I think with my feet

"Integrity isn't virtue; it's alignment between inner truth and outer actions", as Martha Beck neatly puts it. However, a whole book -The way of integrity (2021)- to talk about this felt a bit extra. Her Dantean Framework is needlessly cathartic. Everything is a process with typical phases, yadi yada… Glorified self-help still sells. Perhaps I’ve read too much silky zen buddhist stuff. Either way, the book exemplifies a broader tendency: taking a process that can be directly observed and obscuring it with structure, narrative, and emotional ceremony (especially in the psychology-meets-spirituality genre). The dilemma is known, it’s in the name.

Still, it’s a book. That counts for something. A published work signals care, and an attempt at nuance. Often the nuance is so subtle, words are the wrong tool. Just like feeding all the books to an AI model won’t make it a great thinker. There’s a lot more to cognition than words carry.

My own thinking, if I may, is directly tied with my interaction with the world. My thinking and moving are one process. Feeling slightly too hot, being a bit tired, needing to pee, influences my thinking (that last one a lot). I just learned that this is a field of research called "embodied cognition". I would have hoped for it to be obvious long before it was academic.

Buddha and Socrates were both cautious about putting their ideas down on paper. Their teachings were lived truths requiring a living voice. No web page or book captures the essence of anything. It’s especially salient to contemplate in the case of these two monumental figures, who pressed how everything is a matter of perspective. Words feel so real.

Today, we use a lot of computers, that leads us to assume that the solution to most problems is computer-shaped. When you have a hammer, everything you see is nails. Salience bias.

A growing subset of people believe that computers will continue to dramatically augment human intelligence. In their view, every limitation is just a matter of more computing power or more training data. Adjacently there is a fun bunch thinking about "Tools for Thought". Most of them researchers and programmers in the western world. To their credit, many acknowledge bias and limitations. In practice, these tools remain glorified note-taking apps (sorry, personal knowledge management systems). Computer-shaped solutions for human-shaped problems. Any lingering concerns have largely been drowned out by the economic opportunities of the AI rush.

Machines can mimic a lot of our concepts such as language, numerals, coordinates, and images, doing so much faster than we can. While it’s useful, it is not intelligence. It’s all left-brain, hyper-efficient processing of logic and syntax, useful but limited, and certainly not "true" in any embodied sense. In academia, this is fueling a search for new ways of thinking, mainly to cope with the sheer speed and volume of (mis)information.

This exposes the hollow promise of the "Tools for Thought" field, which often treats the human mind as a system to optimize. By focusing on "bi-directional linking," "knowledge graphs," and "second brains," researchers often prioritize accumulation and fragmentation over the integrity of the whole. Filing cabinets for the ego. And so much digital noise for my already tapped out left brain.

These tools may help organize thoughts, but they do nothing to help realize the nature of thinking itself. I think there is more gold to it, but no research grants will pay for long walks and sitting out in nature. As always I’m writing this as a note to self, ironically reminding me that the mind is not the notes. While meditation and aimless walks are the opposite of thinking, it’s been for me useful counterweights to a world of words and numbers. No scaling or funding needed.