An Aspect of Concept Formation in Tesla’s Thought

The following remarks are an attempt to understand one aspect of Tesla’s mental processes on creative discovery. Like some other geniuses, Tesla had a striking style of creative thought. The image of the setting sun which played a role in his discovery of the alternating current device for example, and his ability to conjure up eidetic images of working machinery, are well known. Also like some other geniuses, Tesla attended to the workings of his own extraordinary mind, and often wrote about what, in his view, made it tick in its special way. In this paper I want to explore a comment of this kind, made by Tesla on his own approach to solving problems of invention,¹ in 1921.

Before describing his own style of thought, Tesla pauses to indicate what he considers an error in thought habits of others: Some people, the moment they have a device to construct or any piece of work to perform, rush at it without adequate preparation, and immediately become engrossed in details, instead of the central idea.

There are two points here. First, the errors of others in “rushing at it without adequate preparation” and becoming “ engrossed in details”, and second, the alternative approach recommended by Tesla. That is, not rushing at the problem without adequate preparation, and becoming engrossed in the central idea. Let us pursue for the moment Tesla’s preferred method. What does it actually amount to? Tesla continues:

Here, in brief, is my own method: after experiencing a desire to invent a particular thing, I may go on for months or years with the idea in the back of my head. Whenever I feel like it, I roam around in my imagination and think about the problem without any deliberate concentration. This is a period of incubation. Then follows a period of direct effort. I choose carefully the possible solutions of the problem. I am considering, and gradually center my mind on a narrowed field of investigation. Now, when I am deliberately thinking of the problem in its specific features, I may begin to feel that I am going to get the solution. And the wonderful thing is, that if I do feel this way, then I know I have already solved the problem and shall get what I am after.

Having gone this far, Tesla comments further on this feeling of certainty that the solution is in hand, and it is this next remark that I want to focus on with some care.

The feeling is as convincing to me as though I already had solved it. I have come to the conclusion that at this stage the actual solution is in my mind subconsciously. though it may be a long time before I am aware of it consciously.

The experience reported here, a kind of foreknowledge that the solution will be forthcoming, is not unique to Tesla. The same experience was described by Poincare, Russell, and many others involved in creative work. Interesting as it is just on Tesla’s account, then, it is also of more general interest. An important point to note is that in Tesla’s own statement, there is a report of the experience he had -the feeling that he was going to get the solution and, in addition to this, a theory about the experience. The report of the experience is just that. It says that the experience occurs and describes some of its quality, such as its relative certainty. The theory tries to say what the nature of the experience is - that it is a manifestation in the conscious mind of the inventor of the fact that the solution already exists in the inventor’s subconscious mind. Let us note that we may admit the existence of the experience Tesla reports, and assign it some importance in the creative process, without believing in the theory or interpretation of it which Tesla (and many others) suggest. In the remainder of this article, I shall develop a theory about the nature of this experience, this “foreknowledge” that a solution to a problem has been or will be found - that does not use the concept of the subconscious mind. On its positive side, this theory will suggest that the creative process as experienced by Tesla involves a transcendence of linear time and occurs instead in a time which reflects the indeterminancy and the “holographic” structure also familiar from recent physical theory. In order to make all this clearer, let us consider the assassination of Robert Kennedy by Sirhan Sirhan.² Sirhan shot Kennedy at about 12:13 a.m. on June 5, 1968. Kennedy died some 25 hours later at 1:44 a.m. On June 6. Sirhan murdered Kennedy. Now consider the question: When did Sirhan murder Kennedy? At the time of the shooting? Surely not, because if that were so it would have been true to say at that time “Sirhan murdered Kennedy.” But that would not have been true. Nor is it true that Sirhan killed Kennedy at the time of Kennedy’s eventual death, for at this moment, Sirhan was in jail, and he did nothing. Nor is there any single moment between the shooting and the death of which we could say: “That is when the murder occurred.” Rather, I believe we must say that the murder occurred in the time expanse from the shooting to the death, but not at any particular time in that expanse. Thus, we have a distinct case of indeterminancy. For this is what indeterminancy is: a set of elements is indeterminate, for example, if it has some elements - say something between one and one hundred elements but no determinate number of elements. Or an electron has an indeterminate mass if it has mass - but no determinate amount of mass.

In Tesla’s case, it would often be true to say that he first arrived at the solution to a problem sometime between time a and time b, but at no particular time.

And finally, a thing is indeterminately set in time if it belongs to that time (say, Tuesday between noon and four), but not any determinate time within that span. This is how it is, we have seen, with an act of murder. And this is also how it is, I am suggesting, that creative acts of mind sometimes occur. In Tesla’s case, it would often be true to say that he first arrived at the solution to a problem sometime between time a and time b, but at no particular time. It is not satisfactory to say that he solved the problem at the time it first occurs to his conscious mind, for, as Tesla himself points out, this ignores the experience of realizing that the solution has appeared before it is worked out (as Tesla puts it) in the “conscious” mind. Nor is it justifiable or desirable to speculate (or worse, to uncritically assume) that if the inventor’s mind grasped the solution in the period during or between his first undertaking the search for a solution and his articulating it in consciousness, then there must have been some relatively discrete, determinately bounded arena or medium in which this determinate event could occur - and it is partly this thought that often suggests, as I believe it did to Tesla, that the relevant discovery first occurs “ in the subconscious.” But the indeterminate nature of the mental act in question makes it clear that no such assumption is needed -just as it is indeterminate in time, so a creative act can be indeterminate in the “where” of its occurrence. We may say, I suppose, that it occurred “in Tesla”, (to the extent that that language accurately describes its experienced quality), but there is no need, and so no justification for further or more determinately specifying the “where” of its occurrence as “in the subconscious mind.” Besides being characterized by indeterminancy, the time of a murder, and the time of a Tesla-like creative act of mind, have a holographic structure. By that, I mean primarily that in the case of the murder and the case of the creative discovery, the whole is present, and equally, in each of the parts. But in order to see this, it is necessary to explore a further aspect of these cases; namely, their character as temporal gestalts. Consider, then, a further case; namely that of a person who stumbles at the top of a staircase. I mean the kind of case which we all know - a man stumbles at the top of the stairs, looks around in embarrassment, to see if anyone has seen him, and if someone has seen him, explains his stumbling by saying: “I thought there was another stair.” Did he “think there was another stair?” Notice that in such a case the man did not think to himself “let’s see - there is one more,” nor did he quietly voice this proposition to himself beneath his breath, nor did his lips silently shape the words: “There is one more stair.” So it is tempting to postulate that the thought occurred (if indeed we agree that in this case he did think there was another stair) at a determinate time “in the subconscious mind.” But once again, there is no need for such an assumption. Here is another, better way of thinking about the existence of this “thought” namely that now, in retrospect, referring to that thought to explain or clarify how I came to stumble, is what it is for there to have been the thought then. Let me be clear: just as an electron in an EPR pattern of relationship can have a spin, but only in spatial relation to another, paired electron, so the “thought that there was another stair” can occur at time t₁ but only in relation to the occurrence of a paired thing at time t₂.

I realize that to many people this idea will seem hopelessly counterintuitive - even impossible. This resistance comes, I think, from the idea that the past is gone

I realize that to many people this idea will seem hopelessly counterintuitive - even impossible. This resistance comes, I think, from the idea that the past is gone. Unlike the future, which is “open”, the past, according to this view, is “closed” and no longer available to be changed or in any other way determined or constituted by what happens at a later time. In reply to this, I would make two points. First, it is not being suggested that the past is “changed” by what comes later. In the case of the man who stumbled on the stairs, it isn’t that at first he didn’t think there was another stair, and then later, when he stumbles, that gets changed around so that now he did think there was another stair after all. On the contrary, he thought there was another stair all along, given such-and-such subsequent development. Second, it is not sufficient at this point simply to insist that the past is closed in such a way that what I am suggesting is impossible. For this would simply be to beg the question. Of course, for one who believes that either a thing occurs at time t₁, or else does not occur at time t₁, independently of what comes later, what I am suggesting will appear as impossible. But to simply insist on this “closed past” ontology would be to win the argument by definition. Now consider how the idea of temporal gestalt relates to our two test cases, which, like the thought that there was another stair, exists in a temporal context. First, it is clear that a shooting can be a murder, but only in relation to the subsequent resultant death of the victim. If the death does occur, then, the shooting was a murder, otherwise not. In the case of the stumble, the occurrence of the thought that there was another stair at time t₁ depends upon the occurrence of the stumble. In other words if the same stair-walker, in the same conditions had, for whatever reason, not executed the awkward stumble we described at time t₂, then thought nothing else whatsoever in the case had changed, the thought “there is another stair” would not have occurred at time t₁. This is what I call a “temporal gestalt” - an entity whose parts exists and have their properties only in a context, where the context in this case is not the more familiar spatial context of here-and-here, as in perceptual figure-and-ground, or the EPR effect, but a temporal context of before-and-after. Returning now to our original problem, let us consider how this idea of temporal gestalt relates to the suggestion I made earlier that Tesla’s experience of problem resolution occurs in a time dimension that is holographic. The question, remember, was whether the murder. in the one case, or the solution, in the other, equally exists in each of the parts of the relevant time expanse t₁ - t₂. Surely, these things did exist at the times to which their respective occurrences are assigned, but, only in relation to what comes after. Tesla’s solution to a problem did exist in him, prior to the time of its appearance in his conscious mind, just as the thought “there is another stair” existed in the stumbler at t₁. But it existed, not in the linear time of mechanically successive moments, but in a gestalt-time with holographic structure. The occurrence of the thought, the solution and the murder in their respective contexts have this in common: they all occur or exist equally in each of the parts or separate moments, of their temporal gestalts. Thus, in addition to the characteristic of indeterminancy, the mental acts of creative thought so carefully described by Tesla, and so prominent in his mental life, have a holographic form. These features of them seem to me to be important alternatives to the psychoanalytic, “conscious/unconscious” model that Tesla himself seemed to prefer as an interpretation of their underlying structure.