Raymond Smullyan, Mentats, and Naivete

I've been reading a lot of Raymond Smullyan lately (2 books done, halfway through another one, and two more lined up once they're returned to the library), and halfway through the first book he was already on my all-time favorites list. I strongly recommend his stuff - there's nothing quite like it. I'm particularly fond of the way he points out the paradoxical nature of everyday life. It's gotten to the point that I found myself making up a hilarious conversation while I was shaving a few days ago. Here it is:

A: Some questions are not meant to be asked!

B: This is certainly a possibility, but then I must ask you: What are these questions? Why must they not be asked? And most importantly, are my last two questions meant to be asked or not?

I don't, as a rule, have unquestioning respect for anything, but if I did, this would have blown all my justifications of that notion straight out of the water. This probably isn't good enough to be worthy of a Smullyan book, but you get the idea. In his essays, he points out weird things about all sorts of notions, some of which we take for granted, others which we don't (though we might know people who do), and he does this with a type of logic that I can only characterize as naively innocent, insightful and incisive. (W00t - I made an accidental alliteration! And what do you know, in pointing it out, I did it again! )

It's important to realize that when I say naive here, I mean it in a highly complimentary sense. I've recently come to believe that naivete is a very strong defense against intellectual garbage, and one should always adopt a naive mental posture when evaluating a new idea (old ones, too!). Your worst enemy in these matters is a huge accumulation of 'things I know'.

It's the same thing with those 'aha!' moments that we all have. One of my favorite quotes from Dune deals with just that. It's a quote from a text used by Mentats - the human computers (they're really far more complex than that simplistic description) of the Dune universe.

“Ready comprehension is often a knee-jerk response and the most dangerous form of understanding. It blinks an opaque screen over your ability to learn. The judgmental precedents of law function that way, littering your path with dead ends.
Be warned. Understand nothing. All comprehension is temporary.”

I've been thrown by my ready understanding over and over again, but thankfully I'm now conscious of it (thanks to a friend of mine who is charmingly naive and a marvellously efficient mathematical reasoner), and can fix it. Obviously you can't become naive, but you can certainly cultivate an attitude of intellectual naivete when integrating new concepts. I suspect that naivete informed by knowledge born of sophistication is a pretty deadly combination.

Incidentally, ready understanding is actually more dangerous the smarter you get. When a smart person understands something really quickly, he usually has some sort of approximation to the truth, or at least something that seems to work on the surface. A lot of the time, it'll work enough to seem right (this is what happened to me, in fact). But it stops you from considering complex concepts in greater detail, and makes it even harder for you to correct/improve your flawed understanding of them.

Does this mean you should sit down and consider everything you do with great concentration? I'll leave that up to you, but don't forget this Mentat admonition:

“Many things we do naturally become difficult only when we try to treat them as intellectual subjects. It is possible to know so much about a thing that you become totally ignorant.”

This applies to lots of philosophy and theology, for instance. Very large parts of these two disciplines (and they're not the only ones) are webs of nonsense spun out of over-intellectualization of simple concepts - either because this gets you famous, or because it preserves a fragile worldview that can't survive simple questions - so you make it survive complex ones and point to those instead.

Unfortunately, most of us lose this between childhood and adolescence, and we even wind up thinking that it's an essential part of maturity. I think it may have its origins in that weird social ostracism things that children practice - "Look, Timmy doesn't know how to tie his shoelaces! Hahahaha - what a dweeb!" - sound familiar? You can bet Timmy learned how to tie his shoelaces before the week was out, to the immense surprise of his mother who had been fruitlessly trying to teach him for several months.

But it isn't just shoelaces - you can take a whole bunch of nutty propositions and just render them 'true' by mocking anyone who doesn't see why they don't make sense. Just like in that story with monkeys and bananas. Repeat for a little while, and you've got traditions, customary practices, shared beliefs, stories...culture! Then you wind up laughing at the strange practices of a tribe in some remote spot in Africa, without realizing that your own traditions are the product of the very same bugs/features in human cognition that created the traditions you laugh at.

Fake sophistication is the second-most common commodity on the planet (next to wasted human potential). If we don't recognize the fact that many of our social practices are bursting at the seams with contradictions, we'll never be able to fix them. It doesn't help that many cultures subscribe to the silly view that their way of life will endure forever, is the one true way to live, etc, etc, etc. This simply isn't true. There never has been such a way of life, nor is one even possible. Some are objectively better than others. In other cases, the only way to make a judgement is to decide upon prevailing conditions and see how they perform relative to them. And conditions always change - not recognizing this is an ancient mistake, a minor mental adaptation from back when things changed so slowly that you could play by the same rules for a thousand years without any trouble.

This won't work anymore, though - not in a world that changes as fast as this one. If there's one lesson the human race should learn, it's this: Finished products are for decadent minds.

I wish that last line was original, but I feel compelled to confess that I filched it from one of Isaac Asimov's Foundation novels.

So in conclusion, go forth and be naive!