Submerged Cables: Intuition

“Arthur Koestler compared intuition to an underwater chain whose ends are visible on opposite sides of the ocean. As my title indicates, I prefer the image of a submerged cable, for today it is through unbroken fiber-optic cables, not open links susceptible to corrosion, that information is transferred across the globe at near light speed. In any submerged cable, there are connections; we just don’t see them.”—Skip Eisiminger

Skip the B.S.

By Skip Eisiminger

“Amber, once reckoned as a lightning trap,/is now understood as petrified sap.”—The Wordspinner

“I’ve explored myself from soul to snout,/but after eighty years, I’m still a scout.”—The Wordspinner

CLEMSON South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—8/10/2015—I took Psych 201: Introduction to Psychology when Shane, our first born, was about six months old, not knowing he’d be perfect for my experiments in epistemology. He spat and frowned when I fed him a lemon slice and sucked ferociously when I offered him my honeyed finger. He cried when the radio was too loud, closed his eyes when the light was too bright, dropped the ice cubes I handed him, and wrinkled his nose when I held his diaper too near. Hence, I concluded, humans are born knowing a great deal, or blessed with a ready grasp, or both.

One day after class, I asked Dr. Twitchell, my psychology professor, if a child born without the five senses knows anything. “If he has a heartbeat, he’d have his reflexes,” he said, “because no one forgets how to breathe or blink.” And while it would be hard to prove, he thought the poor lump of an asensual infant would still have his intuitions. He said he was a Platonist, for every normal child, in his view, has the potential to see the illusions cast on the cave’s wall for what they are. He asked me what my major was, and when I said English, he said he came down between Plato and Wordsworth. When I asked him what he meant, he said Plato had theorized that the birth shock all but destroys the memory of our pre-existence, but we gradually regain this knowledge. Wordsworth, however, thought we come “trailing clouds of glory” but gradually lose the knowledge we’d absorbed in heaven.

“Next time you’re in the library,” he said, “read the story of Socrates and the slave boy who’d never had a course in geometry.” Basically, as I eventually learned by reading Plato’s “Meno,” Socrates convinced his audience that the boy not only understood Pythagoras’s theorem, he’d always known it. Patiently, his teacher drew a two-unit square in the sand and asked his student how the area might be doubled. The boy guessed that doubling each side to four units would double the area. Another drawing, however, convinced him that doubling the sides would quadruple the area. But slicing the small square along the diagonal and using four of these diagonals to form a square would double the area. There’s more, but the boy eventually intuits a² + b² = c², Socrates implies, a universal truth that originated long before humans had a name for the hypotenuse.

A generation later, Aristotle thought there was nothing in the conscious mind that entered the “organ of sensation” before birth. But even in the dark silence of the womb, the mind appears to have “known and unknown unknowns.” Women, I think, are particularly gifted with the latter. Late one evening, my wife returned from a neighborhood walk complaining of an “eerie feeling” she’d had walking under some beetled pines on a vacant lot. I should tell you that her grandmother was a faith healer, and her mother melted lead soldiers on New Year’s Eve to read like tea leaves. That night, a storm toppled two of the trees onto the street in front of our house. Now, we’d spoken of these trees before and wondered about calling the city, but we never did. Was my wife attuned to the ion abundance near these stressed trees, or was God speaking to her? I’d walked and driven under the same trees many times without any spontaneous mental combustions.

Another time, however, I was the one whose viscera were stirred by an unknown hand. Ingrid and I were seated in an air-conditioned movie house on a July evening. Two hours into a three-hour film, I had a sinking feeling, as if the bullet with my name on it had been fired, and I turned to the woman in whose eyes I see the future, to tell her. But before I could speak, she said, “I’m going to faint.” And she did. After she regained consciousness and I’d brought her some water, I remembered Einstein’s famous doubts about quantum mechanics, “spooky action at a distance.” But aren’t gravity and magnetism also spooky actions at a distance? Like two electrons that have been “entangled,” once two people have profoundly loved each other, no matter how distant they are from each other, the distress of one will move the other. For years now, when Ingrid’s back goes out, mine usually follows.

Finally, here’s one of our son’s intuitions. One day, when Shane was three, we were driving on a two-lane country road in the family VW, and he was standing on the hump of the floor in the back-seat area without benefit of car seat or safety belt. It was 1967 after all, and I had no seat belt, either. On most excursions at age three, Shane loved to grab the driver gently by the neck and ask, “Can no breathe?” Suddenly, a dog ran across the road, and I hit the brakes hard, throwing Shane between the seats, and onto my lap. Actually, I pulled him there as he flew by to keep him from hitting the dashboard.

After I’d slowed and we’d caught our collective breath, I posed an ethical question. I asked him whether if no cars were coming, if there were no time to brake, and if the police were behind me, should I cross a double yellow line (“A no-no,” I explained), or hit a dog in the road. Like Huck Finn, who knew he had to help a slave escape despite all the laws and evidence to the contrary, Shane said, “It’s just paint, Daddy.”

My Georgia grandfather, who’d left school in the eighth-grade, liked to say, “The cows will come home whether pigs fly or not.” That’s a homespun version of The Onion’s famous headline, “World death rate holds steady at 100%.” Nevertheless, the counterintuitive still amazes: who knew that a sheet of infinitely flexible paper, folded double 50 times over, would reach beyond the solar system?

An objective review of some 25,000 predictions by 250 seers concluded that the vast majority proved false, like most intuitions. Though the much-lauded Punxsutawney Phil is right only 39 percent of the time, Amazon was granted a patent in 2014 for “anticipatory shipping.” Apparently, some buyers are such an open book that Amazon gives them the occasional book they don’t want and didn’t order. But despite algorithmic progress, no one loudly anticipated the crumbling of the Berlin Wall, the World Trade Center, or America’s banking system. Nevertheless, those who do predict disaster are often crowned “Oracle.” Here’s my personal bid to seize the title from Nostradamus: “Somewhere in Europe, a kid playing quoits/will resurrect the true Hakenkreuz.” I cast it in rhyme to help you remember it the next time you see the swastika flying above the Brandenburg Gate.

The screen writer Rupert Hughes, brother of Howard, supposed, “Women’s intuition is the result of millions of years of not thinking.” If Rupert had lived long enough, he might have pointed to Marilyn Monroe’s observation, “A woman knows by intuition or instinct what is best for herself.” Hughes and his ilk might wonder, “Really? After three failed marriages and a suicide?” But surely women have been thinking long and hard for ages, or they and their men wouldn’t have survived in a world where 99 percent of all species are extinct. Four or five million years of living with stronger men forced them, unconsciously perhaps, to develop parts of their brains that men neglected.

Like Monroe and others who gamble with their lives, no one’s forecasts are perfect, which keeps bookies and stock brokers in business. But I know for a fact that the women in my life have had more contact with the spirit than the men, and that includes me. In a universe in which humans are fundamentally larvae in a tomato because we know nothing about the 96 percent lying beyond the garden wall, we need every first, second, and third eye available to us.

Arthur Koestler compared intuition to an underwater chain whose ends are visible on opposite sides of the ocean. As my title indicates, I prefer the image of a submerged cable, for today it is through unbroken fiber-optic cables, not open links susceptible to corrosion, that information is transferred across the globe at near light speed. In any submerged cable, there are connections; we just don’t see them.

 Note: The image of “Plato’s Allegory of The Cave” may be accessed at http://www.deviantart.com/browse/all/?offset=24&view_mode=2&order=9&q=plato+cave and http://shock-socks.deviantart.com/.