UnderAgeThinker

The question then comes up, is this a form of irrational decision making? If so, then the soundness of logic (and math) is bought into question. For, if accurate decisions can be made with out the use of logic, then logic may be faulty. Even if no fault is found with logic per se it could be deemed unuseful, and relegated to a novelty of history in an entirely laissez faire impulse driven society. The future imagined by H. G. Wells in The Time Machine comes to mind.

So then, after this bleak foretelling, you may expect me to be opposed to the whole blink idea. Well, I am more interested with truth, than with what lie will bring a more pleasant future. I happen to believe there is something to this whole idea, which I have taken to calling, blink, after the book. I also happen to believe it is entirely rational. (Crowds cheer: Alas, the future is saved!) But, that doesn’t mean that it will be taken as rational by irrational (postmodern) people. (Crowds stare as deer in headlights: Doom and Gloom.)

I believe the human mind is far more complex than is understood, and this blink speaks to that. I also believe that humans are far more complex than is usually admitted by the experts. Every human is unique. Some may be gifted with far greater instinct than others. Some may have it in certain fields and not in others. I think it can certainly be learned. An example was given in the episode of Culture Shock, I mentioned earlier, of a veteran police officer who knew by instinct that a particular person in an airport had a gun. They could not explain how they knew this, they just had honed their instinct over many years.*

I have several reasons for believing that this instinct is rational. Let me first define what I mean by rational. I do not mean, well thought out. Obviously these gut decisions are not well thought out. I mean logical, I mean that the decision process follows a logical stream. The person making the decision does not need to be conscience of all the intricacies of that logic for it to be a logical decision. That is infact what I believe is happening, I believe that the mind is making logical decisions without the person being conscience of them. They are simply presented with the answer.

It is like a calculator. A calculator takes in data (from the user pushing the keys) and displays the answer. It does not display all the logical steps it had to go through in order to arrive at that answer, but it did go through them. I believe the mind is powerful enough to take in sensory data, in fields that the person is especially gifted in (by nature or by education) and calculate a rational and logical response without the person have to deliberate over it.

Daniel Tammet is one example of this. He was the host and one of the subjects of a Science Channel documentary called Brain Man. He is incredibly gifted in the field of mathematics. He can come up with the answers to highly complex math problems nearly instantly, and to hundreds of decimal places. He claims to not calculate the problems in his head but rather that the answers just come to him.

I have always been a logical person. Some (i.e. my mother) would say that I’m logical to a fault. So when I was a freshman (in college or at university for the Brits) I enrolled in a logic class, thinking it would be a cakewalk. When I would take the tests, I generally knew the answers; they were obvious to me. However in order to get credit for an answer you had to show your work. This I could not do, certainly not in the timeframe of one class period. I ended up dropping the class because of this. Since then I have been more aware of it and have noticed many time when I would hear an argument that I knew was invalid but I could not put my finger on just why. Often if I continued to think about it, I would see the hole in the argument a day or more later.

So is this instinct an advantage? Well, it was certainly a handicap in my logic class, but in certain instances I think it could be very useful. I think it is there to aid us in making decisions when we do not have time for careful deliberations. Think of it as a kind of mental adrenaline. It can be very useful in an emergency but you wouldn’t want to be on an adrenaline high all the time. I believe the reason that the studies that Doctor Gigerenzer cited showed that blink decisions were more accurate than those that were carefully thought out is because most people rarely make rational decisions at all. One of my favorite quotes comes from Blaise Pascal,

“People almost invariably arrive at their beliefs not on the basis of proof but on the basis of what they find attractive.”

This must be even more accurate today than when Pascal wrote it. The only explanation for why blink decisions are more accurate is that they are more rational. It is a sad state of affairs when this is the norm rather than the exception.  So for the masses who make irrational descisions when given the chance, blink decisions are their best hope, but for a rational person, given the time, it should be thought out. 

*I am not sure that it was some one with a gun, but it was along those lines.