The thinker thinks, the prover proves

By admin, on June 26th, 2010

The human brain is a wonderful instrument. Despite being ostensibly evolved to deal with a set of tasks that to a very great extent most modern people are in general not called upon to perform, it has excelled it’s design specification with a powerful aplomb, giving us such wonderful insights into pure mathematics, philosophy and music (at risk of arbitrarily implying a few value judgements about the most intellectually valuable activities). Indeed, human history seems to be characterised much more by the successful expansion of the limits of consciousness than by collision with insuperable limitations.

Not only is the brain is truly a wonderful and flexible system, but each is unique to its owner – indeed, each human brain is a unique example of the most complex type of structure in the known universe. Of course, this diversity of thought provides great opportunity for diversity of achievement and perspective, but it also makes it remarkably difficult to get everybody to agree about anything or everything. While a decent, rational argument might put you in the position to receive the benediction of at least some of the people some of the time, I am constantly amazed by the capacity of intelligent, similarly educated people to reach such distinctly different conclusions from such similar evidence.

More than simply disagreeing, however, human dialogue is characterised in great part by the success of individuals in flexing reality to fit their world view – it often seems that a person’s underlying beliefs do not so much contextualise as pre-determine their response to any new set of evidence.

Robert Anton Wilson, in his seminally weird pseudo self-help epic Prometheus Rising, describes this cognitive phenomenon with the phrase ‘The thinker thinks, the prover proves’. The premise is simple – there is a part of your mind ( the thinker) that decides what you believe, but this part is not primarily the part that undertakes rational analysis of the information you have available to you. Rather, the analytic function (the prover) is not targeted so much as determining what to think, as to proving that what you thought in the first place was right all along. This is why Fox News can boldly assert that the debt crisis of the last few years was anything but due to free markets, while the environmental movement can point to it as proof that run away capitalism is destructive not only to itself but to its environment, while Social Democrats can argue that it shows the need for better and greater Government regulation, and uncivilisationists can argue that it points towards the inevitable failure of conventional economic systems. From the same evidence, each of these types of group and many more can ratioanlly expound their own position, and often never once notice the way that they choose not to acknowledge any stray data that fit less well with their view.

This is not my theory, nor a new one, nor one which I make any claim to develop or nuance. It is, however, a valuable prism to admire the world through – and one which, of course, having adopted it becomes possible to express almost any interaction in terms of – the prover is easily activated. While understanding the world through the eyes of the thinker can be rewarding and insightful, the real challenge is to teach your own prover to think, and your thinker to prove… Good luck!

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