We Are Not Computers (Overthinking it)

By Wayne Allensworth

My carpenter father once told me that I was thinking too much. He had taken me to work with him and set out a task for me, and I was moving far too slowly to suit him. I was maybe 12 or so, so it was probably a demolition job. I was pausing, as if I was facing resistance from the wood and sheetrock that opposed me. I was eyeballing the enemy and gauging every blow. Daddy was usually honest, direct, and blunt in assessing my work, or anybody else’s for that matter, so I put down my hammer. He had that certain look on his face that told me I’d better pay attention. And he showed me what to do and how to do it. Then, when I had it down, he simply walked away. Message received and understood. Trying to break down a task into a conscious series of sequential stages was a waste of time and effort. Get the motion down, repeat it, absorb it, make it second nature, and move on. Lived experience, muscle memory, and cutting out mental chatter. Like an athlete in motion, a pitcher on the mound, or a chess player who sees the whole board in an instant. The more you think about it, the worse the result.

It was the same at other places in other jobs. I learned very quickly that trying too hard worked against you. Overthinking a problem made it harder. Set it aside and do something else for a while. It would come to you. That “aha!” moment. Likewise with memory. Trying to remember a name or date or detail of any kind by bearing down on a mental vice to force something out did not help at all. Thinking — overthinking — was a roadblock to memory retrieval. When I write something, I don’t start by trying to force something out, a sure path to writer’s block. Maybe you have some ideas for potential topics to write about. You do some reading, then let go of it for a while. When you sit down to write, it will come to you.

I’ve always found it difficult to write by assignment. Somebody wants a certain type of piece, a certain subject — and they want it now. If you rush to manufacture something, planning every sentence, forcing out something formulaic, the product usually isn’t very good. When I worked in Washington as an intelligence analyst, I was fortunate that I was given some leeway to take on subjects that interested me. Sure, I could crank out a piece on what the Kremlin was saying about some U.S. initiative, but my best work came from somewhere else. And it was not “analysis,” meaning a paper with precise conclusions arrived at by a sequential, rules-based series of steps. A reduction of complex reality to a series of bullets on a page. The whole was greater than the parts. And context was everything.  It occurred to me that some of our policymakers’ biggest mistakes were in viewing complex reality through a reductionist, contextless lens that focused too narrowly on a person, place, or thing. It thus exaggerated perceived “threats” by not comparing them to something else — and by not just waiting and allowing some time for ideas to gestate. It was a huge problem in a world driven by a never-ending flow of “news,” a gusher of often faulty information. The Internet made that far worse. Time became compressed, and the pressure to act or react intensified. I grew to believe that “we” need not “react” to everything, at least initially. Sometimes the best thing to do was wait.

But the bureaucracy saw everything as a problem to be solved by “analysis,” readily pigeonholed and categorized. The qualities most seriously lacking were insight and imagination. Experience was critical, if, that is, you actually learned something along the way. At one point, management instituted “metrics” to quantify “output.” But since quality, experience, and insight can’t be measured, they fell by the wayside. And deciding whether a forecast was accurate  took time and reflection. It wasn’t a matter of being all right or all wrong, either. Nowadays, I understand that some in the “intelligence community” are entranced by AI — Bill Gates’ fantasy of replacing human insight and experience with “artificial intelligence” that isn’t creative or insightful because it’s programmed. Reflexive mechanistic categorization, the narrow focus of area specialists who don’t look outside their own field, and blindingly narrow focus build political molehills into Everests of perceived crises. “Experts” as defined by the bureaucracy know more and more about less and less — and are not really supposed to step outside that mental “box” managerial types used to talk about. They had no idea what they were saying.

In his magisterial, encyclopedic two-volume sequel to The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, Iain McGilchrist took up the subject of cognition, of conscious “thinking” and unconscious gestation within the context of his brain hemisphere theory. He relates the story of a Frenchman, a horse trainer with a Master’s degree in physiology who had read The Master and His Emissary and subsequently wrote to McGilchrist about his uncanny ability to evaluate racehorses intuitively. The young Franck Mourier had developed a passionate interest in horse racing. He worked out a complex mathematical model for selecting the best thoroughbreds based on around a hundred parameters. After retirement, Mourier made a living as a race tipster. He went to the races each day and, in a few minutes before each race, he estimated each horse’s chances of winning. He wasn’t using his elaborate mathematical evaluation system. There was no time for that. And the results were surprisingly better than the pre-race “expert” consensus. Mourier also noticed that the more preparation he did — and the more pressure he put on himself — the worse the results. The harder he tried, the more he faltered. He learned to simply trust what he saw.

As related by McGilchrist, and it jibes with my own experience, most of our “thinking” is unconscious, even among those of us who claim to problem-solve via logical sequencing. When customers asked Mourier why he had chosen a particular horse to win, he often wasn’t sure. He would come up with something, but as McGilchrist observes, even among mathematicians and physicists, they often rationalize explanations for breakthroughs after the fact. An insight came to them via a process they themselves couldn’t account for. Expertise is not a metric. A novice — McGilchrist, a psychiatrist and neurologist himself, uses doctors and nurses as examples — initially uses something like Mourier’s mathematical formula in arriving at judgements. They can reach a competent journeyman level that way. But true experts, people who have a sterling track record (so to speak) like Mourier, operate at another level of cognition, scanning, surveying, and evaluating a situation globally that cannot be reduced to a series of numbers or set criteria. In a very short time, even a few seconds, an experienced eye like Mourier’s could see and evaluate a horse. He developed an intuitive sense of what made a good one, intuition being an amazingly rapid evaluation based on a global assessment that integrated the whole of Mourier’s experience.

McGilchrist also cites a vast number of studies indicating that allowing a subject more time to evaluate something does not improve its accuracy. Often, quite the opposite. We all must start somewhere, and a linear, sequential set of criteria, a formula, and rote memorization, are the first steps taken by the left hemisphere, with its detailed focus, toward competence. If we wish to get beyond the journeyman phase, however, that mental foundation must be reintegrated with the global view of the right hemisphere. We need both, but modernity is stuck in a LH view of reality that skews what we perceive and dismisses wisdom based on experience. It’s a kind of madness that has afflicted our civilization for hundreds of years. Since the Enlightenment, scientism has replaced religion and tradition as the foundational prism for viewing reality. Not science as a method, but scientism as a belief system. It’s a belief system that convinced its adherents that mental alchemy could, in fact, decipher the secrets of the universe and transform every element into the gold of certain knowledge. Of course, all of us have benefitted from the method, but we have suffered from the belief system. The Faustian bargain became the dominant worldview. Its acolytes work very hard to squelch any dissent.

We are not, after all, “meat computers.” We too often fall into the modern machine paradigm of humanity, speaking of our minds being “wired” or “programmed.” The human psyche is far more complex. Such a reductionist, materialistic, mechanistic view of humans encourages casting the unborn child as a soulless blob of cells, a mini-“meat computer.” The human brain is not a program operating on an algorithm, a conviction that gained lots of ground in the last half of the 20th Century. 

The biggest problem with AI is not what it can do, but what its high priests believe it can do — replace humans, those messy, imprecise, inexplicable entities that get in the way of “progress.” AI is artificial, but it is not “intelligent.” It does not possess the miraculous qualities of human consciousness. Reality as we live it is a flow, not a series of miniscule points on an imaginary line that we can computationally traverse, arriving at predictable results. Creativity is impossible to quantify, as is imagination and insight. And most of the best “thinking” is a creative process at the boundary where the conscious mind meets the so-called “unconscious” mind, that well of experience and memory that connect events across a wide panorama. It works in a manner that no machine can reproduce, any more than a robot artist could create a masterpiece comparable to the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. 

Human cognition is not a computation. It’s a mystery.

Chronicles contributor Wayne Allensworth is the author of  The Russian Question: Nationalism, Modernization, and Post-Communist Russia, and a novel, Field of Blood.

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