Thinking outside of the box has long been held up in our popular culture as the epitome of critical thought — the ability to see beyond arbitrary lines to the truth, those flashes of genius we can follow in posterity but would never be able to forge ourselves. To me, this is kindred with meta-thinking, when you take a thought or idea about the world and remove the specificities to come up with a more generalized form of that thought or idea.

Perhaps I’m designing a door and I know that the initial friction between the door and the floor will make it harder and harder to get the door moving at first. Then I realize that this same mechanism could also explain why, when I have a messy desk (the initial friction), it’s harder for me to get started on writing my next article (the movement). This realization is an example of meta-thinking – taking the idea of friction out of the engineering box and stripping it back until I can apply it to any situation in which something is beginning, which is a far bigger box to be in.

This is an addictive way of thinking and I found that soon after I began to form these more generalized insights into the world, I was doing it more often, and my mind couldn’t help but notice the box it was in at the time. A recipe for chicken broth? That’s just a combination of elements that produce a meal high in salt, high in warmth, soft in consistency and hearty on the umami scale, otherwise known as the genre of western food, sub-genre soup. A recipe for the genre of EDM might be low in frequency, low in tonal variation, high in BPM and with a few too many pinches of decibels (at least according to my mother’s recipe). Once you know this, you’ve discovered the underlying mechanism of remix culture – by playing around with the elements that make up a certain form of music you can create a new sound, or subvert the entire genre of soup. A meta-step further and every experience is really just a combination of nerve signals, coming from a variety of receptor types at different frequencies and amplitudes, and this rule can sum up everything from a dawn-lit swim in the ocean to the sensation of looking up in the Sistine Chapel.

This ‘urge to meta’ has it’s roots in perfectionism, and you see it across diverse disciplines and ways of thinking. The entirety of science itself has been arranged in a hierarchical structure, with physics at the bottom, and the assumption is that, if we can find all the universal laws, then we can explain all the behavior that sits above these; on the chemical, biological and sociological levels. So it was only recently when I read the article by Martin Rees, entitled ‘Black holes are simpler than forests and science has its limits’, that I realized what the other side of the equation was, and why meta-thinking isn’t the solution to every problem. Rees highlighted some of the problems with reductionism in science, the primary one being that, while fundamental physical laws can generally explain the complex emergent behaviors in biology, sociology etc, they are not the most efficient ways of doing so and they definitely aren’t always enlightening. While a next century super computer may be able to back-compute the position of every particle everywhere as far back as the Triassic period, it is only through the lens of evolution that we really gain any insight into how our bodies have come to be over time. And I’m sure Michelangelo had loftier goals in mind than a specific neural activation pattern in our eyes.

This could be called emergence-thinking, the acceptance that irreducible details in many scenarios can simply get lost as you take the higher vantage point offered by meta-thinking. Rather than taking everything to an extreme conclusion, we have to find a balance between the two and acknowledge the trade-off that is made with either option. As the old adage goes, once you have a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail; so don’t forget once you’ve pulled everything out of their boxes, to put a few things back in too, lest you end up with a messy desk like mine.

Ironically, I came up with this concept from applying meta-thinking to the article by Rees. My mind is a work in progress.

Here is the article by Martin Rees: https://aeon.co/ideas/black-holes-are-simpler-than-forests-and-science-has-its-limits