People throughout time have honed skills with which they could solve ever more complex problems and to try to make sense of what they see in life. The first skill, to solve complex problems is actually a bewilderingly wide number of unrelated skills and arcane knowledge. The second ‘skill’ could be likened to human’s need to integrate and aggregate their experiences into something which is a bit more tractable. Buckminster Fuller called humans ‘integration machines’ in that we created order beyond what other living things did.
So far this sounds like a ringing accolade of what we humans have accomplished, but there are some occupational hazards to all of this integration activity. We seem to be quite susceptible to the lure of the simple answer, and even ‘round numbers’. If you were to spend some time with students (of almost any age) you could see that this is quite common.
I often wonder whether this is a consequence of how some societies are structured, or whether this is something innate in all of us (to varying degrees). Does this relate to how satisfying a ‘happy ending’ is to a story?
There are some well established ‘cures’ for this human peccadillo, of which disciple in thinking would rate very high on this list. An example of how insidious this sort of problem can be would be to look over some concepts and ideas such as that of the heuristic (a number of specific cognitive biases we often exhibit in life). There are quite a number of them, and our innate attraction to simplicity even has some justification (Occam’s razor).
When I think of brash, satisfying ways to answer what seems to be a complex problem, the story of Alexander the Great confronted with the Gordian knot may be the best and most famous example. I’ve known of this historical anecdote since I was in elementary school.
The story is about Alexander, upon arriving with his army in Phrygia in Asia Minor was confronted with the local myth of the Gordian knot. This was a complex knot on an ox cart which was supposed to only he untied by the ruler of all of Asia. Alexander took his sword and hacked it apart and thus immediately solved this local conundrum.
There in another, more modern story which most of my students grasp. It relates to a candy commercial in TV for ‘tootsie roll’, where a boy comes upon an old owl sitting in a tree. He asks the owl how many licks it takes to get to the center of the candy. The owl takes the candy and proceeds to lick it, 1…, 2…, 3… crunch. He bit into the center of the candy and then told the boy…”three’. This is really the same idea, coming from a cartoon character and one of the greatest field generals of all time…
The fact that both of these little stories are satisfying and potentially amusing allows us to see that this whole idea is related to jokes, or perhaps more specifically, the punch lines of jokes. Buddhists have spent a lot of time examining the nature of what a punch line ‘does’ to the listener. The sudden awareness of the ‘answer’ to a ‘problem’ posed in a joke creates a sort of cascade of realization. So, maybe we are integration machines after all…
