Stephen M. Fleming - Know Thyself: The Science of Self-Awareness

Imagine you arrive at your doctors office for an appointment to discuss some recent chest pains. You undergo a series of blood tests and scans, and a week later you return to the clinic, where your doctor reviews the results with you. The condition seems serious, and she briskly recommends surgery for a heart bypass. When you ask your doctor why she is confident the procedure is necessary, she walks you through her thought process, including the possibility that she is wrong and what being wrong might entail, before reiterating her advice that you undergo the surgery. What would you do?

Now imagine that, after you undergo a series of blood tests and scans, the data is fed into an artificially intelligent assistant, which confidently states that the condition seems serious and it would be desirable if you had surgery for a heart bypass. When you ask your doctor whether this is really necessary, she cant tell you; she doesnt know why the recommendation has been made. All she can say is that, when fed the full range of test data, the AI has been highly accurate in the past, and that it would be wise to trust it and proceed with the surgery. What would you do?

In the first case, the answer probably seems obvious: if the doctor is confident and able to explain her reasons for being confident, you feel you should trust her advice. In the second, however, it may not be so clear. Many of us intuitively feel that if a person or a machine is going to be making high-stakes decisions on our behalf, we should be able to ask them to explain why they have come up with a particular answer. Many of our legal frameworksthose that ascribe liability and blame for errorsare based on the notion of being able to justify and defend what we did and why we did it. Without an explanation, we are left with blind trustin each other, or in our machines. Ironically, some of the highest performing machine learning algorithms are often the least explainable. In contrast, humans are rapacious explainers of what we are doing and why, a capacity that depends on our ability to reflect on, think about, and know things about ourselves, including how we remember, perceive, decide, think, and feel.

Psychologists have a special name for this kind of self-awareness: metacognitionliterally, the ability to think about our own thinking, from the Greek meta meaning after or beyond. Metacognition is a fragile, beautiful, and frankly bizarre feature of the human mind, one that has fascinated scientists and philosophers for centuries. In the biologist Carl Linnaeuss famous 1735 book Systema Naturae, he carefully noted down the physical features of hundreds of species. But when it came to our genus, Homo, he was so captivated with humans ability for metacognition that he simply annotated his entry with the one-line Latin description Nosce te ipsumthose that know themselves.

Self-awareness is a defining feature of human experience. Take a student, Jane, who is studying for an engineering exam. What might be going through her head? She is no doubt juggling a range of facts and formulas that she needs to master and understand. But she is also, perhaps without realizing it, figuring out how, when, and what to study. Which environment is better, a lively coffee shop or a quiet library? Does she learn best by rereading her notes or by practicing problem sets? Would it be better to shut the book on one topic and move onto another? Can she stop studying altogether and head out with friends?

Getting these decisions right is clearly critical for Janes chances of success. She would not want to fall into a trap of thinking she knows a topic well when she does not, or to place her trust in a dodgy study strategy. But no one is giving her the answers to these questions. Instead, she is relying on her awareness of how she learns.

Our powers of self-reflection do not lose their importance when we leave the classroom or the exam hall. Consider the experience of James Nestor, an author and free diver. In his book Deep, Nestor recounts how he traveled to coastal locations in Greece and the Bahamas to report on free-diving tournaments. At each tournament, there is only one goal: to dive deeper than all the other competitors, all on a single breath. To prove that they have reached a particular depth, the divers retrieve a tag with a number emblazoned on it. If they pass out after surfacing, the dive is declared null and void. To be successful, professional free divers must be acutely self-aware of their ability to reach a depth while avoiding injury or even death. Slight underconfidence will lead to underperformance, whereas slight overconfidence may be fatal. Its telling that a large part of free divers training takes place on land, in psychological exploration of their underwater capacities and limitations.