When growing a silicon wafer for computer chips, the ideal state is to have the entire wafer be a single crystal. In a single crystal, the entire lattice is uniform, there is a sort of long-range order within the crystal. This is desirable because many chips are printed onto a given wafer, and if the crystal is
mono-crystalline, as above, each chip will have nearly exactly the same properties as any other from the wafer. In a basic sense, this is one of three possible states for the wafer to be in.
The second, polycrystalline, occurs when there are regions of uniform crystals within the wafer, but each of these regions is at a slightly different angle to the other regions. At some point on the wafer, there will be boundary lines, making the wafer look much like a geopolitical map, where the mono-crystalline areas meet. This type of wafer is problematic, because much like a geopolitical map, the properties of the chips which are printed in the varying regions will be different. Not only this, but for chips which are printed on a boundary line, the properties will not even be consistent within the same chip. The final possibility, which is essentially unusable for computer chips, is amorphous silicon, where there are only tiny crystalline areas which show no long-range order at all. This is an over-simplification, but will do for our purposes.
You may be wondering why you just read a short primer on basic microelectronic fabrication (This is one of those things that I learn about in school, by the way, if you were wondering). The point is that I think it's a good analogy for human minds.
Human beings, in general, do not have a very integrated world-view. In various areas of our lives, we adopt different attitudes and beliefs. I believe this has a lot to do with the way we are wired to learn at birth. When you are born, you essentially know nothing. It is hard really to imagine what that is like. Babies are not even cognizant of how to move their own bodies, or even that those flailing flesh limbs actually are part of themselves. They have not integrated the physical world into its place with respect to their identity. What ends up happening is that things are taken as they seem to be, or as they are told they are, because they have nothing to world with. In this way, children are like wafers, becoming crystallized. These new ideas are seeded in different places in their minds, and new ideas are built upon these seeds.
These seeds, or assumptions, are necessary as scaffolding on which to develop further ideas. It is not really possible to function in a reasonable way if you do not have at least locally integrated thoughts. A person with an 'amorphous' mind, would be functionally insane, because no order would exist from thought to thought. It is only possible to operate in an at least locally mono-crystalline situation.
This is much like a crossword puzzle, in which one must sometimes guess at a clue in order to build up further clues for the rest of the puzzle. Sometimes more than one clue will fit, given what you know about the surrounding pieces, but guess you must, and continue on to progress.
Most people start with many seeds, just as people insert answers all over a crossword, not simply working from one corner and completing the puzzle from there. Eventually however, the boundaries begin to come together.
In the early stages of development, seeds which are created local to one another form these polycrystalline boundaries relatively early. These boundaries are often overcome, as one position asserts dominance over another (For example, the understanding that your mind is not the same as other minds, and that others do not possess the same information as you do comes to children at a young age). Part of the reason this is possible is because the boundaries at this stage are very close to where the seed is. Much like in a crossword, if you have several clues that fit, but one that does not, you will erase that one and try to insert a different answer.
These initial amorphous areas coalesce, and become locally mono-crystalline. As time moves forward, there are certain stages where even relatively larger areas which have been established become absorbed by a much larger crystalline area (Discovering that Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny do not exist, and that your parents, people whom you trust, have been lying to you, is a good example of this). Eventually however, you will reach a point where very large areas of reason and order come up to a boundary.
Imagine you were doing a crossword puzzle, and you had filled out nearly the whole thing. You had started working from both the top and bottom, and all is filled out, only you are having problems where the two meet. The clues you have inserted have created a scenario where no possible answer will fit between the two blocks. This is a scenario which very rarely crops up in a crossword puzzle, because the whole framework is structured so that it is unlikely that you will be able to create a large block of answers which are coherent with each other, but are all incorrect. A mind, however, is much more vast and unrestricted than a crossword puzzle. Like in the polycrystalline silicon, nearly everyone is in a scenario where the various parts of their lives are locally integrated, but the entire mind does not fit up.
This is a difficult proposition for a crossworder, because what it essentially means is that a large portion of the work you have done is incorrect. In the case of a mind map, it would mean that a large portion of your world-view is inconsistent with the rest of it. You have made an assumption, as you must have done, at some point in your life. You have grown, through reason and understanding, a large realm of consistent thought, based around that fundamental assumption from years in your past, one that you probably don't even remember.
This non-integrated, polycrystalline state is the normal operating point for nearly our entire species, myself included. This can happen because in our daily lives we simply don't operate around those boundary conditions. In fact, some of these boundary conditions are so commonly in the same spot, that our entire society has grown around avoiding these boundary conditions.
People become extremely uncomfortable when asked to rationalize the disjunction between these non-compatible areas in their mind. Examples of this are "Moral Dilemma" type questions. How does one rationalize the disparity between the wealthy and the poor? Or the belief in laws against cruelty to animals, and yet the existence of slaughterhouses and cattle pens? The fact that rampant AIDS and TB epidemics cut swaths through huge portions of our population, and yet the majority of us in North America are more concerned about what our cell phone ring will tell other people about us?
Part of becoming a global citizen, about having a truly global world-view, is confronting these disjunctures in each of our minds. It is an unpleasant process, un-weaving years of experience and rationalization, but it is a requirement for people who want to operate at that level. Fragmentation of mind is a coping mechanism for people who are forced to operate at a boundary condition and don't want to deal with it. I've read that many Nazi soldiers would work at the concentration camps all day, feeding people into gas chambers, but be able to go home and be very loving fathers and husbands. By fragmenting your mind, it allows you to operate under different assumptions in different times. Despite this, having a fragmented worldview means that part of your assumptions are WRONG, and people who make decisions which affect large segments of the population cannot afford to have a mind so fragmented. Working under wrong assumptions, simply because one does not want to confront the underlying discomfort is unacceptable for people in those positions.
I don't expect the majority of the population to adopt a mono-crystalline mindset, nor do I advocate that an integrated world-view is in all cases better than a fragmented one (after all, it is certainly possible to have an integrated, but incorrect world-view), but the population should at least be aware of these things, so that they can demand answers to tough questions of their leaders, instead of letting them slide like eels around even the simplest of questions as we do today.
