The Windowless Room

I was doing a series of brain teasers compiled by Business Insider,1 when I came across a problem that seemed familiar: three lamps in a windowless room. The layout of the problem is simple:

You are standing outside a windowless room, faced with three switches. Each switch controls one of three lamps inside the room. You may only enter the room once. Determine the corresponding lamp for each switch.

Having studied the Humanities in college and wielding no skills in statistics, I fruitlessly attempted numerical, mathematical solutions. I grasped at whatever scraps of mathematical method I had gleaned in my 14 years of rather elementary Math education and even went so far as to consider the possibility of performing bitwise operations on a set of switches to arrive at a conditional, which would provide the second lamp's conditions. The problem is, of course, prima facie impossible to solve with just mathematics: we simply do not have as many functions (times we can enter the room) as we need to deduce the correspondence between switches and lights. After an hour or so of frustrated scribbling, I folded. So how did BI suggest we solve the problem? By flipping two switches, leaving them on, turning one off, and entering the room to feel which of the off lamps is warmer (!). We know that the single lighted lamp corresponds to the flipped switch and the warm darkened lamp to the switch flipped on then off.

Needless to say, I was taken aback. The entire puzzle fell apart before me, and I felt a profound and essential distrust, even resentment, towards the writer and towards BI, towards whoever had first conceived of the riddle. How was it fair or just that this "brain teaser" be on the same page as the statistically mind-bending Monty Hall problem,2 I asked myself or, rather, raged in my head. There seemed to be some basic injustice here: BI had performed a kind of category mistake—confusing a quaint riddle for a rigorous and surprising brain teaser.

But thinking more about the problem, and more about my reaction to the solution, I was confused at just where, precisely, there had been an injustice. In fact, the Windowless Room challenged a much more comprehensive—or at least eclectic—form of knowledge than, say, the Monty Hall problem, and my rejection of it out-of-hand, as much a knee-jerk reaction as my disdain for lying or fraud, seems wrongheaded, based on no real critique, only ideology.

The Abstract and Symbolic

Not long ago, I was at a university whose pride was its focus on self-sacrificial academic rigor and aloof theory—for many years, the lack of a college of engineering was an achievement, not an embarrassment. A few of my closest friends studied Math and Physics, and in conversations with them about the academy and about their respective fields, a sort of "hierarchy of rigor" emerged. Math was on top, the cream of the crop and king of the STEM hill, followed by Physics, then maybe Engineering. Biology was pushing it, and God Forbid you studied anything like Theater and the Performing arts—at that point you were a lost cause, devoid of rigor and any value as a human being.3

The variable that determines a field's place in this hierarchy, it seems, is its level of abstraction and symbolization. Hence Abstract over Applied Mathematics, Math over Physics. This is an abstraction away from the spatial and concrete to the visual-symbolic. Hence Writing over Painting and Painting over Sculpture. And this is all well and good to an extent: I wouldn't be surprised to learn that mathematicians and physicists provide more material benefit or utility to society per capita than, say, English or History majors, and the development of symbolic systems seems a uniquely and remarkably human endeavor—a useful hermeneutic through which we can more fundamentally understand the spatial and concrete. But there comes a time when the fetishizing of abstraction becomes myopic, when we lose important details and solutions because of a single-minded focus on one form of thinking and knowledge. Indeed, this glorification of abstract, symbolic, visual thinking elides entire bodies of knowledge that, while more concrete or immediate, are nonetheless valuable, even necessary.

Unfortunately, for each of us, for society, such knowledge bears a stigma. While the abstract and immaterial are holy and sacred, kinetic knowledge is profane. This sort of proprioception is, according to dominant ideology or just common wisdom, second class. This is, at least in part, why I reached for a mathematized solution and why Math majors might scoff at engineers. Sure, one could argue that the format of the questions as "brain teasers" primed me to search for mathematized or abstract answers, but one could just as easily challenge why I (implicitly) narrowed the purview of "brain teasers" to abstract and visual thinking, why I discounted or even failed to consider what was, in the end, the correct answer. It seems that I had performed an act of erroneous discrimination based on little more than internalized, gut prejudice against one form of thinking.

Think with Your Stomach

Perhaps this disregard for proprioceptive thinking is an even deeper mistake than it appears on first blush. So much of how we think is unknown to us, but every day we learn that our thinking might be less abstract and visual than we believe (or want) it to be—it might even make us nervous to realize that thinking does not just happen in the brain but across the body, even in the gut.4 It is important to note, too, that this fetishizing of the ideal and abstract is the product of history and of our particular culture. Nietzsche, in On the Genealogy of Morality, an examination that edges into just this sort of question, writes:

If someone cannot cope with his 'psychic suffering', this does not stem from his psyche, to speak crudely; more probably from his stomach.5

And do not confuse Nietzsche, here, for writing in mere analogy. He continues:

If he 'cannot cope' with an experience, this sort of indigestion is as much physiological as any other.6

Even in antiquity, philosophers scrutinized visual culture. In fact, the ancients were particularly sensitive to body knowledge, to enacting and embodying thoughts and experiences. Socrates, who was always skeptical of writing, believed that we acquire true knowledge through dialogue and experience, not through the act of writing, which was mere symbol play. In the Phaedrus, Plato writes:

SOCRATES. It's far better, in my opinion, to treat justice and so on seriously, which is what happens when an expert dialectician takes hold of a suitable soul and uses his knowledge to plant and sow the kinds of words which are capable of defending both themselves and the one who planted them. So far from being barren, these words bear a seed from which other words grow in other environments. This makes them capable of giving everlasting life to the original seed, and of making the man who has them as happy as it is possible for a mortal man to be.7

Speaking, not writing, as a physical, public act is one that inspires happiness and growth, both intellectual and moral. While in antiquity, there was certainly a vita contemplativa, it was only a supplement to a vita activa.

And even Richard Feynman, that genius who effortlessly telescoped and transported us from the concrete and tangible to the cosmically or atomically abstract, had a kinetic way of thinking: as a professor at Cornell he would roll across the floor, imagining himself as an electron, and he believed that Einstein's greatest insights were the result of a physical intuition.8

All this points to the instability of the academic hierarchy conceit. The dog whistle word "rigor"—which, in the academy, is little more than an index of how hard someone works, or at least how hard everyone else perceives or assumes they work—ignores a fundamental truth: the abstract and symbolic are only one form of knowledge. I have no trouble believing that a Theater and Performing Arts major may work as hard, if not harder, than a Math major.9 Indeed, faced with the Windowless Room, I wonder if the Theater and Performing Arts major, or any student of a more embodied subject, would easily find a solution to a problem into which neither I nor my like-minded STEM major friends could make any meaningful inroad. And these sorts of problems are far more common than one might think. It makes me wonder, then, where the value is in all this abstraction when, at the end of the day, you need only touch the lightbulb.

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