TL;DR: <\/strong>Advanced thinking is humanity\u2019s most important learned skill. It has allowed us to create every social and technological improvement we now take for granted. Advanced thinking skills lifted us from ancient doctrine-based primitive thinking to enable humanity\u2019s progress across recent millennia. Continued progress, and resolution of current issues, is dependent on the continued expansion and development of these skills in ourselves, and throughout our societies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Summary<\/strong> One of the key determents of whether individuals can thrive, whether nations can flourish, or whether autocrats be prevented from taking power from democracies, is the explicit teaching of advanced thinking skills to all people from their earliest years. Humans, and human society, developed to survive in a dangerous world. Over millions of years our evolutionary ancestors developed instincts which drew us to the tribal groups that could give us the food, shelter and safety we needed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To make sure we were able to remain in those small tribal groups, we developed the instincts and abilities which would help us to be accepted into the tribe, and therefore protected by it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Many of those instincts related to putting the group above all others (Yudkin et al, 2016, Billig and Tajfel, 1973), and following the rules of the group. Our species developed a social preference for fitting in and accepting our current situation (Cecil, 1972), because that kept us safe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Their societies relied on \u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n This tribalist approach appears to have worked, and the tribes survived. As a result, our species went through thousands of generations of genetic and social filtering for these traits to support our survival. Tribalism kept our species alive for many millennia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Those who stood apart from the tribal crowd may not have survived so well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In our ancestor\u2019s ancient societies, our ideas and beliefs came from our ancient emotions, from social norms, from doctrine, and from The Big Man of the tribe. Ideas were taught as static doctrine, with little room for independent thought. Anything that diverged from this was perceived as degenerate and dangerous, so needed to be crushed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In this environment most people didn\u2019t gain the mental tools, nor have the mental space, to work things out for themselves. They had \u201cvery little awareness of the notion of `argument\u2019 \u2013 the possibility of skill in deductive inference\u201d (Hallpike, 1979, p421). They didn\u2019t have foundational concepts to help them make sense of the world. They had learnt that whether the world made sense didn\u2019t matter as much as whether they adhered to doctrine. They didn\u2019t have overarching conceptual frameworks to help them achieve new interpretations and responses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The result was a short life in a dangerous world spent in blind adherence to tradition and conformity, making sacrifices to the gods, destroying diversity, and always at the mercy of the elements and the predilections of the powerful. Anyone with a new, better idea of doing things was ostracised or crushed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If people in these societies didn\u2019t know what to do, didn\u2019t know what to believe, didn\u2019t know whether something was right or wrong, didn\u2019t know whether someone was good or bad, they would (must) take guidance from their tribal elder (usually an old man with position-based power) and ask what to do, what to think, and how to appease the wrathful gods that controlled their world. They knew that everything had a cause, but to them that cause was usually supernatural and therefore beyond their direct control. Health (Bastian et al, 2019), weather, other people\u2019s actions, were all explained as supernatural events requiring appeasement (usually via some form of tribal elder).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Many isolated societies today that still operate on millennia-old structures and traditions do not have a concept of \u201cmind\u201d, separate from the world around them (Hallpike, 2008), so an explicit process of thinking and contemplation of new approaches is likely to be outside their realm of conceptual possibilities. In other words, resistance to improvement is arguably implicitly built in to their world view.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This primitive mindset was one in which \u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n In this environment, whether through cause or effect of their culture, most people didn\u2019t have the mental tools to work things out for themselves. Teaching of critical thinking hadn\u2019t been invented yet (to the best of our knowledge). They didn\u2019t have mental tools to help them make sense of the world. They didn\u2019t have overarching conceptual frameworks to help them achieve a consistent interpretation and response, and they didn\u2019t have a concept of evidence-based reasoning to help them ensure that their positions made sense.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What they had was an enforced culture of blind respect for position-based power (this being the least legitimate form of power) and no mechanism for questioning that. This was frequently combined with vehement and unwavering support for their own positions, no matter the evidence, logic, consistency or objective ethics supporting an alternative position. Alternative viewpoints were evaluated not on whether they were accurate, but more on whether they held with existing doctrine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Strength, and indeed survival, was to be found only from being in the \u201cin\u201d group, and completely rejecting \u201cthe other\u201d, from following the leader no matter the quality of their leadership, and from often violent responses to dissent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The result was millennia of intellectual stagnation, with corresponding inability, or at times unwillingness, to resolve some of the most basic problems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Non-human animals typically make simple rapid decisions based on primitive instincts and emotions rather than conscious thinking and reasoning. They blindly follow their pack leader and fiercely clash with any other pack. They often make decisions based exclusively on hunger, fear or reproduction. They have neither the intelligence nor the intellectual tools to react in any other way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Humans have evolved beyond this, but not as much as one might hope. Many any of our opinions of the people we meet are formed within the first 100 milliseconds of meeting (Lamme et al, 1998). This may be enough time to decide whether they\u2019re an animal with big teeth, but it\u2019s not enough time to objectively evaluate whether the person in front of you is a good person. It\u2019s not enough time for a more considered response. It\u2019s only enough time for base emotional reactions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As a result of thousands of generations of genetic and cultural inheritance through such tribal groups, humans have developed an extensive set of instinctive and reactive responses to environment which, while possibly valuable in earlier ages, are now of potentially less value.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Humans have many unconscious cognitive biases which adversely impact their ability to make good decisions. They may anchor their views on the first piece of information they encounter on a topic (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974), believe information from an \u201cin\u201d group over an \u201cout\u201d group, no matter the evidence behind it (Gorman & Gorman, 2016), obey authority figures against their better judgement (Milgram, 1963), or have significant negative reactions to even mild forms of social rejection (Eisenberger et al 2003).<\/p>\n\n\n\n To be able to call ourselves better than other animal species, these instinctive thinking processes need to be managed, moderated and (usually) overridden by more conscious and considered approaches. Achieving this requires the awareness and cognitive processes of advanced thinking skills, ingrained into an individual\u2019s world view from a foundational age.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In ancient times when life was harsh, unsafe and often short, humans achieved subsistence and survival by living in largely homogenous tribes that stayed together through adherence to doctrine and discouragement of dissent. In such environments there was little room for the disruption of independent thought, particularly from those without power. Such societies survived, but rarely thrived.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But then some people realised that there is a better way. They started to use their large human brains to analyse, interpret, critique, invent new things and create new ways.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s important to recognise, however, that the apparent inability of people in ancient societies to reason was not due to any lack of intelligence or other genetic failure. It was due to the society in which we each live, and were each educated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The fact that we are able to use reasoning over adherence to doctrine doesn\u2019t mean humans of the present are biologically superior to those who went before. The fact that they \u201cbelieve[d] that Gods or ghosts or magic can influence the rainfall is no evidence that our brains function differently from their brains.\u201d (Evans-Pritchard, 1934, quoted in Winch, 1964). Our higher ability to reason means that we have been taught to reason, building on those who\u2019ve gone before us. People in ancient societies hadn\u2019t been taught the skill of reasoning and critical thinking, so didn\u2019t have such tools available to them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This particular form of positive evolution was not gifted to us by any gods, nor by the natural world. We created it ourselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While it could potentially be argued that we have signs of independent reasoning and logical thinking up to three million years ago when our ancient ancestors (and possibly other hominid species) started making tools (Plummer et al, 2023), our earliest more solid evidence of advanced thinking skills comes much later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The earliest written indication of advanced thinking skills, in this case in the form of introspection, is in the writing of Enheduanna in Sumer from around 2200 BC. Enheduanna\u2019s writing appears to be \u201c[the] first instance of an individual articulating [their] inner life \u2026 [and as such] represents a profound innovation in human consciousness\u201d (De Shong Meador, 2000). The ancient Sumerians created many \u201cfirsts\u201d, including schools, historians and moral ideals (Kramer, 1988). It is arguable that achieving these advances would have required that such reasoning and self-awareness was achieved by more than just a few Sumerian individuals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The earliest written indication of what we might call modern philosophical thinking comes from ancient Egypt, around 1850BCE. The story \u201cThe Tale of the Eloquent Peasant\u201d (Parkinson, 1991) explores issues of justice in rigid hierarchal environments. \u201cThe Debate between a man and his Soul\u201d from the 12th<\/sup> Dynasty (1937 to 1759 BCE) (Allen, 2010) explores what might now be referred to as existentialist angst. While these are not comprehensive philosophical writings as we now understand the field, they are the earliest known writings that explore what have subsequently come to be known as philosophical issues.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Separately, the Vedic Period three millennia ago developed some reasoning approaches, and a millennia ago the Mayan\u2019s appear to have applied systems thinking (Jere Lazanski, 2010) and, we may speculate, other societies achieved similar milestones over the millennia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What was missing from these, however (at least as far as the written record shows), was an explicit effort to analyse, expand and teach the underlying thinking processes that enabled to many of these great early advances.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then some people worked out that there is a better way. They realised that we can use our large human brains to analyse, interpret, critique and invent new things and new ways. They realised that we can go beyond blindly accepting \u201cwhat is\u201d to consider \u201cwhat could be\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Because of this move beyond primitive thinking to more advanced thinking styles our lives need no longer be controlled by our environments and our ancient emotions. We can create systems and objects to make our lives better. We can imagine a better world and create a path to get there. We can advance to a more desirable state.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Everything humanity has created started with someone moving beyond primitive thinking to reason for themselves. Everything from basic hygiene to advanced medicine, from fire to quantum computing, from the wheel to space travel, from inter-tribal cooperation to healthy democracies. Everything.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Every accepted norm, every long-established practice, every ancient tradition, was once new, radical, aberrant and disruptive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It took a certain type of person to create the ideas that lead to humanities\u2019 greatest steps of progress.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It took people who thought outside what exists. It took people who went beyond their primitive reactions to pause and think more carefully about how their world works, how it should work, and how what exists could be changed to something better.<\/p>\n\n\n\n They thought critically and solved problems and, in so doing, contributed greatly to human progress (Rotherham & Willingham, 2010). They moved beyond a primitive thinking style to a more \u201cevolved\u201d approach, no matter when they lived.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This type of \u201caberrant\u201d thinking has occurred many times over the millennia. Initially, we may speculate, it would have been just the occasional exceptionally intelligent person who was able to move beyond primitive reactions to create fire, the wheel or farming.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Eventually, some people formalised and articulated the idea.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To the best of our knowledge, the documented invention of advanced thinking skills happened in two distinct waves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n First, around 2,600 years ago the ancient Greek philosophers (built, it is suspected, on the Babylonians) introduced the concept of teaching independent critical thought. From Thales<\/a> (one of the earliest people to go beyond attribution of natural events to the will of gods) and Anaxagoras (who introduced an early form of the scientific method) to Socrates<\/a> and Plato<\/a>, these thinkers implemented the idea that it is no longer necessary to blindly follow tradition and the will of the gods. Instead, we can think for ourselves to create a better path. And that thinking can be taught.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This was an extraordinary shift. It introduced the radical concept that it was possible to teach a more advanced way of thinking. It introduced to the broader population the concept of structured reasoning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It moved beyond the assumption that all we need is blind faith to live our lives well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Unfortunately, this massive step forward didn\u2019t last. It fell away after a few hundred years as the Greek world fell to violent overlords. But enough of the writings of the ancient Greek philosophers survived through the centuries for future generations to discover the now ancient writings, translate them, circulate them, and build on them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The second, and so far more sustained, wave of widespread teaching advanced thinking skills came from The Enlightenment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Around 300 years ago The Enlightenment<\/a> and The Scientific Revolution<\/a> took the work of the ancient Greek philosophers and added the concepts of evidence and the scientific method. Over time these concepts were shared, developed and, eventually, taught. Then people applied the concepts to new thinking, new areas, new industries, new inventions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The result was the industrial revolution<\/a>, along with the social and scientific changes that followed. The result, also, was widespread education, the explosion in diversity of voices and improvements in public wellbeing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And all that came from a realisation that it is possible to reason for ourselves, and we can use evidence and independent reasoning to improve our ideas and create practical improvements in people\u2019s lives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After the enlightenment the idea of ruling by divine right fell away, independent thinking became (somewhat) acceptable, and belief systems based on science and evidence were introduced into social discourse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n However we define or classify this more advanced, or \u201cevolved\u201d, way of thinking approach, the impact was immense. When people started to reason independently, demonstrate critical thinking, base their positions on evidence or even expose themselves to the scientific method of falsifiability, they demonstrated the advanced thinking skills that have created every advance (and perhaps even some regressive steps) our world has achieved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is as a result of these inventions in thinking skills that modern educated people are able to reason through issues. Consequently, they have the tools to respond to information not only with their base emotions, but also with a more considered position. They can move beyond doctrine. They can identify and interpret evidence in objective ways. They\u2019re able to form their own views based on well-reasoned arguments. They can understand and question their leaders\u2019 logic, and leaders who share this mindset can have open and non-threatening conversations about positions and plans, and together they can create an improved path forward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At the individual level, people who understand how to reason (or think critically) are better at understanding their own true skill levels, or lack thereof (Kruger and Dunning, 1999), and the ability to think critically is even \u201cstronger predictor of real-world outcomes\u201d (that is, a life with fewer major problems) than intelligence (Butler, Pentoney and Bong, 2017).<\/p>\n\n\n\n The progress of the last few hundred years and the world we now live in have been built, above all else, on new ways of thinking. It has been built on the scientific method and key philosophical concepts, such as reasoning, the rule of law, democracy, equality and the concept of inalienable individual rights, the right of anyone to own property.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This has, in many cases, lead to people and society that are more open to improvement, and more likely to use their reasoning ability to improve. It has led to people who understand the value of new perspectives, and are willing and able to change unhealthy behaviours. It has led to people who make decisions not because of blind faith, but because they have reasoned through the factors and have built a view based on logic and evidence. It has led to people who value diversity because they can see and understand the value that brings to them, to the organisations they\u2019re part of, and to their society.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Over the last two millennia, and particularly over the past century, improving education has meant that a growing proportion of the world\u2019s population has been equipped with these intellectual tools. As a result, growing numbers of people are able to reason and can see new problems and new opportunities in the endless complexity of reality, then construct realistic ways to respond to those challenges.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s resulted in a better life for all affected than existed in the millennia before such ideas first occurred.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And it is the ability to think in a more advanced way that got us there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cEncouraging people to define their own problems, explore different perspectives, imagine alternative outcomes to events, and identify erroneous arguments, can boost their overall capacity to learn new material while also encouraging a wiser way of reasoning\u201d (Robson, 2019)<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n [More to come – the full article is a work in progress]<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n If you’d like to investigate this topic further while my final piece on this remains a work in progress, below is some of the research I’ve found useful so far;<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In ancient times when life was harsh, unsafe and often short, humans achieved subsistence and survival by living in largely homogenous tribes that stayed together through adherence to doctrine and discouragement of dissent. In such environments there was little room for the disruption of independent thought, particularly from those without power. Such societies survived, but rarely thrived.
Then some people realised that there is a better way. They started to use their large human brains to analyse, interpret, critique, create new ways and invent new things. Eventually, others worked out that these skills can be taught, and needed to be taught if we are to gain the benefits of widescale advanced thinking skills, and through that build a better world.
Advanced thinking skills are the set of learned cognitive abilities that help us reason well in new situations and in the complex environments we live and work in. They’re made up of the full sweep of learned cognitive skills, such as critical thinking, philosophical reasoning, meta-cognition, evidence-based decision-making, the scientific method, intellectual humility and intellectual empathy, among others.
They have made possible the massive improvements in our lives that have changed humanity from subsistence tribal groups to thriving modern peaceful communities. They are the thinking processes that enable every great invention, every great idea, every great advance that humanity has achieved in recent millennia.
This particular form of positive evolution was not gifted to us by any gods, nor by the natural world. We created it ourselves.
Our explicit written history of these radical shifts in thinking started with the Ancient Greeks, then continued through the Enlightenment and on to the thinkers of the current age. They, and those that went before them, showed us that we can create new ways of doing things, and that we have the ability to create a better world.
Everything we rely on in the modern world exists because someone, at some point, thought differently from those who went before. The houses we live in, the cars we drive, the phones we use, the medical care that keeps us alive, the societies people live safely in \u2013 all of these came about because someone questioned existing approaches and thought of a better way, and then others thought clearly enough to see the potential of that change.
But even though we no longer live in small subsistence tribes, and even though we benefit every day from the clear thinking of our predecessors, advanced thinking skills are not as widespread as might be hoped. Even with centuries of advances in thinking and education, we are currently surrounded widespread use of thinking styles that are more than two millennia out of date.
Primitive thinking surrounds us, and continues to cause harm. We see its impact when doctrine is placed ahead of reason, when xenophobia flourishes, when culture supresses dissent, when powerful people are offended by any who dare to examine their claims, when people reject logic and evidence in favour of their own tribe\u2019s dangerous myths, when people blindly follow power against all objective reason, when people loudly insist on static fixed mindsets and superficial understanding.
There is a way to fix this. Advanced thinking skills can be taught. To almost everyone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Our greatest gift to future generations would be to teach advanced thinking skills as widely as possible and from as early as possible so that it can form a foundation for how all the peoples of the world understand the world around them, and act on the world around them.<\/p>\n\n\n\nPart 1 – The historical perspective<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Evolution for survival<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
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Social systems and thinking skills in ancient subsistence tribal groups<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
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Neurologically-based forms of primitive thinking \u2013 On rapid thinking<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
The implications of primitive thinking styles<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
From ancient to advanced thinking style \u2013 the earliest advanced thinkers<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Preamble<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Earliest indications of advanced thinking skills<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Discovering an alternative<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
The ancient Greeks<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
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The Enlightenment<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
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The impact of advanced thinking skills on the modern world<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
References<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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