Looking for advice, Max turns to an older colleague named Sol Robeson, who tells him he needs to give up rational thought altogether. Just feel, with your intuition. The film's lesson couldn't be clearer. Thinking is bad rational, controlling, and exploitative. It leads to brain trauma and death.
Feeling is good intuitive, empathic, and nurturing.
It leads to healing and sex. So for all its trappings of erudition, the film's attitude is profoundly anti-intellectual. But then, that's true of most indie genius films. In Good Will Hunting the hero is so alienated from the intellectual establishment that he can only get into MIT as a janitor. Will thumbs his nose at higher education because he can dispense with the whole tedious process of schooling.