title: Ep. 36 – Seeing through The Net
author: Alan Watts Being in the Way
contenttype: podcast
publication: Alan Watts Being in the Way
published: 2025-08-27T16:00:00
sourceurl: https://pscrb.fm/rss/p/rss.art19.com/episodes/e1de084f-b087-4fa2-a060-fcf610e671b1.mp3?rss_browser=BAhJIg9mZWVkcGFyc2VyBjoGRVQ%3D--6249cc52a45c5995843f2b1fcedbd2955c2d7057
word_count: 5798
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Sign up and get 10% off at www.betterhelp.com-align-that'sbetter-h-e-l-p.com-align Welcome to Being in the Way, the Alan Watts Podcast, I'm your host Mark Watts, and today we're going to be listening to Seeing Through the Net, which was one of a series of talks to the systems group of engineers at IBM in the mid-60s. In this talk, he begins with an exploration of our ways of knowing, and how it is that we describe the world, relate to other cultures, and ultimately determine our place in the cosmos. It's a fascinating journey that begins with a look at the linear ways of knowing, in which information is strung out along the line, and he points out that this is the method of binary computers, which do this with incredible speed. However, he also points to the value of triangulation, and the comparison of completely different kinds of entities to gain a fuller and more rounded view of ourselves and our place in the world. So this is Alan Watts in Seeing Through the Net, with the IBM Systems Group of Engineers recorded in the mid-60s, and I hope that you will enjoy this podcast and future weeks in which we explore the deepest ways of knowing. Well, now, what I want to do is have a mutual brain picking session, and I'm going to start the ball rolling by saying why I, as a philosopher, am interested in many things that you are all probably interested in professionally. Basically, what we're going to talk about, I suppose, is the problem of control, as exemplified in the ancient Latin question, Chris custodia Zipsos, who guards the gods. Now we know that we're living in an age when there's been an enormous proliferation of techniques for subjecting every kind of natural process outside the human skin and now increasingly inside the human skin to some form of rational control. And as we succeed in doing this, it also becomes apparent that we're failing, that the process becomes of such a high degree of complexity that we begin to feel that we're standing in our own way, that everybody complains the state of affairs in the modern world and the technological world is so complicated that nobody can understand it and nobody really knows what to do. That, for example, you want to run a small business and you find you run into such enormous legal hassles that you need so many secretaries to do the paperwork, that you can hardly do the business, that you're trying to run a hospital, but that you have to spend so much time making records and writing things down on paper that you don't have much time to practice medicine, that you're trying to run a university and the requirements, the recording, the endless red tape of the registrar's office and the administration building is such that the actual work of research and teaching is seriously hampered. So the individual increasingly feels himself obstructed by his own cautiousness. This is basically what it is. Now to explain myself, first of all, because most of you are strangers to me, I am a philosopher who has for many years been interested in the mutual fructification of Eastern cultures and Western cultures, studying oriental ideas, not in the spirit of saying to the West, you ought to be converted to oriental ideas, but in the spirit of saying, you don't understand the basic assumptions of your own culture, if your own culture is the only culture you know. Everybody operates on certain basic assumptions, but very few people know what they are. You can say, very often encounter the sort of character who's an American businessman, and he says, well, I'm a practical businessman, I believe in getting results and things done, all is thinking and high for gluten, logic and non-sensors of no concern to me. Now I know that the practical basic assumptions, the metaphysics of that man, can be defined as pragmatism, as a school of philosophy, but it's bad pragmatism because he's never thought it through. And so it's very difficult, you see, to get down to what are your basic assumptions? What do you mean by the good life? What do you mean by consistency? What do you mean by rationality? The only way of finding out what you mean by these things is by contrasting the way you look at something, by the way it's looked at in another culture, and therefore we have to find cultures which are in some ways as sophisticated as our own, but as different from our own as possible, and of course, for this purpose, I always thought that the Chinese were optimal and the Indians, the East Indians, and that by studying the ideas of these people, by studying their life goals, we could become more aware of our own, it's the old principle of triangulation. You don't establish the situation of a particular object unless you observe it from two different points of view and thereby calculate its actual distance from you. So by looking at what we are pleased to call reality, the physical world, from the basic standpoints of different cultures, I think we are in a better position to know where we are than if we only have one single line of sight. And therefore this has been my interest in my background. And arising out of this there has come a further question which I would call the problems of human ecology, how is man to be best related to his environment, especially in circumstances where we are in possession of an extremely powerful technology and have therefore the capacity to change our environment far more than anyone else has ever been able to do so. Are we going to end up not by civilizing the world but by lost and realizing it? In other words, are we going to foul our awareness as a result of technology? But all this gets down to the basic question is, really, what are you going to do if you're God? If in other words you find yourself in charge of the world through technological powers but instead of leaving evolution to what we used to call in the 19th century the blind processes of nature, that was begging the question to call them blind. But at any rate we say we are not going to leave evolution anymore to the blind forces of nature but now we are going to direct it ourselves because we are increasingly developing to say control over genetic systems, control over the nervous system, control over all kinds of systems, then simply what do you want to do with it? But most people don't know what they want and have never even seriously confronted the question of what they want. You ask a group of students to sit down and write a solid paper of 20 pages on what is your idea of heaven? What would you really like to happen if you could make it happen? And that's the first thing that starts people really thinking because you soon realize that a lot of the things you think you would want are not things you want at all. Just for the sake of illustration you had the power to dream every night any dream you wanted to dream. And you could of course arrange for one night of dreams to be 75 years of subjective time or any number of years of subjective time. What would you do? Well of course you would start out by fulfilling every wish. You would have routes and orgies and all the most magnificent food and sexual partners and everything you could possibly imagine in that direction. When you got tired of that after several nights you would switch a bit and you would soon find yourself involved in adventures and contemplating great works of art, fantastic mathematical conceptions. You would soon be rescuing princesses from dragons and all sorts of things like that. And then one night you would say, now look tonight what we're going to do is we're going to forget this dream as a dream. And we're going to be really shocked. And when you woke up from that one you would say, whoo, wasn't that an adventure. Then you would think more and more far out ways to get involved and let go of control, knowing that you'd always come back to center in the end. But while you were involved in the dream you wouldn't know you were going to come back to center and be in control. And so eventually you would be dreaming a dream in which you found yourselves all sitting around in this room, listening to me talking, all involved with the particular life problems which you have. And maybe that's what you're doing. But here's the difficulty you see. The difficulty of control, are you wise enough to play it being God? And to understand what that question means, we've got to go back to metaphysical assumptions underlying Western common sense. And whether you are a Jew or a Christian or an agnostic or an atheist, you are not uninfluenced by the whole tradition of Western culture. The models of the universe which it is employed, which influence our very language, the structure of our thought, the very constitution of logic, which are going into, say, computers. The Western model of the universe is political and engineering or architectural. It is natural for a child to ask its mother, how was I made? It would be inconceivable for a Chinese child to ask how was I made? It might ask how was I grown or how did I grow? But not how was I made as if I were an artifact, something put together, something which is a construct, but all Western thought is based on the idea that the universe is a construct. And even when we got rid of the idea of the constructor, the personal God, we continued to think of the world in terms of a machine, in terms, say, of Newtonian mechanics, and later in terms of what we call quantum mechanics, although I find it rather difficult to understand how quantum theory is in any sense mechanics. It's much more like organics, which is to me a different concept. However, that may be. It has percolated, you see, into the roots of our common sense that the world is a construct as an artifact. And therefore, as one understands the operations of a machine by analysis of its parts, by separating them into their original bits, we have bitted the cosmos and see everything going on in terms of bits, bits of information. But I found that this is extremely fruitful in enabling us to control what's happening. After all, the whole of Western technology is the result of bidding. That's supposed, you know, you want to eat a chicken, you can't eat the whole chicken at once. You have to bite it. You have to reduce it to bits, but you don't get a cut-up fry out of an egg. It doesn't come that way. So what has happened is this, that we don't know the origins of all this. It's maybe go back thousands of years. The way we develop the art of thinking, which is essentially calculus, is this. The universe, as it comes in nature, the physical universe, is something like a Rorschach block. It's all wiggles. We who live in cities are not really used to this because we build everything in straight lines and wrecked angles and so on. Wherever you see this sort of thing, you know human beings have been around because they're always trying to straighten things out. But nature itself, it's clouds, it's water, it's the outlines of continents, it's mountains, it's biological existences and all of them wiggle. And wiggly things are too human consciousness a little bit of a nuisance because we want to figure it out. And it is as if, therefore, some ancient fishermen, one day held up his net and looked at the world through the net and he said, my, just think of that. There I can see the view. It's one and that peak of that mountain is one, two, three, four, five, six holes across and the base is one, two, three, four, five holes down. Now, I've got its number, see? And so the lines of latitude and longitude, the lines of celestial and terrestrial latitude and longitude, the whole idea of a matrix of a looking at things through graph, paper painted on, printed on cellophane is the basic idea of measurement. This is the way we calculate. We break down the wigglingness of the world into comprehensible, countable geometrical units and thereby figure it and construct it in those terms. And this is so successful up to a point that we can of course come to imagine that this is the way the physical world really is. It's a great, discontinuous, full of points in, in fact, a mechanism. But I want to just put into your mind the notion that this may be the prejudice of the certain personality type. You see, in the history of philosophy and poetry and art, we always find the interchange of two personality types, which I call prickles and goo. The prickly people advocate of intellectual populism. They want origa, they want precise statistics, and they have a certain clipped attitude in their voices. And you know this very well in academic circles, where there are people who are always edgy like that. And they accuse other people of being disgustingly vague and measmic and mystical. But the vague measmic and mystical people accuse the prickly people of being mere skeletons with no flesh on their bones. And they say to you, you just rattle. You're not really a human being. You know the words, but you don't know the music. And so therefore, if you belong to the prickly type, you hope that the ultimate constituent of matter is particles. If you belong to the gooey type, you hope it's waves. If you prickly, you're a classicist. And if you're gooey, you're a romanticist. And they're going back into medieval philosophy. If you're prickly, you're a nominalist. If you're gooey, you're a realist. And so it goes. But we know very well that this natural universe is neither prickles nor goo exclusively. It's gooey prickles and prickly goo. And you see, it all depends on your level of magnification. If you've got your magnification on something so that the focus is clear, you've got a prickly point of view. You've got structure, shape, clearly outlined, sharply defined. The little out of focus is going to go, and you've got goo. But we're always playing with the two. Because it's like the question is the world basically stuff, like matter, or is it basically structure? Well, we find out, of course, today that in science, we don't consider the idea of matter of just, of there being some sort of stuff. Because supposing you wanted to describe stuff, in what terms would you describe it? You always have to describe it in terms of structure. It's actually comfortable, something that can be designated as a pattern. So we never get to any basic stuff. It seems to me that this way of thinking is based on a form of consciousness which we could best call scanning. The capacity to divide experiences into bits is somehow related to a physical facility which corresponds to sweeping a radar beam or a spotlight over the environment. The advantage of the spotlight, as it gives you intensely concentrated light, on restricted areas, a flood light by comparison has less intensity. But if you examine, say, this room or in total darkness, and you use the spotlight, very thin beam, and you scan the room with it, you would have to retain in memory all the areas over which it passed, and then by an additive process, you would make out the contours of the room. And it seems to me that this is something in which civilized man, both in the eastern and the west, has specialized. In a method of paying attention to things which we call noticing, and therefore it's highly selective, it picks out, it's punctive, it picks out features in the environment, which we say are noteworthy and which we therefore register with a notation, be it the notation of words, the notation of numbers, or such a notation, say, as algebra or music. So that we notice those things, only those things, for which we have notation. Then a child, very often, child will point at something and say to its parents, what's that? And they're not clear what the child is pointing to. The child is pointed to something which we consider is not a thing. The child is pointed to an area, say, of funny pattern on a dirty wall, and is noticed to figure on it. But the child doesn't have a word for it, and says, what's that? And the adult says, oh, that's just a mess, because that doesn't count for us as a thing. You come through this to the understanding, what do you mean by a thing? It's very fascinating to ask children, what do you mean by a thing? They don't know, because it's one of the unexamined suppositions of the culture. What do you mean by an event? Well, everybody knows what an event is, but nobody can say. Because a thing is a thing. It's a unit of thought, like an inch is a unit of measurement. But the problem that arises is this. First of all, very obviously, everybody knows, I hardly need to mention it. Go to the science of medicine. You get a specialist who really understands the function of the gallbladder. And he studied gallbladder, gallbladder, gallbladder, ad infinitum. And he really thinks he knows all about it. But whenever he looks at a human being, he sees him in terms of gallbladder. And so if he operates on the gallbladder, he may do so very knowledgeably about that particular area of the organism, but he does not foresee the unpredictable effects of this operation in other connected areas, because the human being's gallbladder is not a thing in the same way as the a spot plug in a car can be extracted and a new one replaced. Because the system isn't the same. There is a fundamental difference between a mechanism and an organism, which can be described operationally. One is assembled. You add this bit to that bit, to that bit, to that bit. But an organism grows, that is to say, when you watch in a microscope a solution in which crystals are forming, you don't see this thing of little bits coming in, coming in, joining each other and finally making up a shape. You see a solution where, well, it's like when you watch a photographic plate developing. For suddenly, all the whole area which you're watching seems to organize itself, to develop, to make sense, moving from the relatively simple and gooey to the relatively structured and prickly, but not by addition. So then, if we are trying to control and understand the world through conscious attention, which is a scanning system, which takes in everything bit, bit, bit, bit, bit, bit, bit, bit, bit, bit. What we are going to run into is that if that's the only method we rely on, everything is going to appear increasingly to complicate it to manage. So that you get, for example, let's take the problem of the electronic industry. The catalogues of products that are being produced over the world by the electronic industry. Who has read all the catalogues? Well, you know where you've got something you're working on, whether it's patented or not. Who else has taken out of patent? Has anybody had time to read all the catalogues? Nobody has. They're just voluminous. And it's exactly the same in almost any other field. There's an information explosion, like a population explosion. How on earth are you going to scan all that information? Yes, of course you can get computers to help you in this direction. But by Parkinson's law, the sooner you become more efficient in doing this, the more the thing is going to develop so that you will have to have more efficient computers still to assimilate all the information. You'll be ahead, but only for a fraught time. You see, this is the problem of the sort of competition of consciousness. Of its how fast can you go? Do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, and keep track of it. They say, I've got a good memory, I'm just going to keep track of that. And you say to yourself, I bet you you can't. I'll go more complicated than you. You'll see musicians do this. They're drummers. And they get things going. They start, and so long as they count, and lots of musicians do count, it is crazy, but they do, and they count, count, count, and they out-complicate each other to the point where you can't retain it any longer in memory. So you say, okay, if I can't retain it, we've got this gadget here that can, and we've got these marvelous mechanical memories, and they will retain it, and they'll go much more fancy, they'll go this do-do-do-do-do-do, the colossal spears, just like that, you see. But it's the same old problem, because you've got something that cannot do that. So we end up asking, yeah, but supposing there was some other way of understanding things, let's go back from the spotlight, to the floodlight, to the extraordinary capacity of the human nervous system, to comprehend situations instantaneously, without analysis, that is to say without verbal or numerical, symbolism of the situation in order to understand it. I hope you understand what I mean, that's clear. We do do that. We have this curious ability of pattern recognition, which the mechanical systems have only in a very primitive way, Xerox, a put out a machine, which recognizes figures, written in almost anyone's handwriting, provided their handwriting is fairly grade school and normal. So a computer has a terrible time trying to recognize the letter A when it's printed in, say, sans serif, gothic, longhand, or whatever kind of A you may write. The human recognizes instantly this pattern, but the computer is still at a disadvantage here. It seems to lack a kind of capacity, I would call field organization, because it's all punctive, it's digital, it's like a newspaper photograph, which when you look at it down a microscope is all dots. Now so the problem is this. In developing technology, are we leaving out of consideration our strongest suit, which is the brain itself? See we are at a situation where the brain is still not really worked out by even the most competent neurologists, it puzzles them. They can't give a model of the brain in numerical or verbal language. Now you are that, you see, you are this thing, you yourself are this thing, which you yourself can't figure out. In the same way that I cannot touch the tip of this finger with the tip of this finger, I can't bite my own teeth. But I who is attempting to touch the tip of this finger with this finger am by the sheer complexity of my structure, far more evolved than any system which I can imagine. This is in a way, slightly akin to the girdle theorem, that you can't have a system of say a logic which defines its own axioms. The axioms of any given system must always be defined in terms of a higher system. All right, so you are the most complex thing that has yet been encountered in the cosmos. And you can't figure you out. Now, suppose we are going to try to do that and become as it were completely transparent to us, so that we entirely understand the organisation on the mechanics of our own brains. What happens when we do that? Well you are back in the situation of God. When you are God, what are you going to do? When you are God, you know what you are going to do? You are going to say to yourself, man, get lost. Of course, what you want is a surprise. And when you figure everything out, there won't be any surprises. You will be completely bored. But on the other hand, a person I would say who is really functioning. He is basically a person who trusts his own brains and permits his brain to operate at a more optimal level. In other words, he knows how to think things out. But he makes his best discoveries without thinking. In other words, you all know very well the processes of creative invention. You have got a problem. You think it over and you can't find out any answer to it because the digital system of thinking is too simple, too clumsy to deal with it. It is more complex. There are more variables than can be kept in mind at one time. So you sell sleep on it. Before you go to the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton or behavioral sciences at Stanford where they pay you to goof off, which is highly excellent idea. And you moon around and you've got a blackboard and you look out the window and pick your nose and so on. And your brain eventually hands you the solution to the problem. And immediately because you have technical knowledge, you recognize that's a solution. But then naturally you go back and check it. And you work the bit by bit form of thinking on it and see, now does it come out in those terms? And if it does, everybody will agree with you. Yes, that's the answer. But if it doesn't come out in those terms, they won't agree with you because you haven't subjected it to the socially acceptable, traditional form of analyzing knowledge. But here's the problem. It takes an awful long time to check these things out. It takes an awful long time to arrive at the solution which you got like that by a purely calculated process. Most of the situations of life are such that they don't wait for us to make up our minds. So that an enormous amount of carefully worked out scientific knowledge is trivial. They all very well, very finely worked out but much too late because life comes at you from all sides all over everywhere at once. And the only thing you've got to deal with that is the thing inside here in the skull. Now, I'm not saying this to put down all this marvelous work of calculation brought to immense sophistication electronically and so on, not at all because actually you people are the first people to understand the limitations of your own kind of knowledge. And you're going to have to tell the politicians about this because they don't understand. They think that this kind of knowledge is the answer to everything and I think most of you know it isn't. Which is not something I repeat against technology. It's the only thing that when you walk you put your right foot forward and that's fine but then you must put your left foot forward. So let's say that the great technological enterprise has been put in the right foot forward. But you must bring up the left foot. That is to say bring up re-valuation and new respect for the organic type of organization which is incomprehensible to technological thinking but which always underlies it. That by itself doesn't work because after you bring the left foot up you've again got to bring up the right foot. The analytic after glue comes prickles, after prickles comes glue. And you have to keep this thing up. And I think our danger at the present time is that we are so heady, so delighted with the results of prickles that we've got to let back a little bit of glue into the system. Well now. What we've got to try and do is I think to work out a way of making the brain itself more efficient and this is the thing that civilized education has neglected. And why to quote him again used to say that the academic world today only values three kinds of intelligence, verbal intelligence, mnemonic intelligence, in other words good at remembering and computational intelligence, said it entirely neglects kinesthetic intelligence, social intelligence, and he had at least seven kinds of intelligence out of get what they all were. But it is this extraordinary capacity of the the neural organization to say to engage in pattern recognition and in solving instantly certain complex problems without knowing how it does it. The trouble is when you do something you don't know how to do, you've got a non-repeatable experiment in a certain sense. In other words, you can't explain to someone else how to put it together. But you can do it like you can open and close your hand without any knowledge of physiology. Do it every time. Whoops, I don't know how I do it, I just do it, you see. So we have an enormous potential of intelligence, of knowing how to do all sorts of things, which to the extent that we are academically minded people we won't allow ourselves to do, because we can't explain it. You know there are, for example, there's a way of cooling, abraising furnace, very simple. But engineers say it's theoretically impossible, it can't happen, it's like bees can't fly by the laws of aerodynamics, but they do. So the rather practical issue I come to is this, that technology, if it relies exclusively on linear thinking, is going to destroy the environment. It's going to become too complicated to handle, man is going to be like the dinosaur which had to have a brain in its head and a brain in its rump because it was so big. Now the caveman kept up dinosaur and when he went to bed at night he'd clump it on the tail with a club and it'd scream at 8 o'clock in the morning, wake him up. Now it seems to be we're getting into that kind of sarian situation with our technology, which is going to lead us to extinction. So the question is, are we going to foul things up by insisting on using linear input, information and controlling it as the dominant tool of controlling the world? Or can we master all that as we have done and still use the linear input and analysis, but with a fundamental trust in our power to assimilate multiple input, although we really don't know how we do it. And my point is that you can't find an absolute which you can pin down, you see. So there always remains in any human operation the basic central thing which you can't pin down because it's you, just as the teeth can't bite themselves. Now the assumption of Judeo-Christian culture is that man in his nature is sinful and therefore can't be trusted. The assumption of at least ancient Chinese culture is that man in his essential nature is good and therefore has to be trusted because they say to us, if you can't trust your own basic nature, you can't really rely on the idea that you're untrustworthy. Therefore you're hopelessly fouled up. So this has an amazing political and other consequences, this different assumption. If we say no, we human beings are fallible and basically selfish and really, really fundamentally evil and therefore we need law and order. We need a control system to put us in order. We thereby project these control systems into the church or into the police or into somebody who are really ourselves disguised, it's like daylight saving time, everybody could simply get up an hour earlier but instead of doing that we alter the clock because the clock is a kind of authority and we say well the clock says it's time for you to get up. And the Indian, Amerindians laugh at the pale faces because they say, pale face, he doesn't know when he's hungry until he looks at his watch. And so in this way we become clock dominated and the abstract system takes over from the physical, organic situation and this is my big pitch if I'm going to make a big pitch is that we've run into a cultural situation where we've confused the symbol with the physical reality, the money with the wealth and the menu with the dinner and we're starving on eating menus. Thank you for joining us for seeing through the net with Alan Watts with the IBM Systems Group of Engineers. I'm your host Mark Watts and this podcast was co-produced with the Ramdas Be Here Now Podcast Network. For additional episodes tune into the Be Here Now Network website and for a great depth of Alan Watts' spoken word recordings visit AlanWats.org and AlanWats.com for download and streaming selections as well as his video offerings. Our theme music is by Zakir Hussain, courtesy of Moment Records and please join us in future weeks for further episodes of Being In The Way.