@starfishsystems

5 months ago

What Feynman is describing is what's going on in our CONSCIOUS minds. Of course, much is also going on unconsciously, far more than we can be aware of through direct introspection. And we can train our unconscious minds to perform many tasks for us - quite complex tasks, some of them - which to a great extent can proceed in parallel. An example is driving a vehicle in traffic, operating the controls while maintaining a situational awareness, obeying abstract traffic rules, engaging the social protocols of merging and so on, all the while carrying on a conversation using our conscious minds. The point is, unconscious cognition is most of what we do with our minds. That's not surprising, since it's how those minds evolved. Consciousness, on the other hand, is a relatively new mental trick. We're forcing our mental processes into a linear sequence of steps, so that we can consider and verify each in turn before proceeding to the next. We're not longer processing thoughts in parallel but serially, narratively. This is a fairly heavy commitment of cognitive resources, but even so we can still perform some unconscious tasks in parallel with conscious problem solving. What we CAN'T do very easily is perform multiple conscious tasks in parallel. It seems that the narrative machinery of consciousness is heavily taxed by having to proceed stepwise: knowing where we are in the task at large, how we got to the current step, what we have to solve at this step, what comes next, how to double-check ourselves, how to know when we're done. If we're really striving to do well at this task, it takes up ALL of our available resources. And I think it's a high achievement that our minds can do it at all. What Feynman was doing, in order to get some task parallelism, was two things. First, he was practicing these tasks in order to offload them, at least partially, into his unconscious mind. And second, he was setting up the tasks so as to engage different parts of his mind. Language and vision are known to take place in different hemispheres of the brain, so perhaps each half could be working on a separate problem. But see how hard he had to work at it, in order to achieve this small success! It's a bit sobering, when we look at it from that perspective. Our brains are maybe not evolved very well to support conscious parallel processing. Still, look at how much we've achieved since our species gained conscious ability at all. The great thing about reasoning (which is a specific conscious skill) is not how fast it operates but how reliably. Two structural engineers solving the same problem will arrive at the same answer. That's why planes don't often fall out of the sky.

6 |