An Apology for Mystical Thought

(I work in tech, which means all of my associates have been trained to only appreciate "scientific" thought and smugly dismiss "superstition." Since I don't fit that mold at all, and have a nasty habit of being unable to keep my big mouth shut, I've had to repeatedly articulate a defense of "mystical thinking." Since I've said it so much, I figured I might as well write it down so I can refer back to it. I've placed it here in case it's useful to anyone else.)

Are you familiar with Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem? Very briefly, it says that all systems of reasoning are either inconsistent or incomplete. Another way of characterizing this is that you can understand everything (but not for sure), or understand things for sure (but not everything), but—importantly—not both: it is impossible to understand everything for sure, even in theory. You can think of inconsistent thought as intuitive or mystical or "right brained," and incomplete thought as analytical or scientific or "left brained."*

In the modern era, we have almost completely discarded intuitive thought in favor of analytical thought. This has bought us a lot of amazing things—refrigerators and computers and rocket ships and the Haber–Bosch process and so on—but at a steep cost: there are many things which we have simply lost the ability to think about at all, and I believe these blind spots to be a major cause of the dysfunction and alienation present in modern society.

Put another way, the scientific revolution has given us very sure footing in our thought, but has made us blind to what we don't know. (And, anyway, nobody likes people who are too sure of themselves.)

On the other hand, there are many traditional systems of thought which, while not giving the same sure footing that analytical reasoning does, allow one to understand a much greater range of phenomena in ways that are practical to everyday living. And it is not as if one has to abandon scientific thought to use these: if one has many models, one is more likely to have a model appropriate for a given situation; the more maps one has, the better they can navigate. Even if you think, say, astrology has no scientific basis, there is nonetheless thousands of years of wisdom encoded in that system, and it is perhaps wasteful to "throw the baby out with the bathwater."

Astrology isn't the only example: mysticism and religion fall into this camp as well. These attempt to apprehend the whole range of human experience, and in my opinion do so... but the cost for this is that their models are paradoxical—no two religions describe the same phenomena in the same way, and in fact tend to describe them in mutually exclusive ways. So the tools have their limitations, but they still provide powerful ways of understanding life and human experience in ways that science is only beginning to approach, and then dimly.

Raymond Smullyan, the eminent logician, wrote that empiricism, positivism, and mysticism are not mutually exclusive, but mutually supportive: they can each understand phenomena that the others cannot. If we wish to understand life as best as we can, should we not use all the tools at our disposal?

* This is an extremely hand-wavy explanation of the Theorem. Pedantic types will whine about how I've characterized it, but in my defense I have three justifications for doing so. First, fuck them. Second, it's very difficult to explain something as complex and technical as the Theorem to a layman in a single paragraph. Third, since the human mind is capable of acting as a "formal system" (as defined by Gödel), it must be at least a "formal system" (at least in certain contexts), and therefore it must be subject to the same constraints as a "formal system" is (at least when used within those contexts).