Yesterday, I opened this semester’s AKC series, Rethinking Thinking: Bodies, Minds, and Machines in the Modern World, with a lecture entitled, “Why re-think thinking? Three myths about the mind.”
Over the semester, I’m inviting the King’s community to explore how we think—and how we might think differently—with help from colleagues across the College’s faculties and departments. My aim in the opening talk was to set the stage by asking why the very act of thinking deserves re-examination.
Here’s the podcast version on Spotify. And, below, I provide a short blog-version of the talk.
Rethinking the taken-for-granted
We live in a world obsessed with thinking—and with improving it. “Critical thinking” appears on every syllabus. Books about how to think “fast and slow” fill bestseller lists. And the “thinking machine” has become a cultural icon, from Turing’s early speculations to ChatGPT today. Yet, for all this attention, we rarely stop to ask what thinking actually is.
Behind our everyday use of the word lie three powerful myths—ideas so familiar we hardly notice them, yet so influential they shape how we understand intelligence, design education, and even imagine ourselves.
The three myths are:
- Thinking is just in the brain.
- Thinking is just like a machine.
- Thinking is just having an opinion.
Each myth contains a grain of truth—but each leaves out something vital. By re-examining them, we can recover a richer, more humane account of thinking: one that is embodied, meaningful, and grounded.
Myth one: Thinking is just in the brain
Ask most people where thinking happens, and they’ll point to their heads. But as philosopher Shaun Gallagher and others have shown, cognition is not confined to the brain—it is embodied. Our movements, gestures, and environments are not accessories to thought; they are its conditions.
Try explaining a difficult idea without moving your hands, or solving a problem while sitting perfectly still. Thinking happens through the body. Even writing, walking, or talking are forms of thinking in motion.
Philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers go further: the mind extends into its environment. When you rely on a notebook, smartphone, or even a colleague’s memory, those external supports become part of your cognitive process. In this view, learning at King’s is not just information transfer into individual heads; it’s a distributed act involving tools, texts, spaces, and people. The mind, we might say, is networked.
Myth two: Thinking is just like a machine
The rise of artificial intelligence has revived one of contemporary philosophy’s central questions: what distinguishes human thought from computation? Can a machine that writes poetry or diagnoses disease truly understand what it’s doing?
John Searle’s famous Chinese Room thought experiment argues no. A computer can manipulate symbols by rule—syntax—but lacks semantics: the capacity to grasp meaning. Understanding, Searle insists, depends on the biological causal powers of living systems—brains, not algorithms. Margaret Boden agrees that even advanced AI may not bridge this gap, since the concepts of “intelligence” and “consciousness” remain unresolved.
Machines may simulate reasoning, but they do not experience it. They process data, not meaning; compute patterns, not understanding. Human thought is intentional—it is about things in the world, shaped by desire, care, and consciousness.
Myth three: Thinking is just having an opinion
In the age of the “hot take,” everyone has a view, but not everyone has reasons. We risk confusing opinion with understanding.
Plato drew this distinction long ago in the Republic, contrasting doxa (opinion) with epistēmē (knowledge). To know something, he said, is not merely to state that it’s true but to grasp why it’s true—to see how it fits into the deeper structure of reality.
Modern philosopher Whitney Schwab describes this as seeing how a fact is grounded in the natures of things. Thinking well, then, is not about asserting views but about cultivating reasoned judgment—opinions disciplined by understanding and open to correction.
At its best, a university is not a factory of opinions but a community of inquiry. Thinking together—testing, revising, and deepening ideas—is part of what makes education a profoundly human endeavour.
From thinking to meaning
Each myth captures part of the truth: thought is physical, logical, and expressive. But each alone distorts the whole. To re-think thinking is to bring these fragments back together—to see thought as something we do through our bodies, with meaning, and in conversation with others.
Thinking is not a mechanical process but a moral and existential one—the way we orient ourselves in the world. It is how we connect knowledge with care, intellect with experience, and insight with action.
As the AKC year begins, I invite every member of the King’s community to cherish the opportunity to think—to make your studies and conversations part of the larger work of rethinking thinking, both personally and together.
🎧 Missed the lecture?
The recording of “Why Re-think Thinking? Three Myths About the Mind” will be available next week on the AKC Podcast. New episodes appear every week of the semester.
Next week, we welcome Professor Rachel Mills CBE who’ll help us re-think thinking with the oceans in mind. 🌊
Edward A. David 
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