. Tacit Knowing By Huston Smith from, Why Religion Matters, pp. 257-260 I begin with a human ability that baffles epistemologists completely, one that differs markedly from reason. Reason performs logical operations on information that is in full view and can be described and defined. Again and again, though, we find that our understanding floats on operations that are mysterious because all that we seem able to know about them is that we have no idea how they work. We have hunches that pay off. Or we find that we know what to do in complicated situations without being able to explain exactly how we know. The knowledge in question is unconscious, yet it enables us to perform enormously complicated tasks, form reading and writing to farming and composing music. Expertise is coming to be recognized as more intuitive than cognitive psychologists had suspected. These students of learning are finding that when faced with exceptionally subtle tasks, people who “feel” their way through them are more creative then those who consciously try to think their way through. This explains why computer programmers no less than psychologists have had trouble getting the experts in their field to articulate the rules they follow. The experts do not follow rules. This bears crucially on artificial intelligence, whose theorists are reluctantly coming to see that machines can never replicate human intelligence because we are not ourselves thinking machines. Each of us had, and uses in every moment of the day, a power of intuitive intelligence that enables us to understand, to speak, and to cope skillfully with our everyday environment. Somehow that intuition summarizes everything we have ever experienced and done, and enables that summary to shape our present decisions. That states the matter, but abstractly, so we need an example to give it force. Japanese chicken-sexers are able to decide with 99 percent accuracy the sex of a newborn chick, even thought the genitalia are not visually distinguishable. No analytic approach to learning the art could ever approach such accuracy. Aspiring chicken-sexers lean only by looking over the shoulders of experienced workers, who cannot explain how they themselves do it. Exposed to the art, the novices “get the hang of it,” as we say. Talking parrots provide an even more startling instance of the obscure talent I am tracking. What goes on when a parrot imitates the voice of its owner, or the bark of a dog, or human laughter? Presumably the parrot has some sort of conscious life. It hears the voice, it hears the bark of the laughter, and presumably it wishes (in a way that rudimentarily corresponds to our desire to do something) to imitate the sound. But then what happens? When you think of it, it is one of the most extraordinary things you can imagine. Something incomparably more intelligent than the parrot itself sets to work and proceeds to activate a series of sound organs that are totally different from those of human beings. People have teeth, a soft palate, and a flat tongue, and the parrot has no teeth, a tough tongue and a beak. From these, however, it proceeds to organize its absolutely different apparatus to reproduce words and laughter – so exactly that we are very often deceived by it into thinking that what is in fact the parrot talking is the person herself making the utterance. The more we reflect on this, the stranger it becomes, for in the course of evolutionary history parrots have not been imitating human beings from time immemorial, people arrived after the parrots’ adaptive mechanisms were in place. We have here an ad hoc piece of intelligent action, carried by some form of intelligence within the parrot, that cannot be explained by evolutionary conditioning. We find these examples astonishing, but the talent it jolts us into noticing is in kind one that directs every step of our lives. What we call prudence provides an everyday example. Functioning in something of the manner of a hidden gyroscope, it monitors our inclinations and comes up with a yes or a no, the two magical words of the will. To do this, it spins no theories. Instead, it synthesizes all we have learned and brings this synthesis to every decision we make. In and – because it gives no evidence of caring about their mutual agreement – conveys the impression that each particular answer is absolutely ad hoc. This gives the talent the air of practical poetry, for each particular answer arises spontaneously while being for the most part appropriate and (for the moment in question) conclusive. The spontaneity of prudence is deceptive, however, for if we reflect on the matter we find that all its ad hoc answers arise form a whole that directs them and makes them appropriate its actives are prodigiously married. The integral truth of our being, form which springs, envelops and inspires everything we consciously and unconsciously do, giving our lives their form and style, and seeing to it that each action and decision reflects that style. Nothing I have thus far said is new. For some time chemist-turned-philosopher Michael Polanyi, evolutionary biologists, and developmental psychologists have been talking about tacit knowledge – cognitive underpinnings that are indispensable to our knowing but that operate unconsciously. All of these investigators, however, assume that mental operations that we cannot explain ride the waves of simpler operations that are rationally intelligible. In short, they assume that the more derives from the less. Traditionalists assume the opposite, and from this single difference the two worldviews that this book has been juggling separate as day from night. Defiantly I have taken my stand with the traditionalists, and in this closing chapter, as I said, I am taking the initiative. I want to try to drag modern investigators kicking and screaming toward the possibility that, given the way they have set things up they cannot get to where they want to go – as computer programmers say, garbage in, garbage out. Smashed to smithereens, Humpty Dumpty cannot be put together again – attempts to so are Kafka’s cage searching for a bird. This suggests that it might be sensible to go back to where Humpty Dumpty was sitting, happy and whole on the wall. Wholeness comes first, multiplicity later; the many drive from the one. Approaching the matter from this direction will not lessen the mystery of the progressions involved and may not hold many suggestions for scientific research, though maverick biologist Rupert Sheldrake is toying with some possibilities here. It might, however, carry suggestions for how we should live. That would be no small benefit, given Richard Rorty’s observation that the legacy of Descartes’ dualism has been to cause philosophers to replace the search for wisdom with the search for certainty, and to turn toward science rather than toward helping people attain peace of mind.