According to a view of psychology to which I subscribe, there are two parts to our minds, two parallel processes that contribute to our thoughts, judgements and actions, what Kahneman and Tversky termed System 1 and System 2 thinking.
System 1 is our “fast thinking” side, where emotion and instinct informed by past experience and learning drive our judgement and action, with all the thought taking place in the “back rooms”, the vast mainframe of our mind that “we” don’t have a lot of access to, even though it has a lot of access to “us”. System 2 is that part of our mind that is more what we think of as “us”, the consciously logical and calculating part that counts and measures things. This latter, more “human” part of our thinking is a more recent addition, whose evolution is closely linked with language.
We have evolved to be a social species, whose success lies in our ability to interact, which in our case has created a need and an urge to communicate our thoughts to each other. Our thoughts and judgements at the deeper system 1 level are enormously complex, being based on the accumulated experiences of every moment of our lives and unfortunately all we have to communicate them, not being telepathic are various meaty protuberances flapping and waving about, some of which we can honk air through. Thus (I believe) system 2 thinking evolved as a way of simplifying and structuring those aspects of our thoughts that we needed to share to an extent that they could be communicated via the limited means available.
I believe consciousness was an emergent consequence of this endeavour; in building the processes that could put together a coherent, consistent whole from this simplified, rather granular overview of the pathways and contents of our minds, we built ourselves. To put it another way, in evolving to communicate with others, we also evolved to communicate with ourselves, albeit on this simplified level. (The areas of the brain that are used to structure ideas and concepts are the same ones we use to interpret the structure and concepts of language)
The means used to communicate with ourselves are surprisingly similar to those we use to communicate with others. If I ask you “How are you feeling?” you initially have no idea. You have to ask yourself the question first before you can answer, as though you are asking a third person. More than that, the question you ask yourself isn’t even “How am I feeling?” it’s “How would a person like the one I imagine myself to be, be feeling given the sort of circumstances I find myself in at this moment?”
Each of us carries within ourselves a vision of the universe, one that is unique to ourselves. This vision is built up second by second from our own observations and experience, combined with what we have learned second hand from others, Not only this but our interpretation of all this data through the lens of the “us” that is in itself the sum of our experiences takes this vision to another level. The complexity of the world view that we all have and against which we make the judgements on which we act is staggering in its nuanced, layered complexity.
When we communicate with each other (and to a large extent ourselves), much of this vision gets left at the threshold of the mechanical and simplified phrasing of our methods of communication. The language that is the conduit via which our ideas leave our minds to be received and interpreted by others is restricted by the physical limitations described above.
And thus, urged by the engine that is our desire to share and communicate fully, art bursts forth, the further evolution of language (and ourselves), by which those deeper, richer aspects of these unique interpretations of our experienced, lived and learned realities which cannot be transmitted in speech or writing, the deeps of our individual universes which we would otherwise be obliged to keep within ourselves, ineffable and unknown, may be communicated. These characteristics of art and music that are beyond the intellect in experience, that delicious feeling that we have shared something with their creators, their minds touching our own, often across time, space and even mortality are important. Art is important.
AA
