Cormac McCarthy asks an interesting question here , and gives the wrong answer, also interestingly. Along the way he manages to describe in simple language a fundamental problem of how our minds work, one that he rightly says, remains mysterious – though I think I have a clue.
McCarthy briefly retells the story of Kekulé, who struggled to understand the form of the benzene molecule. A dream of a lizard biting its own tale (like Ouroboros) prompted him to realise that the molecule was a ring. So we may conclude that Kekulé’s unconscious had done the work for him and found the solution. McCarthy rightly contends that most of our problem-solving, our maths and so on, is done unconsciously. We can reason about things consciously using language and other symbols explicitly, but it i
The problem posed by McCarthy is: why didn’t Kekulé’s unconscious just tell him the answer, instead of sending it as an esoteric symbol in a dream? The unconscious understands language, he says, or it wouldn’t have understood the problem Kekulé was trying to answer in the first place (I don’t think that is clearly true). He concludes that the unconscious has been running our mental lives quite successfully for millions of years before language came along: it therefore distrusts and dislikes language and pre
Motus Mentis