the meta descartes problem

Even for those not interested in philosophy, and who may otherwise be unaware of Descartes, the average person has probably at least heard the phrase, “I think, therefore I am”, at least once or twice.

Thinking, thinking, thinking. Image via Big Stock Photo/Rawpixel.com

At its heart, “I think, therefore I am” is rooted in Descartes exploration of existential skepticism – that is, the exploration of whether it is possible for us to prove foundational assumptions, such as (paraphrasing), “how do I know that I exist?”

In more recent philosophical times, the root of the Descartes phrase has been described as the “brain in a box” conundrum. If you were just a brain in a box, with no other physical reality, and all your sensory inputs were simply wired directly in to your brain, would you have any way of proving that/know any different? (The Matrix – the first and only good movie in the franchise – certainly popularised this conundrum.) It's a question that still plagues us – just look at the regular theories discussed on whether or not we’re living in a simulation, and (if we are living in a simulation), how we could prove that.

Once upon a time, as many Gen-Xers will relate to, I had a fantastic memory for phone numbers. I could remember a dozen of my relatives phone numbers, my parents phone number, dozens of friends phone numbers, and probably a dozen or more other phone numbers that I called reasonably regularly. And then, along came my first mobile phone (a Nokia 2010), and all that ability to memorise phone numbers went out the window. Why? Because I stopped needing to exercise that mental muscle. I could store more phone numbers in my first mobile phone than I ever need to regularly call, and suddenly my ability shifted from remembering the digits themselves but to remembering how many times I had to scroll down to (or whatever else the process was) to get to the number I need. These days, I still find myself questioning my memory whenever I have to manually recall my husband’s mobile number, even though it’s been the same number for at least 15 years or more.

So, we know Descartes coined the term, “I think, therefore I am”, but that’s not the term that I believe we need to be concerned about as part of our everyday existence. (By all means feel free to ponder the question, of course. It’s fun.) No, I’m far more concerned with the meta-version of the term: “I think that I think, therefore I think that I am”. This entire problem can be (no pun intended) summarised as this: there’s nothing wrong with ingesting a summary of something, so long as you still derive the intrinsic value of it.

Despite the tendency to believe this is an emerging problem, it actually isn’t actually a new one. Summary tools have been popular for decades — for example: study/summary guides for literature for high school and even University students. Other contexts include products like Blinkist, which provide audio and textual summaries of books that people don’t have time to read and digest themselves. The question, in any such scenario, is — just because you’ve read the summary (however it is produced), does this increase your actual understanding of the topic, or just give you a meta-understanding of the topic? Reading a ~40 page summary of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 does not mean you’ve read the literary perfection that is Catch-22. You may be able to regurgitate some key events in the book, but it won’t be the same as remembering, for the remainder of your life, the visceral punch in the stomach you get the first time you truly understand the absolute horror of what happened to Snowden, or truly appreciate the sublime logic of Orr wanting a paid lady to thwack him on the head until he was knocked unconscious.

I was lucky enough to go into a Computer Science degree at University with a poor relationship with mathematics. While most of my contemporaries fevered intensely through electives covering advanced mathematics, physics, and other such topics, I almost addictively absorbed every Philosophy elective I could fit into my schedule. And I’ll never forget the first thing my first Philosophy lecturer said. The head of the department and a former quantum physicist, he remarked, “University is the last time you will learn for the sake of learning”.

Whether this was a fatalistic truth or a cynical fear, he had a point. He went on to describe how once you go into employment, you will inevitably have to learn for the sake of employment. Now, that’s not a bad thing in itself, but his point (I believe) was this: once you’re learning for the sake of employment, unless you have a particular passion for the work, you’ll focus on learning just enough to get the job done — because there’ll always be more work to do, and not enough time to do it in.

We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical. Our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity.

Charlie Chaplin: The Great Dictator, from CharlieChaplin.com

Chaplin may have been working on a very different parable with his quote above (and I believe now, more than ever, people need to read that speech in full regularly), but it’s still emblematic of the problem at hand: we need to make sure our joy, intellect and humanity is preserved regardless of the tools we make use of on a day to day basis.

The risk posed to us with any summary aide tool is the same: do we actually comprehend the results, or do we just think that we comprehend the results? And this isn’t about intellectual snobbery — perhaps, if you’re in a rush, it’s OK just to get the summary and move on. But we must always be honest with ourselves — and like the phone-number/muscle-memory problem I described at the start, we must also be careful to avoid a problem where we stop exercising certain skill-sets and have them atrophy.

“I think that I think therefore I think that I am” is a problem that can be avoided — but as is always the case, it requires deliberate understanding that the problem is there to be avoided, and a deliberate intent to avoid the problem. In short, it means to continually choose to exercise those mental muscles, even if at times you have to resort to the summary.

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