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 scrip…