Follow up to Secrets of Success: Futile to Covet

This is a follow up to The Secret of Success.

I always fantasize about what it would be like to have extraordinary mental powers. Who wouldn't want to have a level of comprehension beyond all comprehension? However, I quickly realized that this is nothing like fantasizing about being a professional athlete or a famous celebrity. I begin by considering the underlying mental processes that these prodigies, geniuses, and the like, have. There have been studies already that suggest that people's understanding of certain things are completely different from the norm (assuming, of course, that there are at least some fundamental things that are uniform within the norms). For example, it's now known that chess masters don't think serially; that is, they don't "play out" possible moves as the early chess playing programs did. Rather, they recognize scenarios and patterns, which are assigned values, and work to achieve the higher valued scenario. Now this kind of thing seems common in our everyday experiences of familiar and frequently practiced activities, but if you consider the sheer volume of all possible board setups, it's quite astounding. (Anyone who plays poker even semi-extensively using ICM should be able to relate).

Consider other so-called geniuses: idiot savants (warning: incoming tangent--my professor Jimmy M. made it clear that "autistics aren't like Dustin Hoffman from Rainman... if they were, they would be fucking geniuses, not retarded"). Their extraordinary abilities range from being able to calculate large (but relatively simple) mathematical calculations in an extremely short period of time. For example, some could give you an answer to, say, 1,495,420 x 235 in under 5 seconds without writing anything down. These people, given that they are autistic, can do few other things well, but they have, literally, a different understanding of numbers. There are others that can calculate dates, have perfect spatial recognition (i.e., when drawing), and memorize enormous amounts of information through what seems to be nothing more than rote memory and, in the case of musical savants, replicate a piece of music to the exact note and tempo after a single hearing. We have to assume that all of these people, too, have a different understanding than everyone else not like them.

So you have to wonder: how exactly do they understand things? The philosopher Nagel posed the question "what's it like to be a bat?" By this, he meant for his audience to imagine the character of a bat's experience. I don't think he meant the content of a bat's experience (like living in a cave hanging upside down and eating insects) but the nature of it; what is it like to be able to discern the size, shape, and motion of objects through auditory processing such as we do through sight? Is this even possible to imagine, or speculate? After all, we necessarily know only the character of our own experience.

It would be a waste to speculate on the sensory experience of idiot savants, but we can speculate as to their understanding of things in which they excel. It would be the opposite of imagining what it would be like to have the mind of someone with a lower IQ than ourselves. "How can they not see this emerging pattern?" "How could they not deduce this?" Likewise, we must ask of the savants "how can they find that pattern so quickly? or "how could they memorize all of that in a matter of seconds?" But any attempts to imagine what it is like to have their understanding would be stopped dead in its tracks by an inherent contradiction in the nature of the the thought experiment itself. That is, we can't understand something in a different way when the only and every thing we understand is limited by our own understanding. In other words, we can't transcend the character of our own experiences as everything we experience is bound to the character of that experience. And, (not trying to beat a dead horse here... or maybe I am) we can't speculate what it is like to have speculative powers beyond our own speculative powers (and, of course, I don't mean fantasizing about your ingenuity winning you fame and admiration of your peers and that of the girl you've been eye-humping). I can go on and on here, but hopefully, you get the point that you can't ask of something a performance beyond its own capability.

There is the biological and neurological element of idiot savants. Sure, they must have some neurological anomalies that account for the differences in processing. Many of you might be tempted to claim that this is all there is to their abilities. Quite frankly, I agree completely. However, that is not what I was getting at, but rather that we can't, by imagination and speculation alone, come even remotely close to an accurate mental picture of what it would be like to have that understanding. But how about this: imagine that neurologists were able to isolate the precise neurological anomaly that accounts for quick mathematical calculations and were able to artificially replicate that structure in already living humans such that all other mental functions were left in-tact except for being able to do mathematical calculations. Now tell me what the mental steps you think you would be taking to do 1,495,420 x 235 in under 5 seconds after you undergo this procedure. What do you think? I would bet the first thing you would say is, if I twisted your arm, that you are doing what you learned in 4th grade math class but do it much faster. Without getting into how this is not actually an adequate answer (there is no adequate answer), I would ask you to imagine doing the calculation at the speed at which it is required to compute the equation in under 5 seconds. Ha! Got'ya. You can't. It's simply outside of your mental capacity to do so.

That is not to say that one's mental capacity is forever static. With enough training, practice, drugs, surgery or what have you, you can ultimately rewire the neural connections in your brain such as to achieve that level of processing. We all, as beings that age and become more wise with every experience, have fluctuating mental capacities. This, however, is gradual and it's difficult, if not outright impossible, to pin-point moments of improving mental processing. If anyone was able to achieve an understanding beyond their understanding merely by the exercises proposed above, it would require an almost instantaneous and dramatic neurological transformation. Yet, there is not a day that goes by where I don't wish I had such epiphanies.

EDIT 4/19 - I was catching up on some reading and it seems that The Economist had an article on The link between autism and extraordinary ability | Genius locus. It touches up on similar elements that was in my post... but the date of it makes it seems like I copied it from them (I didn't!). First off, don't get confused about the "theory of mind" which, in the article, is in reference to the ability to empathize, or 'to put yourself in someone else's shoes." While this is possible for us, I wasn't referring to such, dare I say, superficial notion of thinking what it would be like to be someone else. The article refers to theory of mind as the ability to recognize others as conscious agents, to put it into shallow terms. My idea of "thinking what it would be like to be someone else" refers to the thoughts of what it would be like to have their consciousness.