I don’t think I have ever really told anyone about this, but when I was a kid, maybe around ten or so, I can distinctly remember having conversations with myself. I would often think to myself or sort of daydream or talk to my own mind, tell myself things (sometimes, as I got older, these things veered into self-deprecation), ruminate about questions, solve problems, etc. I assumed most people did this sort of thing; I guess you might call it ‘thinking out loud.”
Looking back now, one specific detail I find very interesting about this whole thinking out loud endeavor as a child is that I had a specific name I would use for this version of myself that I was conversing with inside my own head; I would call it ‘second mind’; as if this meta-cognitive entity was someone separate from myself and I could talk to it, reason with it, have a conversation with it. I vividly remember doing this; “I don’t know about that second mind,” or “Do you think he should get onboard the space ship now or should he wait until after the rover is fixed, second mind?” I can remember doing this all the time, having these meta-cognitive conversations with myself inside my own head.
As I got older, these metacognitive abilities worked out very well for me as a writer. Writing felt very easy. I tell the story all the time that most of my three novels were written in my head as I drove back and forth between Pennsylvania and Cincinnati. I would easily hold long passages of prose, dialogue, ideas, and more inside my head and, even though I wasn’t speaking specifically to my ‘second mind’ anymore as an adult, I was meta-cognitively processing all kinds of intricate details about the books I was writing in my head; I was essentially thinking about writing.
These meta-cognitive processes, reflection, self-awareness, a focus on the thinking that happens during long-form processes of creating writing to learn, are all foundational concepts in Writing Studies which is now what I teach at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in the Writing, Rhetoric and Digital Studies Department; me and my second mind feel right at home.
And so recently, when I read the new book by Ethan Mollick “Co-Intelligence” which argues why we must all become AI experts (a stance I share for many reasons), I was struck by this passage:
“And AI can be very useful. Not just for job tasks, as we will discuss in detail in the coming chapters, but also because an alien perspective can be helpful. Humans are subject to all sorts of biases that impact our decision-making. But many of these biases come from our being stuck in our own minds. Now we have another (strange, artificial) co-intelligence we can turn to for help. Al can assist us as a thinking companion to improve our own decision-making, helping us reflect on our own choices (rather than simply relying on the Al to make choices for us). We are in a world where human decision-making skills can be easily augmented in a new way.”
Is that you, second mind? Is Mollick describing an externalization of the meta-cognitive processes I have been relying on for most of my life? Could AI represent the technological embodiment of my own meta-cognitive thinking? And, perhaps the most important question, is this why AI feels so comfortable to folks in academic disciplines who regularly practice and teach meta-cognitive, process-based approaches to thinking and learning, such as Writing Studies, that places less emphasis on product and more emphasis on learning and thinking through process?
Consider this the introduction to a larger exploration of The Second Mind: AI in the Humanities and please join me to explore how we might use AI to more fully embrace meta-cognitive approaches to thinking and learning. This journey welcomes everyone so if you are interested in how AI might be changing the ways we think, teach and create, I welcome you to join me; the journey is what you make it.