Thinking About Thinking
Thinking about thinking hasn’t always been a thing.
We human beings haven’t always had the luxury of being aware of an intellectual process, mainly because for most of our existence, survival took up nearly all of everyone’s time.
Eventually, civilization thrust the division of labor upon us, with all of the good and bad that goes along with that. Division of labor meant that some folks now grew crops, while some people could just make pottery all day.
Some people even had the job to sit around and think.
The folks who sat around and thought all day didn’t just keep their thoughts to themselves. They shared their ideas with other philosophers, as they came to be called. They wrote their ideas down, and some of them even started writing down their thoughts about the ideas of other philosophers.
The concept of thinking about thinking is called metacognition. Our ancient ancestors started getting pretty good at it all at once, around 2500 years ago.
India gave us The Vedas, ancient scriptures that explored self-realization through practices like meditation and introspection.
In China, Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching advocated for a more intuitive and spontaneous approach to thinking. For the first time anywhere, we see evidence of non-judgmental observation of mental processes.
Ancient Greece in particular was a hub for metacognition. Socrates’s famous quote, "I know that I know nothing,” sums up much of his main contribution. Understanding that your own knowledge has limits means that you’re motivated to fill in those gaps, to find someone who knows more than you about a particular thing.
Plato’s Allegory of the Cave perfectly illustrates thinking about thinking. The premise of the entire work is that we don’t experience reality as it is, but instead how we perceive it. Plato’s student Aristotle took this concept and ran further with it, introducing empirical observation and analysis to a more casual thought process.
This ability to think about thinking was our superpower. It turbocharged the acquisition of knowledge, caused a fundamental shift in the way we perceive ourselves, and invited us all to turn inward so that we could better understand the world.
I’m very cognizant of this legacy we all carry. We learned how to think about thinking 2500 years ago, and we’ve never stopped improving that process.
The process is very personal for me. I write every day, and then I ask other people to leave a comment, kind of like this:
This isn’t some attempt to drive up engagement numbers for SEO purposes or something. This is my way of getting some feedback on an idea I’ve had or an observation I've made. I study and research a topic every day for us to discuss, and frankly, I can’t believe how fortunate I am to have conversations about things I’m interested in every single day.
From the bottom of my brain, thank you! Keep on helping me think about this stuff, and we’ll keep talking about it.
There’s another way I get a lot of help in refining the way I think, and that’s working with other writers. This has been unbelievably rewarding, and whatever idea I had before starting work on a piece like this, it’s probably going to be expanded in some way because of the contributions of the other person.
These folks have helped me to refine my own thought process, and I am grateful to all of them for helping me think. Be sure to open a new tab for some of these collaborative works, should they spark your interest.
and I have worked together several times now, and we share a love for polymathic thinking, the concept on which he named his Substack, . Most recently, he and I crafted Becoming Polymathic and An Ode to Beer.Once in a while, a little bit of commentary on an idea is all you need to really expand your thinking.
has helped a few times with my more philosophicall pieces, including (most recently) Mary’s Room. has dedicated her time, energy, and considerable intellect to mental health, especially as it intersects with artists and creators. She helped me think about epigenetics and learned family trauma in Skipping a Generation.Sometimes, collaborating with a group of writers can be just the thing. Sci-Friday is a collection like this, where we each try to write something at least sci-fi adjacent each week, and then we all talk about one another’s pieces (or Notes, if you’re on Substack). One piece like this was about one of my favorite authors, Kurt Vonnegut.
Sometimes you get inspired by something someone else creates. I wrote Macabre Mary partially in response to a story
told on her (very fun) Substack. It was also a part of , a close cousin to Sci-Friday (and such fun!). and I had a blast making The Turk, 100% inspired by a sidebar conversation we had where we both ended up drawing some interesting conclusions, helping us both view the events of the past through a different les.Similarly,
and I had a chance to work on a two-part article about John Maynard Keynes, wherein I mostly talked about Keynes’s life, then Aaron talked about his investing style and economic contributions. We both helped each other think things through. My piece is here, and Aaron’s is here.If you’re writing on Substack, maybe it’s time to start thinking about thinking a bit more. You have an incredible support network here, and all you have to do is engage.
If you’re reading here, you can join the conversation by commenting, or you can simply respond to the email this went out with. Thanks for being a part of my thinking journey!
One of my favorites is the exploration into whether we actually can, or do Think Critically:
https://www.polymathicbeing.com/p/do-you-really-think-critically
My over-thinking about my own thinking recently has given me a headache. I think I'll stop thinking about it.