Art Reboot

22 of intellect was a giant leap in consciousness that transformed the place of humans in the world. It developed a new power to knowingly use past experience in the present to plan for the future, and it enabled increasingly sophisticated languages, allow- ing knowledge to become cumulative and transmissible from one generation to the next. The squeaks and barks of beaks and mouths became human language and, in time, the written word. Nobody denies the role that the intellect has played in the emergence of human culture and society. The problem with intellect, however, is that it demands as well as serves. As its capacity evolved and its power to accelerate our progress grew, it also exerted power over us. Suspended in our increasingly soph- isticated linguistic abilities, we became trapped in their delights like wasps in a jam jar. We became tempted to see our intellectual mode of consciousness as self-sufficient and autonomous; not just as one mode of consciousness but as the only mode. Tool became tyrant. Einstein hinted at this: The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honours the ser- vant and has forgotten the gift . The work of the American-Austrian logician Kurt Gödel (1906–78) in the early twentieth century gives us valuable in- sight into the limitations of intellect. Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems (two of them) posited that it is forever impossible to understand a closed system within and confined to the languages of the system itself. He reached this important conclusion in