# The Kekulé Problem  ## Metadata - Author: [[Cormac McCarthy]] - Full Title: The Kekulé Problem - Category: #articles - Summary: insert summary - My notes: - Summary: The text discusses the relationship between the unconscious mind and language, highlighting how the unconscious operates differently from our conscious thoughts. It suggests that while language is a powerful tool, the unconscious prefers non-verbal forms of communication, like images and metaphors. This tension raises questions about why the unconscious does not simply express itself in words and how it organizes our thoughts and experiences. - URL: https://nautil.us/the-kekul-problem-236574/ ## LLM Chats ## NotebookLM ## LLM Audio ## Highlights > Why the snake? That is, why is the unconscious so loathe to speak to us? Why the images, metaphors, pictures? Why the dreams, for that matter. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k4ghg04hsxbfg7tb52x5wbcs)) > A logical place to begin would be to define what the unconscious is in the first place. To do this we have to set aside the jargon of modern psychology and get back to biology. The unconscious is a biological system before it is anything else. To put it as pithily as possibly—and as accurately—the unconscious is a machine for operating an animal. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k4ghhhs6dkmewbdpbd9a3xhg)) - Tags: [[ai aesthetics paper]] - Note: what it in fact is #aesthetics > Problems in general are often well posed in terms of language and language remains a handy tool for explaining them. But the actual process of thinking—in any discipline—is largely an unconscious affair. Language can be used to sum up some point at which one has arrived—a sort of milepost—so as to gain a fresh starting point. But if you believe that you actually use language in the solving of problems I wish that you would write to me and tell me how you go about it. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k4ghra4njeg52xabwqrhamhr)) - Tags: [[phenomenology/thinking]] > I’ve pointed out to some of my mathematical friends that the unconscious appears to be better at math than they are. My friend George Zweig calls this the Night Shift. Bear in mind that the unconscious has no pencil or notepad and certainly no eraser. That it does solve problems in mathematics is indisputable. How does it go about it? When I’ve suggested to my friends that it may well do it without using numbers, most of them thought—after a while—that this was a possibility. How, we dont know. Just as we dont know how it is that we manage to talk. If I am talking to you then I can hardly be crafting at the same time the sentences that are to follow what I am now saying. I am totally occupied in talking to you. Nor can some part of my mind be assembling these sentences and then saying them to me so that I can repeat them. Aside from the fact that I am busy this would be to evoke an endless regress. The truth is that there is a process here to which we have no access. It is a mystery opaque to total blackness. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k4ghtwwmdajzhqe7zxgb7hxf)) - Tags: [[phenomenology/thinking]]