Little Thinkerphilosophy for children

Who Am I · ages 8–11

Where do your thoughts live?

Name a thought. Now point to it. Where is it?

You can point at your knee. You cannot point at your thought about your knee - the thought seems to be somewhere else, or maybe nowhere.

Ibn Sina’s floating-person puzzle pushed on exactly this. If you removed every sight, sound and touch, could a mind know itself? Descartes said the one thing that cannot be doubted is that thinking is happening.

Modern brain scanners show which regions light up when you think. That tells us a lot about where thoughts happen in the brain, and nothing at all about what a thought is. That gap is one of the biggest open questions in philosophy - and nobody has closed it yet.

Try it

Try to think nothing for thirty seconds. Count how many seconds you get. Then write down the first thought that pushed its way in. You have just caught your own mind in the act - which is a strange and quite philosophical thing to do.

What do you think?

Do you think there is a right answer to this question?

Talk about it

  • Is your mind more like a computer, a story, or a garden?
  • Could a robot have a thought about thinking?
  • Are you the same person you were two years ago?

Yes, but… — the arguments people actually make

  • Scans show which part of the brain lights up, so we know where thoughts are.

    That tells you where thinking happens, not what a thought is. Knowing where a fire is does not tell you what burning is.

  • If a computer could talk properly, it would have thoughts.

    That is a serious position. The objection is that it could imitate the output of thinking without anyone being at home — which is the hard part.

  • You can't point at a thought, so it isn't real.

    You cannot point at Thursday, either, or at the reason you came in the room.

What other philosophers think

  • Ibn SinaThe floating person: strip away every sight, sound and touch, and the self still knows it exists. So the mind is not merely the body.
  • René DescartesReached the same conclusion by another road. Whatever is happening in here, something is being thought, so something must be here to think it.
  • Gilbert RyleCalled the separate-mind picture the ghost in the machine, and argued that thinking is a thing we do, not a place we sit.
  • Hilary PutnamArgued a thought is a kind of computation — so it might not matter what it is made of, only what it does.

If you want to go further

  • The Concept of Mind — Gilbert Ryle1949. The clearest attack on mind-versus-body as two separate things.
  • Meditations on First Philosophy — René DescartesMeditation II, for the version that sets the whole argument going.
  • The Book of Healing (al-Shifa) — Ibn SinaHis philosophical encyclopedia. The floating-person experiment is in its account of the mind, six centuries before Descartes ran his.

Most of these were written for adults, which is why it is worth reading them with someone older.