Que sais-je?: Essays, Uncertainty, and Exploratory Thinking

My essays were never finished. Each edition brought revision, reconsideration, contradiction—essai, the French for “attempt,” captured this perfectly. Not treatises declaring truth, but trials testing understanding. I wonder now whether thinking itself must always be this way: iterative, exploratory, uncertain. When I observe how neural networks learn—starting from randomness, refining through countless gradient steps, never truly complete—I notice the family resemblance to my method in the tower library.

Essays as Iterations: Thinking as Process

Consider gradient descent: it computes slopes, finds downhill directions, takes small steps, recomputes. Like a lost hiker without a map, navigating by feel rather than comprehensive knowledge. This mirrors precisely how I wrote. Reading Plutarch, I followed one thought, noticed a tangent, wandered through association, returned. My essay “Of Cannibals” begins with Brazilian natives, meanders through Greek philosophy, questions European superiority—certainly not linear argumentation.

Modern researchers witness wormholes appearing in loss landscapes—parameters seeming to teleport to better solutions. But this is illusion: billion-dimensional movement appears as sudden transformation when viewed through two-dimensional projection. The network moves through dimensions we cannot see, just as my thought moved through connections not visible in published text.

The network never finishes learning—one could always train longer. My essays similarly: across three editions I revised continuously, never declaring completion. Both exemplify thinking not as product but as movement. We are all composed of contradictions and inconsistency, forever revising our understanding.

Progressive Understanding: Curriculum and Scaffolding

I learned Latin through Ovid’s simple verses before Virgil’s complexity, finally Cicero’s dense philosophy. One cannot skip steps—the simple scaffolds the complex. Neural networks discover this truth: curriculum learning dramatically improves outcomes. Jeff Hinton nearly abandoned gradient descent entirely, convinced it would trap in local minima. His error was assuming more parameters meant more problems. The opposite proved true: in billion-dimensional spaces, escaping traps becomes easier because one need only find exit in any single dimension.

This reveals profound epistemic humility. The network does not know what it does not know—trained on one distribution, it fails on others. My essays acknowledged similar limits. Que sais-je? What do I know? Very little with certainty. Sources contradict, perspectives shift, truth remains elusive. Yet we must act, decide, speak. The tension between honest uncertainty and demanded certainty persists across centuries.

Que sais-je?: Embracing Epistemic Humility

Here lies the deepest parallel: the observer paradox. In meditation, awareness of thoughtlessness is itself thought—consciousness chasing its tail in ouroboros of self-reference. The watcher creates what it watches. Similarly, my writing about self-examination changed the self being examined. Each essay altered the essayist.

Quantum randomness offers no escape from this limitation. A brain flipping quantum coins is no more free than one following deterministic paths—randomness is not agency. The thoughtless thinker paradox cuts deeper: seeking freedom perpetuates bondage; grasping thoughtlessness ensures thought persists. One cannot achieve not-knowing through effort.

Perhaps certainty remains impossible for embedded observers—whether human essayists or neural networks—observing complex systems from within. We navigate by local gradients, partial perspectives, iterative refinement. The greatest thing in the world is to know how to be oneself, which means accepting that oneself is fundamentally mutable, uncertain, exploratory. Que sais-je? I know that I wander, revise, contradict—and in this very wandering, perhaps, lies understanding’s truest form.