The corner of the sage

Pray be seated, children.

Welcome to the corner of the sage. I hope I can offer a little diversion from the ordinary weather of a day. This is meant as a tribute to the brain, which is a poor temple and the only one we have.

I have wanted, for some time, to speak of a subject the computer scene rarely bothers with. Scene. I have never liked the word. Why not the computer arena, the computer exhibit, the computer spectacle, the computer stage, the computer theatre, the computer parade. Nobody has asked me about this. It is possible to live a whole life without giving the names of things a second thought. That, in a way, is the subject.

Aristotle called man a living being with the ability to think. Without that ability we would still eat and sleep and die. We would not ask what we were doing.

It is tempting, here, to start a contest. Which animal is cleverest. The whale, some will say, and mean by that a kind of moral ranking. I am not interested in a ranking. I am interested in the difference between following a pattern and thinking.

Take a hen. Lay three rows of grain in front of her. Some of the grains are real. Some only look real, and taste of nothing you would eat twice.

The first row is all true grain. She eats the first. It is good. She eats the second. It is good. She continues to the end. She has learned a rule: this line feeds me.

The second row alternates. Good, then foul, then good, then foul. After the second grain she becomes careful. After the fourth she has the pattern. She skips every other one. This looks like intelligence. It is only the world repeating itself loudly enough.

The third row has a pattern too, but not one you can steal from the first glance, and not one a hen will live long enough to finish mapping. She grows confused. She eats nothing.

That is the difference I wanted. To recognise a pattern is to survive yesterday again. To think is what you do when yesterday stops working. The hen in the third row is not stupid. She has met the edge of induction. Most of our cleverness lives on the second row, and calls itself wisdom because the trick still pays.

Socrates (470–399 BC). You have heard the name.

He was born in Athens among the sophists and refused the title. A sophist, in his mouth, was a man who already had wisdom, which is to say a man who had stopped. Socrates wanted the older Greek sense of the word philosopher: a lover of wisdom, a hunter, someone who knows that the last answer will not be his to keep.

He wrote nothing down. Plato, a student, did, and so we can never be sure where the teacher ends and the student begins. That, too, is a kind of philosophy. We inherit other people's questions and answer them in our own handwriting.

Socrates walked. He asked who we are, what we are doing here, what the purpose of a life might be. He thought the answers mattered less than whether the questions were the right ones. We still call it Socratic irony: the pretence of not knowing, the question asked as if by a fool, to the passer-by who is sure. I suspect he enjoyed it. I also suspect it was how he learned. The knowledge was not in the reply. It was in the next question the reply made necessary.

He believed people chose badly because they knew too little. "He who knows the right thing will also do the right thing." And: faced with two evils, a man who understands them will not take the greater if the lesser is available. That is a hopeful doctrine. It assumes that evil is mostly a failure of seeing. I am not sure the world is that kind. I am sure that refusing to look is a way of choosing the greater evil without having to name it.

The second row of grain will carry you a long way. It will not tell you who you are when the pattern breaks.

I am sorry. Is that the time. Thank you for sitting five minutes in this little corner of the world. Have a pleasant evening.

The sage.