Review: Stories, Dice, and Rocks That Think by Byron Reese

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

Stories, Dice, and Rocks That Think is at its strongest when Byron Reese is showing that the ways we think about the world came from somewhere. Storytelling, mathematics, probability, and (less so) artificial intelligence can feel so normal to us that it is difficult to imagine a world without them. Reese’s book helped make those habits of thought feel strange again.

The book traces a progression from humans using language and telling stories, to using abstract concepts like mathematics, to developing ways of predicting the future, and eventually to creating “rocks that think” (computers). I found that movement through the history of thought a useful means of sensemaking, albeit one that still feels a bit arrived at in hindsight. Regardless, it's still compelling. It offers an accessible way to consider thinking devices (conceptual or physical) as most distinctly human: our ability to communicate, externalize ideas, imagine what has not happened, and anticipate what might happen next.

To do this, Reese pushes on the distinction between humans and other animals far. His argument about the uniqueness of language and communication sometimes felt forced, as though acknowledging greater continuity with other animals would weaken the story he wanted to tell. Human communication has clearly played an extraordinary role in our development, but the book occasionally seemed too eager to make it wholly different from anything else in the evolutionary record and claiming that no other animal has developed more advances technologically speaking as evidence.  I might make an argument that some of that might be a result of human interference, but that's more a side point.

It does hint at the larger limitation. This feels like a history written by a generalist rather than a specialist. Reese is moving across vast areas of knowledge, and I suspect specialists in human evolution, animal communication, mathematics, or intellectual history would find plenty of nuance being glossed over. At the same time, that generalist perspective is part of what makes the book useful. It creates a structure that is easy to grapple with and offers a valuable interpretation of how we got here, even when that interpretation may not be true in some absolute sense.

The section on probability was particularly strong. We now think, speak, and make decisions through probability constantly, whether we are looking at a weather forecast or trying to judge the risks of a decision. Reese’s account helped me see how normalized that way of thinking has become and left me curious about what the world feels like when you do not think in probabilities.

I imagine moving from a world organized around prophecy, divinity, or certainty into one organized around probability as a movement toward agency. Probability does not necessarily give us control, but it gives us multiple possible outcomes to work towards. If more than one future can happen, then perhaps our actions can help determine which one does. That control may be real or imagined, and my own response is undoubtedly shaped by living in a 21st-century United States discourse saturated with ideas about agency and personal ability. Even so, Reese helped me understand how working in probabilities changes our relationship to the future.

The move from dice to “rocks that think” also felt natural. Throughout the book, humans externalize thought into tools: the voice box, writing, ledgers, mathematical proofs, dice, fiction, and eventually computers. These tools do not merely preserve thought after it happens. They allow us to do forms of thinking that would otherwise be impossible, whether by transferring knowledge across generations, calculating more than we can hold in our minds, or imagining things that have not happened yet.

Fiction belongs in that progression too. It gives us somewhere to hold the unreal and to postulate what could be. Cervantes’s Don Quixote, with all of its metatextual play, feels like an especially good example: a story being used to think about stories, reality, authorship, and what fiction does to people.

Reese’s final destination may be a little too neat. “Rocks that think” is a clever phrase, and it can feel as though the whole history has been arranged retroactively to arrive at artificial intelligence. I found myself wondering whether the argument would have moved so strongly in that direction if AI were not so present in the moment when Reese was writing. Still, there is something valuable in seeing AI as another stage in our long history of using artifice to hold, extend, and act upon human thought. These systems may simulate a form of thinking, but they are also, at their foundation, human thought gathered and operated at scale.

Reese’s writing is clear and functional rather than stylistically remarkable. I did not pause over sentences because they were amazing or moving. The prose served the argument, which matters given the complexity and scope of what he is trying to communicate.

Ultimately, Stories, Dice, and Rocks That Think gave me a useful way to make sense of the relationship between human thought and the tools that carry it. I don't accept every distinction Reese makes, and I remain wary of how much nuance gets compressed in such a sweeping history. But the book enhanced the way I think about thinking itself: how we store it, extend it, transfer it, and use it to imagine futures that do not yet exist.

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