There is no content

I have sometimes said ‘there is no content’ or ‘the word content is a red flag’ – indicating that we are likely doing education and not learning.

I appreciate that this may seem perplexing to some people, so I’d like to explain why I say these sorts of things.

Let’s start with a naïve realist’s view of the world – by which I mean there is stuff out there happening – trees falling, teacups shattering and so on – which we pick up via our senses in a process that we call ‘experiencing the world’.

Strictly speaking this view is philosophically dodgy, what philosophers call ‘unfalsifiable’. What they mean is that since there is no way to detect the world ‘out there’ except via our senses, we can’t be sure it is ‘out there’ at all. This is a philosophical position shared by Rene Descartes and The Matrix.

But let’s not go down that rabbit hole. Assume stuff happens in the world. What happens next? The answer to that turns out to be surprisingly simple: if it matters to us, we have a reaction to it*. An emotional reaction. We store these emotional reactions, and we use them to recreate what happened. This is called ‘memory’. These stored emotional reactions fade over time, and don’t preserve a great deal of accuracy in any case – they are just designed to store the important stuff.

So where is the ‘content’ in this account? Imagine that I walk up to you in the street and unexpectedly punch you squarely on the nose, causing your nose to bleed. You will likely have a reaction to this, you store this reaction and can use that to tell people a story about why it is a good reason to avoid me. Where is the ‘content’?

Our intellectual error has been failing to understand that the same process takes place if I sit you behind a desk and show you some words on a screen. You have a reaction to them. Your reaction will vary depending on how important they are to you: for example if a person has just said ‘this will be on a test’, or ‘your life depends on remembering these words’. If they are not terribly important to you, you will likely have very little reaction and it would be a good idea, therefore, to write them down. Maybe you will have a stronger reaction to them later on - for example when you are about to take an exam.

Either way exactly the same thing is going on: you are experiencing something, having a reaction to it, storing the reaction, and later using this stored reaction to modify your behaviour or reconstruct what you experienced.

Not only is the process the same in both circumstances – it is the same whether you are a cat, rat, or human (or a sea slug even). We are not supernatural creatures.

You throw a ball for your dog, he is excited and chases it. You pat him on the head when he returns it. He may well have learned something. Where is the ‘content’?

We got confused several hundred years ago – we started assuming that people function like blank slates, or books, or computers and that you could transfer information into them in symbolic form, storing ‘content’.

Note that neither slates nor books nor computers have reactions to anything, though, so will never experience the world. Slates, books and computers will store the same content in the same way, but two people sitting in a classroom will react differently to what they experience and store different things as a result. Either way, there is no content.

If you look really closely at how people are using the word 'content' they mostly mean 'factual information expressed symbolically'. You could get a dog, rat (and possibly a sea slug) to store symbolic information - for example by giving them electric shocks in response to different symbols, so that they have a reaction to them - but it would be a really peculiar abuse of memory, and it wouldn't really have much to do with learning per se. We would have to give it a different name. Like 'education'.

*I am well aware that various groups of neurons detect stimuli of different kinds. My point is that these sensory inputs are converted into affective responses as an encoding/processing format, the way that digital computers convert various inputs into 1s and 0s for processing purposes.

Photo: Andrea Piacquadio