Applying ancient divination to modern intuition | Peter Struck | TEDxPenn

Summary

In 480 B.C., facing an overwhelming Persian army, the Athenians sought guidance from the Oracle of Delphi, receiving a cryptic message about a 'wooden wall.' This led to a pivotal decision to build a navy, which ultimately saved Athens. The speaker explores the ancient practice of divination as a form of non-discursive thinking, suggesting that it was not superstition but a culturally sanctioned method to tap into our unconscious cognitive abilities. Drawing parallels to modern practices like intuition and 'thinking without thinking,' the talk posits that our capacity to know often exceeds our understanding, and that ancient techniques may still hold wisdom for us today.

Takeaways

• 🛡️ In 480 B.C., the Persians assembled an enormous army of 300,000 men, the largest in history at that time, to attack Athens.
• 👑 Xerxes, the Persian leader, was a figure of such prominence that he was simply referred to as 'The King' by other nations.
• 🤔 The Athenians, known for their ingenuity and rational intellect, faced a serious threat and sought solutions through deliberation and logic.
• 🔮 In desperation, the Athenians consulted the Pythia, the most authoritative oracle of the day, who provided a riddle about a 'wooden wall'.
• 🚢 The Athenians interpreted the riddle as a guidance to build a navy, which ultimately led to their survival and prosperity.
• 📚 The Greeks, and many ancient cultures, often turned to divination and other non-rational techniques when rational thinking reached its limits.
• 🧠 The speaker's research suggests that our ability to know often exceeds our capacity to understand how we know, leading to the concept of 'surplus knowledge'.
• 🌐 The practice of divination was not limited to the Greeks but was widespread across ancient cultures, indicating a universal human cognitive pattern.
• 🔄 The speaker's experience with cognitive scientists revealed parallels between ancient divination practices and modern non-discursive thinking techniques.
• 💭 Non-discursive thinking, such as intuition, can be as effective as, or more effective than, conscious deliberation in certain complex situations.
• 🌟 The speaker proposes an axiom: 'Our ability to know exceeds our capacity to understand that ability,' suggesting that we remain somewhat mysterious to ourselves.

Q & A

What was the size of the Persian army in 480 B.C.?

The Persian army in 480 B.C. was the largest in history at that time, consisting of 300,000 men.

Who was the leader of the Persians during this period?

The leader of the Persians was Xerxes, a figure of significant stature during his time.

What was the situation in Athens when the Persians decided to attack?

The situation in Athens was serious, as they faced the threat of the massive Persian army led by Xerxes.

How did the Athenians approach the problem of the Persian invasion?

The Athenians approached the problem by gathering information, using logic to draw inferences, and engaging in public debate to consider their courses of action.

What did the Pythia, the oracle at Delphi, tell the Athenians?

The Pythia told the Athenians that only a wooden wall would remain unconquered, which was interpreted as a riddle.

What were the two options the Athenians considered based on the Pythia's riddle?

The Athenians considered either fortifying the Acropolis with a wooden fence or building a navy to confront Xerxes at sea and cut off his supply lines.

Why did the Athenians consult an oracle despite their rational thinking?

The Athenians consulted an oracle because they believed in reaching beyond the limits of their rational thinking to access non-discursive thinking, which could provide insights in complex situations.

What is the term for the study of divine signs or divination?

The study of divine signs or divination is referred to as divination.

How did the ancient Greeks view divination in relation to rational thinking?

The ancient Greeks viewed divination as a complement to rational thinking, using it to access non-discursive thinking when rational thinking reached its limits.

What is the speaker's main argument about divination and rational thinking?

The speaker argues that divination was not a strange or superstitious practice but a culturally authorized technique for engaging non-discursive thinking, which is a part of human cognitive history and remains relevant even today.

What is the speaker's proposed axiom regarding our ability to know?

The speaker's proposed axiom is that our ability to know exceeds our capacity to understand that ability, suggesting that there is surplus knowledge that we can access but may not fully comprehend.

Outlines

00:00

🏛️ The Crisis of Athens and the Oracle's Riddle

In 480 B.C., the Persians, led by Xerxes, amassed a massive army to attack Athens. The Athenians, known for their rational intellect and recent inventions like democracy and tragedy, faced a dire situation. They sought guidance from the Pythia, the most authoritative oracle of the time, who provided a cryptic answer about a wooden wall remaining unconquered. This led to a debate in Athens on whether to fortify the Acropolis with a wooden fence or build a navy. The latter prevailed, and Athens survived, leading to questions about why rational thinkers would rely on an oracle. The Greeks, and other ancient cultures, often turned to divination when rational thinking reached its limits, engaging in practices like examining animal entrails or interpreting dreams and bird behavior.

05:04

🧠 Beyond Superstition: Understanding Divination

The video script explores why ancient cultures, including the Greeks, turned to divination and oracles. It challenges the idea that this was merely a result of superstition or a strategy by the elite to control the masses. Instead, it suggests that divination was a culturally accepted method for accessing non-discursive thinking, which operates outside of conscious, logical reasoning. The script introduces the concept of non-discursive thinking, which is part of our cognitive lives but often overlooked, and compares it to modern practices like intuition and the benefits of taking a break from a problem to let the subconscious mind work on it.

10:05

🌌 The Axiom of Surplus Knowledge

The speaker proposes an axiom: our ability to know exceeds our capacity to understand that ability. This concept suggests that there is surplus knowledge that we access without fully understanding how, which is culturally useful but not always accurately accounted for. The ancient Greeks' use of divination is seen as a method to tap into this surplus knowledge, not as a result of superstition or manipulation. The speaker concludes by relating this to modern practices, such as taking a break from a complex problem to allow the non-conscious mind to process it, which can lead to breakthroughs, as it did for the Athenians in their historical crisis.

Keywords

💡Oracle

An oracle, as mentioned in the script, refers to a priest or priestess who delivers messages or predictions believed to be inspired by the gods. In the context of the video, the Pythia, the most authoritative oracle of the day, provided cryptic advice to the Athenians during a critical time of crisis. The oracle's response about the 'wooden wall' led to a significant debate and decision-making process in Athens.

💡Divination

Divination is the practice of seeking knowledge of the future or the unknown through various techniques, often involving a degree of mystery or supernatural insight. In the video, the Greeks' use of divination, such as consulting oracles and examining animal entrails, is discussed as a method that complements rational thinking, especially when faced with complex or overwhelming problems.

💡Themistocles

Themistocles was an Athenian statesman and military strategist who played a key role in the Persian Wars. In the video, Themistocles is mentioned as the one who brought the oracle's riddle back to Athens, which influenced the Athenians' decision to build a navy instead of relying solely on their land defenses.

💡Rational Thinking

Rational thinking is the process of forming conclusions based on logical reasoning and evidence. The Athenians, known for their ingenuity and rational intellect, are depicted in the video as using rational thinking to deliberate and gather information before turning to the oracle for guidance, illustrating a balance between rational and non-rational approaches to problem-solving.

💡Non-discursive Thinking

Non-discursive thinking refers to cognitive processes that occur outside of conscious, logical reasoning. This concept is introduced in the video as a complement to discursive thinking, suggesting that our brains can process information and arrive at conclusions without our full awareness. The speaker draws parallels between ancient divination practices and modern intuition, suggesting that both tap into this form of thinking.

💡Intuition

Intuition is the ability to understand or know something without conscious reasoning. In the video, the speaker discusses intuition as a form of non-discursive thinking that is still prevalent in contemporary society. It is presented as a valuable cognitive tool that can provide insights beyond the scope of rational analysis.

💡Thin Slicing

Thin slicing is a term used to describe the ability to make quick, accurate judgments based on limited information. The concept is mentioned in the video as a modern equivalent to ancient practices like examining animal entrails, where a quick decision is made in the heat of the moment, often proving to be effective.

💡Cognitive Science

Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary study of the mind and its processes, including perception, thinking, and memory. The video references cognitive scientists who are exploring non-discursive thinking, suggesting that our understanding of human cognition is evolving to include more than just rational, conscious thought processes.

💡Unconscious Cerebration

Unconscious cerebration is a term from the 19th century that refers to the idea that our minds can process information and make decisions without our conscious awareness. The video uses this concept to explain how ancient practices like divination may have been tapping into the power of the unconscious mind, similar to how modern individuals might rely on intuition or take a break to let their subconscious work on a problem.

💡Axiom

An axiom is a statement or principle that is accepted as true without proof, often serving as a starting point for further reasoning or argumentation. In the video, the speaker proposes the axiom 'Our ability to know exceeds our capacity to understand that ability,' suggesting that there are aspects of human cognition that remain mysterious and beyond our full comprehension.

💡Surplus Knowledge

Surplus knowledge refers to the additional information or insights that we gain beyond what we can rationally explain or understand. The video discusses surplus knowledge as a product of non-discursive thinking, which can be culturally useful and provoke further explanation, even if the explanation is not entirely accurate.

Highlights

In 480 B.C., the Persians assembled an army of 300,000 men, the largest in history at that time.

The Persian leader Xerxes launched this massive force against Athens.

Athenians, known for their ingenuity and rational intellect, faced a serious threat.

The Athenians turned to the Oracle of Delphi for guidance during their crisis.

The Pythia, the Oracle, provided a riddle about a wooden wall remaining unconquered.

The Athenians debated whether to fortify the Acropolis or build a navy.

Athens chose to build a navy, which led to their survival and prosperity.

The reliance on Oracles was a common practice among the Greeks and other ancient cultures.

The speaker's field is classics, focusing on Greece and Rome.

The speaker challenges the notion that divination was used for political manipulation or superstition.

Ancient cultures worldwide used divination when rational thinking reached its limits.

The speaker spent time with researchers at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford.

Cognitive scientists are exploring non-discursive thinking, beyond conscious awareness and logical rules.

The speaker proposes that our ability to know exceeds our capacity to understand that ability.

The speaker suggests that ancient divination practices were effective because they leveraged non-conscious thinking.

In modern times, we use intuition and activities like cleaning, walking, or showering to allow non-discursive thinking to occur.

The speaker concludes that ancient practices and modern intuition share similarities in addressing complex problems.

The speaker's axiom implies that we will always remain somewhat mysterious to ourselves.

The speaker's work suggests that non-discursive thinking has a consistent role in human cognitive history.

Transcripts

Translator: Nadia Putri Reviewer: Denise RQ

The year is 480 B.C.

The Persians have mounted on an army of 300,000 men,

the largest in history up until that time.

It's a sized army that the Romans would later use

to dominate the entire Mediterranean.

The leader of the Persians, Xerxes, a man of such stature during his time

that even people of other nations referred to him simply as "The King",

had decided to launch the full fury of this force

against a single city, Athens.

The situation in Athens was serious.

The Athenians figured

if anyone could come up with a solution to this particular problem, though,

it may well be them.

They were, after all, renowned

for their ingenuity and their rational intellects.

They had recently invented democracy and tragedy,

and within a decade,

would see the birth of Socrates and philosophy as we know it.

So, they did what any rational people would do in such a situation:

they deliberated.

They gathered information.

They used rules of logic to draw inferences.

They used public debate to test their conclusions.

And with careful arguments, they considered their courses of action.

After grinding away at it,

they did what any rational group of people would do at that time:

they sent away for an Oracle.

The Pythia was the most authoritative oracle of the day.

She was an aging, frail, illiterate woman

housed in a massive stone temple at Delphi.

She took questions from her petitioners,

and she dispensed answers in the form of riddles.

The Athenian answer was grim.

But there was one small glimmer of hope.

The Pythia said that only a wooden wall will remain unconquered.

[Themistocles] took this riddle back to their city.

And a debate which have been meandering in many different directions

quickly crystallized around two potential options.

Either hole up in the traditional stronghold of the Acropolis

which have been surrounded by a wooden fence

or use wood to build a navy

to take on Xerxes at sea and cut off his supply lines.

The second course of action prevailed, and Athens survived and thrived.

Now, we might wonder why did they do this?

Why did they rely on an Oracle?

Why did they imagine,

especially this group of people that was an emblem for rational thinking,

why did they imagine that a person with no knowledge base

could provide any pertinent insight into their situation?

And this was no aberration.

The Greeks were in the habit of turning to oracles

and also used many other techniques

when they ran up to the limits of their own rational thinking.

They were interested in the instinctual behaviors of animals

like the flight paths and screeches of birds.

They were interested in their dreams,

and they spent time examining

the pulsating entrails of the animals they sacrificed to their gods.

They called it the study of divine signs or divination.

Seems like strange behaviour, yes?

Well, in the next 10 minutes, I'm going to try persuade you of 2 things.

Number one, it wasn't strange, and number two, you still do it.

My field is classics.

The study of Greece and Rome.

And when scholars in my discipline take on this question,

they typically pull out two kinds of answers.

Number one comes from a vantage of social history.

Let's imagine that what we have is an elite group that has a strategy,

and they use the ostentatious mystery of divine science

in order to persuade the masses to come their way.

They form consensus, and they manage descent.

But there's a problem for this idea.

The problem is that most situations of divination, despite our example,

were not relevant to politics.

Most had to do with matters of personal and even intimate concern.

Should I be involved in a business deal with this person?

Should I take a trip on this day?

Should I marry this man?

These things have nothing to do

with the dynamic between the elite and the masses.

There's a further problem,

which is according to all the evidence that we have,

even in situations of politics,

the elite thought it worked just as much as the masses did.

So if elite were pulling wool over anyone's eyes,

they were pulling wool over their own eyes as well.

Doesn't quite hold up.

Another kind of explanation comes out,

and it starts from the idea of superstition.

We're told that primitive brains are superstitious

- and the corollary is that ours aren't -

and they're prone to exotic theological commitments

so they believe in strange things.

But there's a problem with this line of thinking as well.

While it may well be a part of the behaviour divination,

it doesn't necessarily explain the behaviour divination.

While superstition may have something to do with it,

it doesn't necessarily lead to the behaviors that we see in divinations.

It's not as though, when sufficient amount of superstition in the air, people think

that the Universe is coursing with hidden messages

that are readable by these techniques.

A final kind of explanation, which is the category of no explanation,

suggest that well, lots of people do weird things,

cultures have strange beliefs, so there may well be no explanation.

It's just a weird Mediterranean behaviour

and we've grown out of that kind of thing, thank goodness.

There's a problem here as well, though.

It wasn't just the Greeks who did this kind of thing.

In fact, all ancient cultures for which we have evidence,

from the Southern tip of Africa to Northern Britannia

and from Eastern to Western Eurasia,

we're in the habit when they ran up

against the limits of their rational thinking

to turning to techniques that took over for them

and allowed them to advance their problems.

The techniques vary.

The Chinese took tortoise shells and put them in fire

and then read the cracks that happened afterwards.

But the structure and the thinking is the same.

If we're going to propose that this is some kind of mass delusion,

we'd need some explanation for why the mass delusion is so consistent

across human cultures

that had functionally nothing to do with one another

in many different areas of the world.

Superstition is a very weak answer.

Now, in my work on the arcane past,

things took the most important turn for me,

when I took a brief tour into the present time.

A time I don't spend that much time in and it's strange.

Strange and bizarre for me.

I spent a year with a team of researchers

at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford.

This is mainly a group of cognitive scientists,

evolutionary biologists, and behavioral psychologists

who are pushing the envelope of understanding

of the complexities of our cognitive lives.

Most of us, and I surely at the time,

have a standard picture of how our brains work.

We set out on a problem. We direct our awareness to it.

We self-consciously gather facts and using logical rules,

we draw inferences, we reach conclusions

that then motivate our actions.

Let's call this discursive thinking.

But this is only part of the story.

The researchers at the Center were expanding this view

and opening up fields that I would call non-discursive thinking.

Things that don't quite answer to that description

or the way our brains work.

And some other pieces that they were coming on

would ring bells for me, struck me as very familiar.

One scholar was working on face-to-face conversations.

He looked at how we continuously, and unselfconsciously

process non-verbal cues in our conversation partners.

And that these shape the top-level thinking

that emerges from such events.

The oracular consultation was famously interactive.

The bell is ringing in my head.

And someone even without a knowledge base, may well discern

from just seeing how a person reacts to different suggestions,

what the most useful one is going to be in a particular situation.

Another kind of scientist was studying the phenomena of thin slicing.

This is a claim that our snap judgments are sometimes as good,

and for some things better than our most careful deliberative processes.

The examination of entrails instantly came to mind for me.

In situations like these, often in the heat of battle,

where debate is coursing around from many different pieces of information,

the cutting open of a live animal, usually a large one,

has a way of focusing people's attention.

And the focusing of the splayed innards of another animal

interrupts the conversation.

While the diviner is staring at that, let's imagine that the diviner

comes up with a snap judgment, not a considered decision.

And while rule books for such things were legendary in antiquity,

none of them survived, and I think none of them ever existed.

It's not about applying rules to a particular situation.

It's about making a snap judgment in the heat of the moment.

There were also scholars at the Center who were laying out the strong gains

that people accrue when they're dealing with complex problems.

After they have been grinding it out for awhile,

to set their attention on something else for awhile,

and allow their non-conscious minds to advance the problem.

Their non-conscious minds have power and can advance the problem.

When they return to it later, things look different and clearer

than they did before.

Nearly all the techniques of antiquity did this kind of a thing.

As an historian of ideas, this got me to thinking.

Discursively, I think.

I was interested now in looking at non-discursive thinking historically.

Over time, there are different manifestations of this.

In the contemporary period, in polite company, anyway,

we use the term intuition to describe these things.

We may well refer to the famous phrase of Malcolm Gladwell,

thinking without thinking.

A century and a half ago, in the wake of Darwin,

in the middle of the 19th century, when physiology was the queen of sciences,

there was a different way of talking about it.

These scientists were fascinated by the reflex action

that they observe in the musculature of our body,

and they propose there were congruent kind of actions

happening in our thinking.

They call this unconscious cerebration.

Two centuries before that, the English poet John Milton

has the archangel Raphael explained to Adam in the Garden of Eden

that the creatures of the Universe think in two different ways.

There is discursive thinking, which is what humans mostly do,

and then he says there is something else

called intuition, which is mostly the way angels think.

On occasion, humans get a chance to think like angels,

but it happens rarely.

This opened up a whole new vantage on Greek divination for me.

It started to look less like an outlier,

and more like the tail of a long and consistent arc

of human cognitive history that attested to a core human experience.

We oftentimes find ourselves in a situation

of knowing things without knowing quite how we know them.

This led me to propose an axiom.

Here's my axiom.

Our ability to know exceeds our capacity to understand that ability.

Let me repeat.

Our ability to know exceeds our capacity to understand that ability.

And if it's true, as an axiom, it held in the past, it holds good now,

and even despite the ingenious work of our cognitive scientists,

it will hold into the future.

We will remain to some degree mysterious to ourselves.

The axiom tells us that there will be surplus knowledge.

Surplus knowledge is provocative.

It provokes some accounting for it,

and by the axiom, that accounting won't be exactly right,

but it needs to be culturally useful.

So back to the ancient world,

I gained a different kind of perspective on what they were up to

after spending time with these cognitive scientists.

When they took time out of their deliberative thinking

to change focus on a puzzling riddle: cracks on a tortoise shell

or the erratic flight paths or the screeches of a bird,

they were engaging

in their own local variant of a culturally authorized techniques

for opening a space for non-discursive thinking to happen.

This was not an example, mainly,

of them engaging in exotic theological commitments

because of superstitious brains.

It was not an example of them

trying to manipulate the masses with ostentatious mystery.

That's not why they did this.

They did this because it worked.

Our non-conscious brain has power, and they had ways of putting it to use.

And finishing back up to the present time, my claim that you do this kind of thing:

well, whenever you're facing a multi variable question

with over complex data set in a situation you really care about

and you need to take a break, chances are you probably do something.

You clean your desk.

You take a walk.

You take a shower.

You sleep on them.

These are our culture's authorized forms

for opening up a break in discursive thinking

and allowing our unselfconscious, non-discursive mind

to take over for awhile.

According to our best authorities today,

this improves our chances of making headway,

and according to the authorities from antiquity,

whom I must say, I trust a little bit more,

you should definitely do this.

You may well defeat a great empire.

Thank you.

(Applause)