The Act of Creation Read Online Free PDF Page A

direction -- say
west to east. Another person will repeat sub-vocally the syllables Li,
La, Lo , as if striking a tuning fork, hoping that his memory circuits
(Lincoln, Lisbon, etc.) will start to 'vibrate' in response. His strategy
determines which member of the matrix will be called on to perform,
and in which order. In the spider's case the 'members' of the matrix
were the various sub-skills which enter into the web-building skill:
the operations of secreting the thread, attaching its ends, judging the
angles. Again, the order and manner in which these enter into action is
determined by strategy, subject to the 'rules of the game' laid down by
the web-building code.

All coherent thinking is equivalent to playing a game according to a set
of rules. It may, of course, happen that in the course of the parlour
game I have arrived via Lagos in Lisbon, and feel suddenly tempted to
dwell on the pleasant memories of an evening spent at the night-club
La Cucaracha in that town. But that would be 'not playing the game',
and I must regretfully proceed to Leeds. Drifting from one matrix to
another characterizes the dream and related states; in the routines of
disciplined thinking only one matrix is active at a time.

In word-association tests the code consists of a single command,
for instance 'name opposites'. The subject is then given a stimulus
word -- say, 'large' -- and out pops the answer: 'small'. If the code
had been 'synonyms', the response would have been 'big' or 'tall',
etc. Association tests are artificial simplifications of the thinking
process; in actual reasoning the codes consist of more or less complex
sets of rules and sub-rules. In mathematical thinking, for instance,
there is a great array of special codes, which govern different types
of operations; some of these are hierarchically ordered, e.g. addition
-- multiplication -- exponential function. Yet the rules of these very
complex games can be represented in 'coded' symbols: x+y, or x.y or x^y or
x÷y, the sight of which will 'trigger off' the appropriate operation --
as reading a line in a piano score will trigger off a whole series of
very complicated finger-movements. Mental skills such as arithmetical
operations, motor skills such as piano-playing or touch-typing, tend
to become with practice more or less automatized, pre-set routines,
which are triggered off by 'coded signals' in the nervous system --
as the trainer's whistle puts a performing animal through its paces.

This is perhaps the place to explain why I have chosen the ambiguous word
'code' for a key-concept in the present theory. The reason is precisely
its nice ambiguity. It signifies on the one hand a set of rules which
must be obeyed -- like the Highway Code or Penal Code; and it indicates
at the same time that it operates in the nervous system through 'coded
signals' -- like the Morse alphabet -- which transmit orders in a kind of
compressed 'secret language'. We know that not only the nervous system
but all controls in the organism operate in this fashion (starting
with the fertilized egg, whose 'genetic code' contains the blue-print
of the future individual. But that blue-print in the cell nucleus does
not show the microscopic image of a little man; it is 'coded' in a kind
of four-letter alphabet, where each letter is represented by a different
type of chemical molecule in a long chain; see Book Two, I).* Let us return to reasoning skills. Mathematical reasoning is governed
by specific rules of the game -- multiplication, differentiation,
integration, etc. Verbal reasoning, too, is subject to a variety of
specific codes: we can discuss Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo 'in terms
of' (a) historic significance, (b) military strategy, (c) the condition
of his liver, (d) the constellation of the planets. We can call these
'frames of reference' or 'universes of discourse' or 'associative
contexts' -- expressions which I shall frequently use to avoid monotonous
repetitions of the word 'matrix'. The