Five-Dimensional Chess Played Between Ideas, Not Personas
A THING TO THINK ABOUT — NO. 2
Five-Dimensional Chess Played Between Ideas, Not Personas
A brief exercise in thinking about thinking
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“Five-dimensional chess played between ideas, not personas.”
What is five-dimensional chess played between ideas, not personas?
The answer is:
Thinking.
Not merely the production of thoughts, conclusions or opinions, but the act by which thoughts are held, related, examined, revised and allowed to encounter one another without turning the people who express them into the objects of the contest.
The sentence is therefore both a description and a small experiment.
To understand it, the reader must briefly think about what thinking is.
That is the point.
1. The pieces are not the players
An idea is not a person.
An expression is not an identity.
A disagreement is not, by itself, a conflict between selves.
These distinctions appear obvious when stated directly. In practice, they are repeatedly collapsed.
A person expresses an idea. The idea is challenged. The challenge is experienced as a challenge to the person. The person then defends not only the proposition, but the identity, standing or history that has become attached to it.
At that point, the object under examination changes.
The discussion is no longer principally about whether the idea is coherent, supported, recoverable or useful. It becomes a contest over who is right, who is credible, who has authority, who should concede and whose position will prevail.
The idea becomes inseparable from the persona presenting it.
The board has been replaced by the players.
“Five-dimensional chess played between ideas, not personas” proposes a different arrangement.
The person remains present. Authorship, responsibility, experience and judgement are not erased. But the person is not treated as the object that must win or lose.
The ideas are placed in relation.
The people make those relations possible.
2. Some working definitions
The terms can be stated simply.
The symbols below are not offered as a complete theory of cognition. They expose only the transitions the riddle asks us to notice.
P represents a person.
R represents a perception.
E represents an expression.
I represents an idea recoverable from that expression.
T represents the act of thinking through which these objects are related.
M(T) represents thinking about that act of thinking.
A person perceives something:
P → R
The person expresses something concerning that perception:
R → E
Another person encounters the expression and attempts to recover the idea:
E → I
Thinking occurs when an idea is not merely received, repeated or opposed, but placed into active relation with other ideas, observations, assumptions and possible consequences:
T(I₁, I₂, I₃ …)
Thinking about thinking begins when attention is directed not only towards the ideas, but towards the relations by which they are being compared:
M[T(I₁, I₂, I₃ …)]
The reflective question is no longer only:
Is this idea correct?
It also becomes:
How was this idea constituted?
What was perceived?
What was inferred?
What was assumed?
Which transition has been made?
What has been preserved?
What has been added?
What would permit revision?
What has become attached to the person rather than remaining available for examination?
That reflexive relation is the additional dimension.
It is not a mystical fifth dimension. It is the dimension introduced when the process of thought itself becomes available as an object of thought.
3. Why chess?
Chess is useful as a metaphor because a move does not possess meaning in isolation.
Its significance depends upon:
the position from which it was made;
the pieces still in play;
the rules governing their movement;
the preceding sequence;
the future states made possible or impossible;
and the perspective from which the position is being evaluated.
A move that appears irrational in one frame may become intelligible when a longer sequence is recovered.
An apparently strong move may conceal a loss several transitions later.
The same is true of ideas.
An idea inherits meaning from its assumptions, vocabulary, evidence, history and intended domain. Removing it from those relations may make it appear more universal, more contradictory or more certain than it actually is.
Thinking therefore requires more than selecting between isolated propositions.
It requires the preservation of position.
Five-dimensional chess suggests a form of thought in which several positions, histories, operators and possible transitions must be considered at once.
But the metaphor contains a trap.
Chess normally has opponents.
Thinking need not.
When the game is played between personas, the objective becomes victory over another participant. When it is played between ideas, the objective changes.
An idea may defeat another idea.
It may also qualify it, localise it, expose an assumption within it, reveal that the two ideas concern different objects, or show that an apparent contradiction was produced by an undeclared transition between frames.
The result need not be a winner.
The result may be a better location.
4. Who we are, not what we are
Every expression is, at the moment it is made, an active expression of who we are.
It emerges from a particular history, location, vocabulary, body, culture, purpose and field of attention. In that sense, thinking cannot be separated entirely from the thinker.
But an expression is not a final statement of what the thinker is.
A mistaken idea does not make the person who holds it a mistake.
A revised conclusion does not erase the person who previously held another view.
A contradiction does not convert a human being into a contradiction.
The difference between who we are and what we are matters here.
“Who” permits history, change, relationship, responsibility and development.
“What” tends towards classification and closure.
When we treat a person’s expression as evidence of what that person essentially is, revision becomes dangerous. To change the idea may appear to require the surrender of identity.
When an idea remains an active expression of who a person is at a particular moment and under particular conditions, revision becomes part of continuity rather than its destruction.
The person can say:
This was my position.
This is why I held it.
This is what changed.
This is what remains.
That is not inconsistency.
It is recoverable development.
5. The intellectual workspace
A genuine intellectual workspace is not merely a place in which information is stored or opinions are exchanged.
It is a governed space in which relations can remain visible.
It should permit us to distinguish:
the person from the persona;
the perception from the expression;
the expression from the recovered idea;
the idea from the claim made for it;
the claim from the evidence supporting it;
the disagreement from the identity of those disagreeing;
and revision from erasure.
Such a workspace does not demand impersonality.
It demands that the personal does not silently acquire authority over the objects being examined.
Nor does it require detachment from consequence. Ideas matter precisely because they affect people, institutions and the world. But consequence should deepen the care with which ideas are examined, not turn every examination into a struggle between identities.
The workspace must therefore protect two things at once:
the integrity of the people participating;
the freedom of the ideas to be tested without becoming indistinguishable from those people.
This is not neutrality.
It is a disciplined form of participation.
6. The constitutional principle
The principle may be stated almost formally:
Where an idea is treated as identical with the persona expressing it, criticism of the idea is liable to be received as criticism of the person.
Where evaluation of the person governs evaluation of the idea, the recoverability of thought is reduced.
Therefore: a productive intellectual workspace must preserve the distinction between the expressed idea and the identity of its author.
This does not mean that authorship is irrelevant.
A person remains responsible for what they express and for the consequences of continuing to express it after relevant correction or contrary evidence becomes available.
But responsibility is not the same as identity.
To preserve the difference is to make genuine correction possible.
7. Thinking as a relationship
Thinking is often imagined as something that happens inside an individual mind.
It also happens between expressions.
An idea is placed into the world. Another person receives it. The idea is reconstructed, altered, questioned or connected with something its author had not seen.
The thought continues beyond the person who first expressed it.
This continuation does not require agreement. It requires a relation sufficiently careful that the idea can survive transmission without being reduced either to repetition or rejection.
Thinking is therefore not merely possession of an idea.
It is participation in the relations through which ideas become available to one another.
The quality of thinking depends partly upon whether those relations remain open.
A defended persona tends towards closure. It protects coherence, status and recognisability.
Ideas, when properly held, can remain revisable.
The challenge is not to abolish the persona. Human beings necessarily present themselves through roles, histories and forms of expression.
The challenge is to prevent the persona from becoming the board, the rules and the prize.
8. The small joke
There is a quiet joke in the phrase.
“Five-dimensional chess” usually evokes extraordinary strategic intelligence: a person seeing further than everyone else, manipulating several levels at once and eventually prevailing through superior foresight.
Then the second half removes the opponent and, with it, the ordinary victory condition.
The chess is not played between brilliant opponents. It is played between ideas.
The apparently grand intellectual performance resolves into something simpler:
thinking properly.
The phrase flatters complexity and then disarms the ego that would like to possess it.
That is why I think it works. Maybe not as something I should say about myself but something that is true nevertheless. At least to me.
9. The exercise
Read the sentence once more:
Five-dimensional chess played between ideas, not personas.
Notice what happens.
You consider the chess.
You consider the ideas.
You consider the personas.
You consider the difference between them.
For a moment, the act of thinking becomes visible within thought itself.
The sentence has performed its own proposition.
That moment need not last long.
It need only remain recoverable and repeated if useful.
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—
Stefaan Vossen ⊙
Five-dimensional chess played between ideas, not personas.
