Know thyself, stardust & chess

If such a thing even exists.

Which is obviously a little self-indulgent, because what I'm really asking is, where do I sit in the grand scheme of things when it comes to thinking about thinking?

But let's allow it.

Metacognition seems to be becoming a little bit vogue at the moment. Almost the new IQ in some conversations. Not exactly, obviously, but there does seem to be this idea that the ability to step outside your own thinking and look at what you're doing is some particularly important measure of a person.

And I did kind of intuitively think, well, doesn't EQ cover a fair bit of that territory too?

Then the more I thought about it, the more I thought this is probably another one of those things that the ancients understood perfectly well, only without the nice shiny glossy packaging.

Know thyself and all that.

Which isn't to say the modern frameworks aren't useful.

They clearly are.

If you can recognize a pattern in how people think, or behave, or respond to things, and then give that pattern a name, you can do something with it.

You can study it.

You can compare it.

Maybe even hack it a little.

But I wonder if that's really understanding it.

Or whether a lot of what we do is recognize that certain patterns are happening in psychology, in the human mind, in human thinking and human behaviour, and then put those patterns into some kind of matrix or framework.

And that's useful.

But I don't know that we ever truly understand what any of it actually is.

Because sooner or later, at least for me, it all comes back to consciousness.

And that's where I start getting into trouble.

What is consciousness doing in all of this?

Is it just coming along for the ride?

Is it the driver?

Is it some sort of symbiotic relationship between consciousness and the biological machinery of the human body?

I don't know.

The spiritual traditions will tell you there is something else going on. A soul, or spirit, or some eternal part of us that isn't simply generated by a bunch of neurons firing.

And I think the spiritual side of it is necessary, or at least useful, because it gives you somewhere to hang your hat with it all.

Otherwise you could spend your entire life pondering these things.

Researching them.

Ruminating over them.

Going deeper and deeper and deeper.

And then arrive at the end of your life, as plenty of people before us apparently have, and say, well, perhaps the important thing was simply to live well.

Anyway, somewhere in the middle of thinking about all of this I remembered something I watched the other day about us all essentially being stardust.

And yes, I've heard that before.

We all have.

Joni Mitchell was singing it more than fifty years ago: We are stardust.

I've known that song for years, but I don't think I'd ever really stopped at that line.

We are stardust.

Not poetically.

Scientifically.

And this was the bit I hadn't really understood.

When the universe was very young, there weren't carbon atoms and oxygen atoms and iron atoms floating around waiting for somebody to eventually assemble them into people.

There was mostly hydrogen and helium, with a little lithium.

Then gravity started pulling matter together.

Stars formed.

And inside those stars, under temperatures and pressures I can't really comprehend, nuclear fusion started turning lighter elements into heavier ones.

Carbon.

Oxygen.

Nitrogen.

The sorts of elements that eventually become plants and animals and people sitting around wondering what consciousness is.

Then those stars died.

Some shed their outer layers back into space.

Some exploded.

Other fairly violent things happened out there too.

And the material they had made went back into the mix.

Then new stars formed from that material.

New planets formed from it.

Eventually our own solar system formed from a cloud that already contained material produced by earlier generations of stars.

Which means some of the carbon in me was actually forged inside a star.

The oxygen in me comes from that same kind of history.

The iron in my blood didn't begin with Earth either.

That's what being stardust actually means.

And for some reason learning the mechanics of it made the whole thing considerably stranger rather than less so.

Because then I started wondering where all this stuff was immediately before me.

If I'm replacing atoms all the time, where are they coming from?

Food?

Water?

Air?

If they're coming from food, then presumably they were in the ground.

Or in a plant.

Or another animal.

And before that, somewhere else.

And then I thought, hang on.

Before there was an Earth, where was this stuff?

Some of it was in the cloud of gas and dust that became the solar system.

And before that?

Some of it was inside stars.

Stars that no longer exist.

Which sort of cooks my brain a little.

Because now I've gone from wondering whether I'm particularly good at thinking about my own thinking to realizing that some of the material currently doing the thinking was once inside a star.

So at least we've learned something useful.

That may be a first for one of these articles.

And many, many, many far more intelligent and insightful people than me have obviously had a crack at exactly these kinds of questions.

And eventually, somewhere in there, you seem to arrive at created or creator.

Something came from something.

Or it didn't.

And I have no idea how you get around that.

Then another thought popped into my head.

Imagine you took a chessboard and all the chess pieces and dropped them into some civilization that had absolutely no idea what any of it was.

None.

They've never seen chess.

They don't know it's a game.

They don't know what the pieces are called.

They don't know how they move.

They don't know that they're even supposed to move.

But you tell them these things are important.

They mean something.

Then leave them alone with it for a thousand years.

I guarantee you that when you came back, they wouldn't have chess.

They'd have something.

But I don't think they'd have chess.

Maybe it's not even a game anymore.

Maybe they've organized their society around it somehow.

And initially I thought, well, perhaps they end up with kings and queens and bishops and so forth.

But even that doesn't work.

Because I'm already imposing what I know about the pieces onto them.

What if this civilization doesn't have kings?

Why would they look at that particular piece and think, obviously that's a king?

They wouldn't.

In fact, what if it worked the other way around?

What if over the years they developed those positions in their society because of the pieces?

So instead of the piece representing a king, eventually they develop something like a king because there is this object they have spent generations believing represents some kind of authority.

I don't know.

I'm making this up as I go along.

You could go anywhere with it.

Maybe the chessboard becomes an education system for children.

Maybe children learn to arrange the pieces in certain ways and those arrangements mean different things.

Maybe that's how they teach mathematics.

Or language.

Or history.

Maybe a thousand years later their entire education system is based on something we would recognize as a chess set, and not one person has ever moved a pawn two squares on its first move.

Or maybe you go there and all of their architecture looks suspiciously like chess pieces.

Towers everywhere.

Strange domes.

Buildings with crenellated tops.

And every building has a checkerboard pattern incorporated into it somewhere.

Every one.

Perhaps it's in the entranceway.

Or tiled into the floor.

Or carved into a wall.

Nobody remembers why.

Nobody has remembered for hundreds of years.

They just know that the ancients required it.

That for some reason a building isn't really complete without it.

It is necessary.

And we would walk into one of these buildings and immediately think, that's a chessboard.

They wouldn't know what the hell we were talking about.

There would surely be people studying all of it.

Very intelligent people.

People who had spent their entire lives trying to understand these objects.

There would probably be different theories about them.

Different schools of thought.

Maybe arguments that had gone on for hundreds of years.

Somebody would have written the definitive book about the sixty-four squares.

Somebody else would have written another book explaining why the first bloke had completely misunderstood them.

And both of them might be able to produce enormous amounts of evidence.

The strange part is, they wouldn't necessarily be stupid.

And they wouldn't necessarily be wrong about everything either.

If they've spent a thousand years working with these objects, they probably would know an enormous amount about them.

They might have discovered relationships and patterns that we'd never even considered.

Their education system might be brilliant.

Their buildings might be beautiful.

Their society might function perfectly well.

They may have taken these objects in directions the inventors of chess could never have imagined.

But they still wouldn't have chess.

At least I don't think they would.

And somewhere in thinking about that, I started wondering if that's what we do.

Not with chessboards, obviously.

With reality.

We find the pieces.

We see patterns in them.

We give the patterns names.

We work out that if you do this, that tends to happen.

Then over enough time we construct more and more sophisticated explanations for what's going on.

And those explanations can be incredibly useful.

They can predict things.

They can allow us to manipulate things.

They can improve our lives.

They can be extraordinarily accurate.

But is that the same thing as knowing what the whole thing actually is?

I don't know.

And that's where I think I ended up back at "know thyself."

Because when you first hear that, it sounds almost simple.

Know yourself.

Understand your tendencies.

Know what makes you happy.

Understand your strengths and weaknesses.

Fine.

But if you really push on it, what exactly is the self you're supposed to know?

Is it the biological organism?

The consciousness observing the organism?

Both?

Something else?

And can the thing doing the observing ever completely understand the thing doing the observing?

Maybe that's part of the challenge buried inside those two words.

Not simply knowing what you like, or why you react the way you do, or recognizing your own patterns.

Perhaps knowing yourself also means occasionally asking what the thing doing all this knowing actually is.

And how much of what it thinks it understands might simply be the framework it has built around the pieces it was given.

That's when I realized I had somehow gone from wondering how metacognitive I might be to ancient philosophy, psychology, consciousness, souls, atoms made inside stars, and a completely imaginary civilization that has spent a thousand years trying to work out what a chessboard is for.

And having gone through that thought experiment, I don't think I'm any closer to answering any of the questions I began with.

Which I'm strangely okay with.

Maybe that's the point.

Or maybe there isn't one.

Either way, every now and then it's probably worth following the thought and seeing where it goes.

Then read a good book, be useful to yourself and others, and don't be a pain in the arse.