Translator: Nadia Putri Reviewer: Denise RQ
The year is 480 B.C.
The Persians have mounted on an army of 300,000 men,
the largest in history up until that time.
It's a sized army that the Romans would later use
to dominate the entire Mediterranean.
The leader of the Persians, Xerxes, a man of such stature during his time
that even people of other nations referred to him simply as "The King",
had decided to launch the full fury of this force
against a single city, Athens.
The situation in Athens was serious.
The Athenians figured
if anyone could come up with a solution to this particular problem, though,
it may well be them.
They were, after all, renowned
for their ingenuity and their rational intellects.
They had recently invented democracy and tragedy,
and within a decade,
would see the birth of Socrates and philosophy as we know it.
So, they did what any rational people would do in such a situation:
they deliberated.
They gathered information.
They used rules of logic to draw inferences.
They used public debate to test their conclusions.
And with careful arguments, they considered their courses of action.
After grinding away at it,
they did what any rational group of people would do at that time:
they sent away for an Oracle.
The Pythia was the most authoritative oracle of the day.
She was an aging, frail, illiterate woman
housed in a massive stone temple at Delphi.
She took questions from her petitioners,
and she dispensed answers in the form of riddles.
The Athenian answer was grim.
But there was one small glimmer of hope.
The Pythia said that only a wooden wall will remain unconquered.
[Themistocles] took this riddle back to their city.
And a debate which have been meandering in many different directions
quickly crystallized around two potential options.
Either hole up in the traditional stronghold of the Acropolis
which have been surrounded by a wooden fence
or use wood to build a navy
to take on Xerxes at sea and cut off his supply lines.
The second course of action prevailed, and Athens survived and thrived.
Now, we might wonder why did they do this?
Why did they rely on an Oracle?
Why did they imagine,
especially this group of people that was an emblem for rational thinking,
why did they imagine that a person with no knowledge base
could provide any pertinent insight into their situation?
And this was no aberration.
The Greeks were in the habit of turning to oracles
and also used many other techniques
when they ran up to the limits of their own rational thinking.
They were interested in the instinctual behaviors of animals
like the flight paths and screeches of birds.
They were interested in their dreams,
and they spent time examining
the pulsating entrails of the animals they sacrificed to their gods.
They called it the study of divine signs or divination.
Seems like strange behaviour, yes?
Well, in the next 10 minutes, I'm going to try persuade you of 2 things.
Number one, it wasn't strange, and number two, you still do it.
My field is classics.
The study of Greece and Rome.
And when scholars in my discipline take on this question,
they typically pull out two kinds of answers.
Number one comes from a vantage of social history.
Let's imagine that what we have is an elite group that has a strategy,
and they use the ostentatious mystery of divine science
in order to persuade the masses to come their way.
They form consensus, and they manage descent.
But there's a problem for this idea.
The problem is that most situations of divination, despite our example,
were not relevant to politics.
Most had to do with matters of personal and even intimate concern.
Should I be involved in a business deal with this person?
Should I take a trip on this day?
Should I marry this man?
These things have nothing to do
with the dynamic between the elite and the masses.
There's a further problem,
which is according to all the evidence that we have,
even in situations of politics,
the elite thought it worked just as much as the masses did.
So if elite were pulling wool over anyone's eyes,
they were pulling wool over their own eyes as well.
Doesn't quite hold up.
Another kind of explanation comes out,
and it starts from the idea of superstition.
We're told that primitive brains are superstitious
- and the corollary is that ours aren't -
and they're prone to exotic theological commitments
so they believe in strange things.
But there's a problem with this line of thinking as well.
While it may well be a part of the behaviour divination,
it doesn't necessarily explain the behaviour divination.
While superstition may have something to do with it,
it doesn't necessarily lead to the behaviors that we see in divinations.
It's not as though, when sufficient amount of superstition in the air, people think
that the Universe is coursing with hidden messages
that are readable by these techniques.
A final kind of explanation, which is the category of no explanation,
suggest that well, lots of people do weird things,
cultures have strange beliefs, so there may well be no explanation.
It's just a weird Mediterranean behaviour
and we've grown out of that kind of thing, thank goodness.
There's a problem here as well, though.
It wasn't just the Greeks who did this kind of thing.
In fact, all ancient cultures for which we have evidence,
from the Southern tip of Africa to Northern Britannia
and from Eastern to Western Eurasia,
we're in the habit when they ran up
against the limits of their rational thinking
to turning to techniques that took over for them
and allowed them to advance their problems.
The techniques vary.
The Chinese took tortoise shells and put them in fire
and then read the cracks that happened afterwards.
But the structure and the thinking is the same.
If we're going to propose that this is some kind of mass delusion,
we'd need some explanation for why the mass delusion is so consistent
across human cultures
that had functionally nothing to do with one another
in many different areas of the world.
Superstition is a very weak answer.
Now, in my work on the arcane past,
things took the most important turn for me,
when I took a brief tour into the present time.
A time I don't spend that much time in and it's strange.
Strange and bizarre for me.
I spent a year with a team of researchers
at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford.
This is mainly a group of cognitive scientists,
evolutionary biologists, and behavioral psychologists
who are pushing the envelope of understanding
of the complexities of our cognitive lives.
Most of us, and I surely at the time,
have a standard picture of how our brains work.
We set out on a problem. We direct our awareness to it.
We self-consciously gather facts and using logical rules,
we draw inferences, we reach conclusions
that then motivate our actions.
Let's call this discursive thinking.
But this is only part of the story.
The researchers at the Center were expanding this view
and opening up fields that I would call non-discursive thinking.
Things that don't quite answer to that description
or the way our brains work.
And some other pieces that they were coming on
would ring bells for me, struck me as very familiar.
One scholar was working on face-to-face conversations.
He looked at how we continuously, and unselfconsciously
process non-verbal cues in our conversation partners.
And that these shape the top-level thinking
that emerges from such events.
The oracular consultation was famously interactive.
The bell is ringing in my head.
And someone even without a knowledge base, may well discern
from just seeing how a person reacts to different suggestions,
what the most useful one is going to be in a particular situation.
Another kind of scientist was studying the phenomena of thin slicing.
This is a claim that our snap judgments are sometimes as good,
and for some things better than our most careful deliberative processes.
The examination of entrails instantly came to mind for me.
In situations like these, often in the heat of battle,
where debate is coursing around from many different pieces of information,
the cutting open of a live animal, usually a large one,
has a way of focusing people's attention.
And the focusing of the splayed innards of another animal
interrupts the conversation.
While the diviner is staring at that, let's imagine that the diviner
comes up with a snap judgment, not a considered decision.
And while rule books for such things were legendary in antiquity,
none of them survived, and I think none of them ever existed.
It's not about applying rules to a particular situation.
It's about making a snap judgment in the heat of the moment.
There were also scholars at the Center who were laying out the strong gains
that people accrue when they're dealing with complex problems.
After they have been grinding it out for awhile,
to set their attention on something else for awhile,
and allow their non-conscious minds to advance the problem.
Their non-conscious minds have power and can advance the problem.
When they return to it later, things look different and clearer
than they did before.
Nearly all the techniques of antiquity did this kind of a thing.
As an historian of ideas, this got me to thinking.
Discursively, I think.
I was interested now in looking at non-discursive thinking historically.
Over time, there are different manifestations of this.
In the contemporary period, in polite company, anyway,
we use the term intuition to describe these things.
We may well refer to the famous phrase of Malcolm Gladwell,
thinking without thinking.
A century and a half ago, in the wake of Darwin,
in the middle of the 19th century, when physiology was the queen of sciences,
there was a different way of talking about it.
These scientists were fascinated by the reflex action
that they observe in the musculature of our body,
and they propose there were congruent kind of actions
happening in our thinking.
They call this unconscious cerebration.
Two centuries before that, the English poet John Milton
has the archangel Raphael explained to Adam in the Garden of Eden
that the creatures of the Universe think in two different ways.
There is discursive thinking, which is what humans mostly do,
and then he says there is something else
called intuition, which is mostly the way angels think.
On occasion, humans get a chance to think like angels,
but it happens rarely.
This opened up a whole new vantage on Greek divination for me.
It started to look less like an outlier,
and more like the tail of a long and consistent arc
of human cognitive history that attested to a core human experience.
We oftentimes find ourselves in a situation
of knowing things without knowing quite how we know them.
This led me to propose an axiom.
Here's my axiom.
Our ability to know exceeds our capacity to understand that ability.
Let me repeat.
Our ability to know exceeds our capacity to understand that ability.
And if it's true, as an axiom, it held in the past, it holds good now,
and even despite the ingenious work of our cognitive scientists,
it will hold into the future.
We will remain to some degree mysterious to ourselves.
The axiom tells us that there will be surplus knowledge.
Surplus knowledge is provocative.
It provokes some accounting for it,
and by the axiom, that accounting won't be exactly right,
but it needs to be culturally useful.
So back to the ancient world,
I gained a different kind of perspective on what they were up to
after spending time with these cognitive scientists.
When they took time out of their deliberative thinking
to change focus on a puzzling riddle: cracks on a tortoise shell
or the erratic flight paths or the screeches of a bird,
they were engaging
in their own local variant of a culturally authorized techniques
for opening a space for non-discursive thinking to happen.
This was not an example, mainly,
of them engaging in exotic theological commitments
because of superstitious brains.
It was not an example of them
trying to manipulate the masses with ostentatious mystery.
That's not why they did this.
They did this because it worked.
Our non-conscious brain has power, and they had ways of putting it to use.
And finishing back up to the present time, my claim that you do this kind of thing:
well, whenever you're facing a multi variable question
with over complex data set in a situation you really care about
and you need to take a break, chances are you probably do something.
You clean your desk.
You take a walk.
You take a shower.
You sleep on them.
These are our culture's authorized forms
for opening up a break in discursive thinking
and allowing our unselfconscious, non-discursive mind
to take over for awhile.
According to our best authorities today,
this improves our chances of making headway,
and according to the authorities from antiquity,
whom I must say, I trust a little bit more,
you should definitely do this.
You may well defeat a great empire.
Thank you.
(Applause)