First a quick clarification of two core concepts. This is easy.

If you remember learning how to drive a car or ride a bike, you likely recall transitioning from the uncertain, unsure, exploratory moments of early learning to the increasingly effortless, unconscious, process that now allows you to drive from work to home without even noticing that you did so.

In the first case (learning) we are in a costly, awkward and error prone “explore” mode. This mode is really rather terrible at “getting things done.” But, when you find yourself in a novel environment or in need of innovating new tools or techniques, “explore mode” is precisely the right place to be.

Once you’ve mapped the territory and have identified the things to look out for (“stop light”) and the appropriate responses to those things (“red light means stop”), it is time to move to “habit mode.” Habit is really rather terrible at exploring reality, creativity and innovation. But it is fast and allows for efficient optimization.

This transition, from conscious learning to unconscious habit is commonplace and extraordinarily useful. Any well functioning human will transition between these two modes countless times in their lives.

The problem that I am noticing in the contemporary environment is that we seem to have run aground on a very dangerous reef: we have replaced authentic thinking (a fluid use of both “explore mode” and “habit mode”) with a simulation of thinking. A form of “habit mode” that represents itself as the totality of thinking.

Simulated thinking shows up as thinking, takes itself as thinking and, armed with a vast and often nuanced script of pre-defined signals and ‘appropriate’ responses, even resembles thinking. But it is not. It is habit, not learning. And, as a consequence, it is completely incapable of creatively responding to (changes in) actual reality.

Broadly speaking, we have become stuck in “simulated thinking”.

This is extremely dangerous. In fact, I’d like to invite you to consider that this might be the central problem of the moment. To be sure, a whole lot of the ideology floating about these days is a mess. And we will have to deal with that as well. But without thinking we can’t even really take the first step. We are trapped using old tools to solve new problems. And that can’t end well.

How did we get here?

A huge amount of early childhood is spent in explore mode. Learning to walk, learning to talk, learning to pick up a pea and put it in your mouth. You can’t be taught any of this. You just have to use explore mode and learn it. Explore mode is largely responsible for all fundamental learning, for exploring your environment and forming novel insights and responses to that environment.

But, and here is precisely where things start to go wrong, it is possible in some cases to move from “learning” to “being taught.” A classic is the good old multiplication table. Who among us “learned” multiplication? I don’t mean “used rote repetition to carve it as a deep habit,” I mean well and deeply came to grasp the fundamental essence of “to multiply” for yourself. My sense is that the answer is practically no-one.

If your only relationship with multiplication is the ability to rapidly answer questions like, “what is five times five” or “what is nine times nine,” you have turned multiplication into something that can be processed with habit mode. In the effort to accelerate and normalize the contents of mind, our society has chosen to apply “habit mode” to the multiplication table. Fair enough. And, in fact, maybe the right way to relate to the subject. It is an effective way to do basic multiplication. But it isn’t thinking.

And here is the problem: in society, it is often the case that most of the things that you need to know were figured out a long time ago. You could rediscover them for yourself, but for the most part that is an exercise in inefficiency. Certainly this is not the sort of thing that a school striving to cram as much “knowledge” as possible into its students would go about doing.

Instead, the efficient answer is to treat all knowledge as a version of the multiplication table: a sort of pre-fab script relating possible inputs (“three times three?”) and appropriate outputs (“nine!”). Who was the sixteenth President of the United States? What is the atomic weight of Hydrogen? What is the meaning of Walt Whitman’s self-contradiction? What is the appropriate relationship between individual liberty and common interests?

Perceive possible inputs, scan available outputs, faithfully report on the most appropriate response. Quickly. Reliably. Speed and precision — the sort of thing that “habit mode” was designed for.

Do this long enough and your native capacities begin to atrophy. And in our modern environment, this is how we end up spending nearly all of our time.