we stop being receptive about it.
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Really can't say anything about what Paulio Coelho has written. I think it is a critical case of words and phrases being inappropriate/insufficient to convey what he meant when he wrote "Maqtub" in that book.

What I understand is this-Instinct is the knowledge which comes before conceptualization of the problem. Imagine someone punches you and you see the punch coming fro the corner of your eyes. You duck (hopefully) and what makes you do it is instinct.

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Why lay man does not get that instinct.
1. lay man does not even know the objective of the experiments. Even if he gets a result he cant make sense of itfor the raeson that he is not aware
that such a problem exists.
Say if i pull out the wire and give u a bomb, u wud realize what it is and run away. But if u never knew that such a thing like bomb existed, how wud u identify it. For u it is nothing more than a round ball.

2.he does not actually set out to look for it. Its like it, u know a signal is coming on a particular channel. All these years u were not tuned to it. So u never realize the transmission. The research, training etc that is being talked about is for the correct tuning.
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Understanding the objective of the problemis outside the domain of instinct. I think the problem here is that we are confusing extremely hard gained skill with instinct.
Consider a golie in football.In penalties, he can be said to be jum,ping left or right on 'instinct' but is it really so? Would you then say that the players at the highest level of the game have greater instinct or greater skill. You or I would have absolutely no clue of what to do.

As for the bomb-you said it yourself. My 'throwing it away' does not constitute instinct at all.It is a conscious decision taken so fast that even I cant consciously follow the chain of decisions.

So in my opinion, A layman having not getting those epiphanies but a scientist getting them has nothing to do with instinct.

Another point that I would like to raise in this regard is that of the subconscious mind. It is well known fact that even when we have banished some thought from our mind it persists in the subconscious.e.g. we are trying to remember a name but cannot recall it.Then several hours later we suddenly remember it.

I like to think of our mind as one huge UNIX machine which is extremely likely to create orphan processes. Even when you have killed the active process, the neural circuits still bear the computation as it is not possible to them all due to the highly decentralized structure of a neural network.This 'orphan' process may ,later on, come up with a solution, which the mystics/philosophers/godmen claim to have as a godsend or instinct.

Your point about no reaction without knowledge is exactly the one I am trying to make. The 'instinct'of the scientist is his subconscious mind come up with a solution.

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And for the last question,capra has himself given a very good account of it. They were not able to get that brainwave earlier because they were looking
in other direction. The moment physicists started looking for it( as an eastern mystic does)they were able to get it.
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By all accounts, the eastern mystic does not look in any direction at all. He is sitting there trying to calm down all his 'orphan' processes to extract 'maximum' performance from them.

Just consider this:
Consider some huge problem like 'who made this universe?' or some such. If you know of swarm intelligence, you will know that in them we consider ALL POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS (kinda like FEYNMAN'S SUM OVER HISTORIES) and gradually converge to the best solution. But the problem with our mind is that in our mind we are carrying so many deeply ingrained filters regarding what is possible and what is not. So the result thrown by the orphan processes I just mentioned are being actively filtered out when we try to intellectualize the problem. And that cant lead us to a solution as the solution demands that all possible alternatives be considered.

Here states like meditating or sleeping come to limelight. From a technical/scientific point of view, these states are a SUSPENSION OF DIBELIEF-a state where our filters are suspnded so that our neural circuit can realize the full potential of that swarm intelligence process running in the background.

Hence Kekule's six snakes dream. I belive it was not a dream about snakes at all. It was one of the possible solutions given by his mind. He subsequently described it as snakes as a sort of verbal approximation. Or his mind, represented its result in the form the imagery it found to be closest to what the result actually was.

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Just to give an example, do u remember how Kekule came up with the structure of benzene. For us, it wud have been a bad dream about snakes but for him that was an insight, a hint by nature, which his instinct interpreted correctly. It came just by chance, he did not try to get that dream
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They say you can not find it if you look for it. I think the hypothesis of the 'orphan process' and the mental filters explains this koan beautifully.