Theme: Agency

YOUR INTELLECTUAL JOURNEY

You know, you start out on any subject and it just seems like there is this vast literature, an infinite amount to learn, and that you’ll forever be ignorant. You struggle to gain each new concept, and master its application. You find some niche and sort of master that, then expand out from there to learn more.

At some point you grasp, that in any field there are a very small number of basic principles. And that you must simply master the permutations of those principles. And that, really, most writing is other people trying to LEARN themselves, by applying those basic ideas or trying to refute them. And so there is an awful lot of ‘chaff’ and very little intellectual ‘wheat’. The problem is learning how to separate wheat from chaff. Other than that, each field isn’t very hard.

(Math is interestingly like this. I mean, you can understand all that there is to know about math from the very basics to the most complex. The problem though, is like chess. The basic rules are really simple actually. But the sequence of moves is pretty enormous, and the consequences of those moves more so. And the art is in actually PRACTICING all those various transformations until you gain an insight from the practice of transforming. Myself, I find it boring as hell. But some people love puzzles and I love problems and that’s what a division of labor is for.)

At some point you begin to grasp the intellectual struggle of each person back into ancient history as trying to wrestle with and within his or her limited knowledge paradigm, and doing the best he or she can. (And that’s when you realize that Aristotle was godlike.) But you can empathize with each of them and their circumstance.

(Philosophy is like this. You see that basically everyone has a bit of fragmentary knowledge and is trying to apply it before they have sufficient empirical means to do so. Worse, that most philosophers are trying somehow to get power, justify power, or undermine power. And in that way, philosophy is a sort of middle ground between religion (norms) and science (laws). But it becomes quite clear that most of the time, they just don’t have good scientific tools to work with, and they ‘re stuck with religion’s model of thought.)

At some other point you begin to see yourself in some paradigm of limited knowledge and and begin to think about what assumptions that you make might be wrong given the most recent increases in knowledge. And at that point you’re usually crushed and humbled.

(The internet has done more for knowledge accumulation than I had ever dreamed of before. I almost can’t reconstruct life before it. Its so horribly SLOW by comparison. So TEDIOUS. I mean, ordering BOOKS from LIBRARIES? Ungh…. It’s hard to be an info-vore in the age of paper, without patience. For those of us with ADD like symptoms, it’s awesome that you can drink from the fire hose CONSTANTLY. )

And then you realize that all of us, even the best, really are fighting against the dark forces of time and ignorance, each of us but a bit of kindling upon the pyre of those who came before us. Some work with diligence their entire lives and serve to maintain by not extend our understanding. Others manage a single marginally useful idea. And others shovel them out by the wagon load as fuel for a coal fire.

And it seems a random game at times. But you can’t win if you don’t play. And it matters more that you play hard, than that you desire to win.