Opinion | Teaching to Think (Teacher or Expert Programmer?) | Observatory

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A teacher is the one who teaches how to think.

Apparently, towards the middle of the twentieth century, the anthropologist and teacher Margaret Mead began to propagate an idea that we now all have in mind in the educational environment: “Students must be taught how to think, not what to think.”

With that phrase, as I say, she inserted a notable twist to the idea of education, opening a new era in teaching – and it put us all into enormous trouble. Therefore, I want to try contributing to this matter to commemorate the day dedicated to teaching (celebrated on May 15 in Mexico).

“Teaching how to think…” Since then, we have told ourselves, “Okay, perfect, that’s our job now. The teacher will be the one who teaches thinking. But where do we start? How do we do it?” Let’s not go as far as Martin Heidegger, who asked what it means to think. We’ll say, “Let’s stick with that much more accessible and familiar place: teaching how to think. That’s it…”

Much simpler? Really? Is it truly easier? Is it even possible?

The truth is that, if we want to answer seriously, we must pose the question as deeply as Heidegger and start by asking ourselves what teaching how to think is. Then, we expand by asking what thinking means. But I will not go too far here, or rather, I will not consider such deep, let’s say, philosophical, thinking that touches themes such as the soul, being, and things like that. Instead, I will limit myself to the simpler idea, from my perspective, that Margaret Mead may have had in mind when she uttered her famous phrase.

As a scientist, Mead would have trusted rational thinking characterized by logical precision. Simultaneously, having the female mind of her time, she would have fought for critical and even subversive thinking. Finally, being a humanist, she would have sought coherent thinking about the subjective, the personal, and the intimate. (An example of her humanism is her affirmation that the first archaeological trace of civilization is a broken but healed femur, indicating that a fellow human attended to that patient.)

The little I know about Margaret Mead allows me to imagine that she was talking about this kind of thinking, so everything that follows is intended to be a preamble to whether it is possible to teach such thinking logically, critically, and humanistically (which I propose to call reasonable thinking).

Can we teach others to be reasonable?

Let’s take it one step at a time. The book University Time, 100 Years of the National University (edited by my sister-in-law, Andrea Gálvez) has an old photograph entitled Swimming Practices of the Benito Juárez Educational Center, where a group of naked young people are seen, face down, in a swimming position, on the solid floor of a terrace! From the outset, the photograph is hilarious: swimming lessons without a pool! But if you think about it, you decry that there is no reason to laugh. Are these young people really learning to swim? Certainly, all sensory experiences (the texture of the water, its temperature, its density, its resistance, its pressure, etc.) are absent at this time. If any of those young people have never been in a pool or the sea, they will have a minimal idea of what awaits them when they transfer from the terrace floor to the actual water. Indeed, at this point, the whole “water” aspect of swimming (to put it a bit humorously) would be, at best, merely theoretical. Is it possible to learn to swim like this?

Unfortunately, I don’t remember and haven’t been able to find the name of the scientist who, to demonstrate the power of theoretical knowledge, taught his children to swim like this, without a pool, or sea, or anything. He explained to them all the elements he considered necessary, and when the children threw themselves into the pool, they could proceed, swimming perfectly.

The theoretical side of thought can be shared with others through language. But is thought reduced to what can be expressed in words? Some believe no, that the moment children jump into the water and swim, the content of their thinking also becomes sensory and acquires an element that cannot be shared with others, at least not with words. Let’s put it this way: I can’t describe my feeling when submerged in water, not even with the sharpest logic (and even if I had all the time in the world).

Nevertheless (as hard as it is to believe!), a good number of scientists and scientific philosophers (the so-called physicalists) think it is possible to convey to others, theoretically, how the texture of water, the taste of peaches, and the color blue feel, taste, and look. They believe they can affirm (taking the color blue as an example) that a person who has always lived in a black and white room (and is dressed from head to toe in a suit the same colors) could one day go out into the world and distinguish, relying only on theory (physical, chemical, neurobiological), which of all the colors they see is blue, distinguishing it from the others.

Is it possible to know colors, sounds, and flavors without seeing, hearing, or tasting them? Is rational thought enough to know everything? Is there nothing that can be defined as “subjective,” in the sense that it is absolutely personal and unshareable? Of course, you can answer these questions in the affirmative, but remember that doing so is accepting that it is possible to explain, theoretically, how it feels to be in love, how seafood soup tastes, and what the musical note C sounds like. It means to accept that if we had enough time, we could explain Beethoven’s 5th Symphony to someone from beginning to end, and that person would enjoy it and feel moved exactly as if they were in front of the orchestra.

In other words, it is believing that science can come to know everything and that, of course, someone can be taught how to think through lessons in logic, which is nothing more than describing the ways (very deep, subtle, and acute) the mind follows to know something. For those who believe this, it is possible to lead students through the corridors of logical-mathematical language, detecting errors and deceptions until they decipher the entire truth. (Regarding those who do not believe this, it is because they do not know the scope of reason or how deeply it can penetrate reality for revelation.) In short, a human can know everything as if he had created it.

However, this is not the only possible vision.

There are other scientists and non-physicalist thinkers who consider that all of the above is unreasonable, that even if we have all the theoretical information about, for example, the color blue, we can never know what it “looks like,” nor can we identify it without having seen it first. For them, a type of experience that is not theoretical can only be obtained directly and is inexplicable to others (the sensation of air on the skin, a toothache, a high-pitched versus a low-pitched sound). These experiences, called qualia, are the subjective component of knowledge.

For qualists(let’s call them that), formal thought has a limit; at the end of the chain is something mysterious that forms us as unique subjects, something we can never explain to ourselves or others, something not proper to objective physical knowledge and only occurs in us and nothing or anyone else in the world. (We can call it “subjectivity” or “direct experience”.)

If qualia exist, it is clear that thought has limits, and one cannot teach someone how to think sufficiently to find the only truth. I remember the joke about the student taking his professional chemistry exam stating that hydrogen sulfide (the one that smells like rotten eggs) had a pleasant smell. The dismayed synodal stood up and exclaimed, “How dare you say it has a pleasant smell?” “Well, I like it,” the student replied. The truth is that no one will be able to refute his answer: if he likes it, no one will ever be able to teach him to think he’s wrong.

New summary: We can only teach our students how to think if we accept that, sooner or later, we will encounter a limit.

The truth is that the idea of qualia is repugnant to physicalists because it opens the possibility that there is something immaterial called a soul. However, being a qualist does not mean believing that a metaphysical instance explains subjectivity. Many qualists are scientists who do not think that a little being from the beyond is the one who perceives blue. They affirm that in our reality, non-material aspects that do not yet appear on the radar of our knowledge determine these experiences; we will have to wait for new scientific advances to understand them.

Thus, a teacher can choose between two types of attitude: teaching his students how to think to reach the whole truth or showing them the limits imposed by subjectivity. We can explain the dramatic relevance of this pedagogical choice if we perceive its relationship with a crucial topic: artificial intelligence.

What do physicalists think about teaching a robot to think? Following what we have said so far, for them, the problem reduces to the material (to the physical, let’s say). Thus, once we produce a physical infrastructure identical to the human body (or perhaps the brain and nervous system will suffice), we can program it analogously to that used to teach students to think in the classroom (i.e., according to the rules of logic). This would produce actual artificial human beings endowed with qualia, that is, with sensory experiences and subjectivity.

And the qualistas? For them, recreating the human body with physical accuracy is insufficient. They will have to wait for new knowledge (perhaps a different science than the current one) to allow understanding of the immaterial component of consciousness. Only then will they know if a robot can be programmed to distinguish blue from red from its experience. In the meantime, they must resign themselves to creating inanimate machines without a being inside. The phrase of the famous Darwinist biologist, T. H. Huxley, who in the nineteenth century encouraged his contemporaries not to believe in fairy tales, supports this thesis: “Something as remarkable as consciousness arising from altering nervous tissue is as inexplicable as the appearance of a genie when Aladdin rubbed his lamp.”

There is a third position, which in no way implies reconciling the previous two but only adds complexity. It’s the one I take (and I selfishly explain it at the end, to do it quickly and avoid many arguments). It goes like this: Some of us believe that subjectivity is neither the product of the interaction of matter nor a provisional mystery that we one day will be able to solve with new cognitive tools; instead, it is something that will always remain inscrutable, leaving eternally intact the intimate experience of contemplating “blue,” of shuddering at the word tree in the middle of a poem, or simply of knowing that we are getting a good idea. The mystery is, and always will be, in ourselves.

This third perspective will never allow us to create animate beings in the world. Instead, we can teach our students ways of thinking only when we commit to deep logical thinking. We are capable of being alert to “that” which cannot be thought, which is impossible to transmit with words: “that” which, in any case, lies between words and does not come from the domain of reason, makes thought “reasonable” and allows us to communicate and understand each other.

Such trust is called faith, and I don’t expect the reader to experience it. In fact, it’s another way of believing in fairy tales. The difference with scientists is that those of us who think this way accept believing in such stories; while believing in fairies discredits scientists, it favors us. Chesterton, the profound essayist, as much a believer in reason as in faith, explained, “My first and last philosophy I learned in the children’s playroom. What I believed in most then, and what I believe in most now, is fairy tales. They seem entirely reasonable to me. Fairyland is nothing but the luminous realm of common sense.” Then he gives us, as an example of the kind of common sense he means, “… the noble lesson of Beauty and the Beast, which tells us that we must love things before they are lovable.”

In the end, as you can see, this third option does not resolve the issue of how to teach our students how to think. We still have to consider a fourth option if we want to take a step forward.

I am going to finish with this conclusion here as a “finale presto,” an abrupt ending, a last provocative without further argument: Whether we opt for infallible logic, for resigning ourselves to its limits, or for a confident mixture between the logical and the ineffable, we must always remain teachers with a sense of humor, which is nothing more than admitting that, at least momentarily, there is something essential that we cannot understand about our fantastic universe.

Long live swimming without a pool!

Long live the pleasant aroma of hydrogen sulfide!

Long live the teachers in their day!

Translation by Daniel Wetta