Thoughts on thinking

Critical thinking, imagination, empathy, and the roads back from machine thinking

Apr 15, 2025

This is a bit repetitive and perhaps a little disjointed. It was written over about a week and approaches how we think and view the world from three closely related directions. The last part, in particular, could be a little too far out for some, as I ask readers to take seriously things they may have been trained to reject. I hope you take something positive from it. Thank you for giving it a read.

We worry a great deal about the loss of critical thinking skills and other cognitive deficits.. Those concerns are real, and there are reasons for them. We require perspective, need to understand the collapse of critical thinking skills at times in the past and consider what thinking skills we really need.

I want to begin by suggesting that critical-thinking skills collapsed catastrophically in 1914. Whether you prefer the older synthesis that Barbara Tuchman popularized in The Guns of August or perhaps Christopher Clark's more radical one in The Sleepwalkers, it is clear that thinking went terribly wrong across the ruling elites and all classes in July and August 1914.

In Tuchman's telling, terrible miscalculations were made, especially by the Czar and the Kaiser. In Clark's, these remain, but the personal and psychological motivations of key participants are introduced. Do we find clear, well-informed decision-making during the crisis? Instead, we find members of the Serbian government and military operating in support of terrorists, Austro-Hungarian leaders betting the future of the state on a rickety army, the Czar and Kaiser operating blindly and with inadequate knowledge of their own war plans, French leadership still thirsting for revanche for 1870, and Britain led into the War by a small cabal and verbal promises while trying to stave off the wholesale mutiny of the officer corps and civil war in Ireland.

While not everything was understood about the horrors of modern warfare, enough was that it should have given pause to everyone involved. The British experienced it directly in South Africa only fifteen years before. The Russians had experienced it in full force five years later. That was a war with observers from all of the European powers. There was an understanding that machines were making it almost impossible for war to be fought in the old-fashioned way. They simply refused to learn or to acknowledge the truth, so they went to war with flags flying, troops of mounted cavalry, frontal assaults against machine guns and modern artillery, and, in some cases, wearing colorful uniforms that made men easy targets.

With few exceptions, scientists and intellectuals rallied around the flag in every nation. Their supposed intellects no match for emotional nationalism. Darwinism was perverted and pressed into ideological service in what became a struggle for survival of the fittest. The vaunted German military minds struggled with grand strategy and failed to understand the true nature of total war. In 1917, Woodrow Wilson, the most intellectual and academic of American presidents, found himself sucked into the maelstrom and spent the next two years spinning wonderful ideas that no other leaders wanted.

The world took decades to regain some semblance of sanity, while critical thought led us to more powerful weapons and strategies of self-annihilation.

I have been skeptical of what we call critical thinking for a long time, about 30 years. I am even more so today. A lot of what passes for critical thinking looks an awful lot like wishful thinking, ideological blindness, outdated or misunderstood science and data, or simply ignoring inconvenient facts. It certainly seems like a good summary of thinking in the 21st century.

In the mid-1990s, I began considering critical thinking quite differently after spending a lot of time reading and reading about Machiavelli, a man renowned for his incisive insights into politics. He was a man of curious paradoxes. In the 1960s, Sydney Anglo noted that many of the examples he gives, particularly in his core political work, The Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livy, sometimes demonstrate the opposite of the point he made. His most famous work, The Prince, has been viewed by some historians as a sort of practical joke, a way of getting back at a man who had him tortured by dedicating a book bound to be seen as completely amoral. His Art of War remained in print for a long time, was almost completely impractical, and presented a solution to men facing overwhelming firepower very similar to the disastrous doctrines of 1914. He was also known for his bawdy humor (even in his official correspondence) and wrote comedies. His famous letter to Francesco Vettori brims with an imaginative account of his writing process. As Pasquale and Linda Villari observed in their massive biography of Machiavelli nearly 150 years ago, he was a man of great imagination who reprocessed his acute observations of kings and princes through it. Imagination is vital to any advanced thought. You cannot have critical thought without imagination, not even in science. Where would we be without Einstein's thought experiments?

I am not arguing that wild imaginings are necessary for critical thinking, but that a trained and well-honed imagination is. It is necessary to imagine many possibilities and to work through them with reason. Too often, reason latches onto one or two alternatives attractive to it. This prematurely narrows the scope of reason and leads to tunnel vision.

Iain McGilchrist argues that what we take as reason is often no more than a part of the brain enamored of its self-generated model of the world for the world itself and believing that other aspects of the brain that see a fuller and more immediate picture of reality as deluded or misguided. In other words, much of what we take as reason or critical thinking lacks the ability to self-critique.

Now, we have technologies that try to simulate critical thinking. Whether we can eventually create such technology, the so-called AI of today is limited by its faulty and overly narrow models of thought. They work well enough that many are deceived by them. It is dangerous for us to believe in them because we then reinforce our own narrow views of reason and critical thinking. Between that and the long-standing tendency to outsource our mental functions to technologies, there is a real danger of mass cognitive decline.

As I said, critical thinking, if it was ever general, collapsed long ago. We have been running on fumes for most of the last century. We farmed it out to ideologies and machine thinking. Today, for many, thinking like a machine means building a machine that can do it better than we can, maybe to become like a god to us; that has become the goal. Worse, this has combined with ideologies and absurd visions of the future.

There are many problems with critical thought today. As I said, it is largely mechanistic. It fails because it lacks imagination. AI may hallucinate, but can it imagine? It lacks empathy. It builds on only what it knows, that is, it cannot imagine beyond the model of the world built into the data it has ingested. Reason will only get it, or you, so far. At some point, imagination comes into play. Leaps of faith are made, and the human, the living dimension that may not make good mathematical sense, is invoked and understood.

We are losing those dimensions. We are also losing context. Machine thinking is very good at static things that do not change much. This is surprising as predictive AI, the opposite of the generative kind so famous today, is good at calculating dynamic systems over time, things like weather, climate, or the interaction the inside of a nuclear weapon

The machine has trouble with time and knowing which context are important. It has to be told which context to pay attention to ignore them. Many of our leaders and self-proclaimed prophets of the future appear to have similar limitations.

When we give ourselves over to machine thought, thereby limiting ourselves to thinking the way we believe the machine does, that is, by limiting context, imagination, and empathy, or we give ourselves over to machines that seem to think, we begin to surrender the last investors of our humanity. We begin to accrue not just cognitive deficits but deficits of humanity. We are 86 years into the age of machine thinking, as I count it. We have lost a lot already. We have made ourselves less flexible and more machine-like. We have too long and easily ignored the existential crises facing us, limiting context, imagination, and empathy. Until we re-introduce those unlimited contexts, imagination, and empathy, there is no hope for us.

The elements of our polycrisis (the causal factors and contexts) are down to a general failure across the political, economic, and cultural spectrum to engage with them persistently and in a connected manner. Even though individual elements may be exploitable by a given group or faction, this is due to their general inconvenience and the difficulty of cutting across so many different topics, each with its own disciplines and experts. More deeply, it is a result of the very human and characteristically modern habits of adhering to a single model of how the world works (no matter how dysfunctional) and of branding those who adhere to another model as insignificant, heretical, or subhuman. In this way, we have progressively eroded our intellectual abilities while crowing about our great intelligence and wisdom, have done irreparable damage to the living world (often while treating it as dead, or at least insensate), destroyed hundreds of millions of human lives over the half-millennium of modernity, and blighted the lives of billions more, while reducing the possibilities for our survival to a walk on a tightrope strung across Niagara Falls.

We are not post-modern, just living through the collapse of a world system. Modernity is just a convenient label. To me, its overwhelming characteristic has been a rigidity that comes from dissecting, classifying, and shoving reality into small, neatly labeled bottles of intellectual formaldehyde. It is interested primarily in its own sensations and importance, in control, and in destroying, denigrating, and denying everything it does not like or cannot understand, and it has been at war with itself for centuries because it is incapable of real unity. The witch hunt, genocide, and ecocide are as characteristic of it as science, artistic expression, and individualism.

We cannot change unless we begin to recognize that no one view can suffice for any or all situations, that there are many different realms of lived experience, that we are not unique, that mind is spread throughout the world, and that the current institutions may not be the ones we need.

It is true that we all must learn to think and to think in disciplined ways if we are ever to think for ourselves, but too often, we learn to think only in one way and no other. This is to forget that one is human and begin to become a machine, even if the thought system one embraces is dedicated to moral or spiritual enlightenment. It leaves too little room for feelings, love, and, foremost, empathy. It looks for only one kind of meaning and misses all others, values only one thing, forgets other values, and becomes incapable of thought itself.

To reject the experiences of others because they do not accord with your belief system (and I do include the sciences as belief systems because of the need to accept specific worldviews if one is to practice them) is to deny both their humanity and to narrow reality itself. I do not say we must accept their explanations or interpretations of their experiences or their physical reality, but we should not reject them out of hand as deluded, spurious, or worthless. They may be as real to the experiencers as anything you or I have known. If the experiences and experiencers challenge our own beliefs or force us to consider the world from a slightly different angle, so much the better.

I am not trying to tear down the arts, the sciences, or the humanities. I am raising the necessity to ask when a given mode of thought is appropriate and to see which ones work best in any context or situation. I ask that we avoid the straitjacket of theories that have been elevated to ideologies and keep in mind that theories, methods, and disciplines are only tools to be used judiciously. I also hope that we will cease ignoring aspects of our technologies, societies, cultures, and experiences that fit uneasily into our worldviews and realize that they may inform us and challenge us in new ways.

We are afflicted by those who have too narrow a view of the present and an even narrower one of the future. People can and should think for themselves. They should experiment with different ideas, modes of inquiry, and ways of seeing. They should not stop at the simple and obvious. Maybe they should look at the same thing, event, or situation through the lenses of science, art, the humanities, and perhaps a hundred others. Try to comprehend what others believe and experience without preconceptions, a very tall order. Never give into one way of seeing, one way of knowing, and never, ever give in to a guru, a demagogue, or a god!

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