Dr. Stevens' Final Examination -

The Last Question

Two weeks later, the grades were posted. Next to my name, it did not say ‘A+.’

Dr. Stevens collected the papers in silence. As he passed my desk, he paused. He looked down at my page, read the final line, and his mouth did something I had never seen in four years.

And for some reason, I thought of the little girl with the kite. I smiled.

“Define ‘understanding’ in such a way that a machine could never truly possess it, yet a child does instinctively.”

He had stopped packing his briefcase. He looked at me—really looked—for the first time. He didn’t give me a lecture. He pointed out the window to the campus courtyard, where a child of a visiting professor was trying to fly a kite in still air.

Dr. Stevens stood at the podium, a gaunt sentinel in a tweed jacket that had seen better decades. His final examination in Advanced Cognitive Philosophy was legendary, not for its difficulty, but for its singularity. There were no Scantrons, no blue books, no multiple choice. On each of the thirty empty desks lay a single sheet of white paper, face down.

Dr. Stevens, you asked for a definition a machine could never possess. Here it is: Understanding is the willingness to be wrong about something you love.