edit

Exploring the dark corners

2006-08-16

I was born curious, wanting to learn and explore everything. I used to think I was looking for knowledge, but it's really the learning that attracts me. Is there a difference? Well, yes. Knowledge is the endpoint, learning is the journey to that point. They involve opposite frames of mind: The person who has knowledge is done and satisfied, full of answers, certain that they have considered everything. Learning, on the other hand, only happens when there is something you don't understand, and you ask questions, and are willing to accept answers that are not what you expected. You're in one mode or the other, not both at the same time.

"How can you say there's a difference? Look at all these books I read so I can acquire knowledge!" Fine, but when you read, are you learning, or just adding another layer of detail to your existing picture of the world? Do you abandon yourself to the search, let it take you where you did not expect to go, or do you let your existing knowledge set all the parameters, tell you where to look and what to see when you get there?

Anyone can pretend to be an explorer and go somewhere they've never been before. But most people take their prejudices with them when they do this, and see what they have been taught to expect. The true explorer - the true learner - is genuinely curious about what they might find if they take a walk in a new direction. They have their preconceptions, but they are open to the possibility that they lack key pieces of information.

Knowledge is illusory and deluded, more often than not, only ignorance and exploration is real, honest. Unless you're an expert in your field, curiosity is the safest bet - and you can't be curious without admitting that you're ignorant.

And if you are an expert, you should know better than anyone how much there is still left to discover, out there at the frontier of knowledge. Talk to laypeople with the authority of Knowledge, if you like, for you know better than they do, but return to curiosity mode when you're done, or you'll never get any further. You'll stagnate, grow possessive of your "knowledge", and become an obstacle for the true explorers.

Curiosity as a state of mind is hard to maintain. My mind welcomes any excuse to conclude that it has reached the endpoint, that it is no longer necessary for me to explore and learn. "Look at all that I know! Now I can rest, now I can teach and judge with authority." This is an effective trick, I fall for it again and again. After all, the more curious I am, the more I learn, and the more I learn the easier it becomes to think that I know, that now I finally know. So I switch from learner mode to knowledge mode, and immediately become twice as dumb as I were.

Another subtle and effective anti-curiosity trick my mind has played on me is the idea that we, as a society, walk up a staircase of knowledge, always improving, every step teaching us that much more, so that whatever we believe today incorporates everything we've seen and learned before. After all, we know the past, but the past did not know us. By looking at all they did and left behind, we can extract all the lessons there are to extract, remember all that is worth remembering, and forget all that is worth forgetting. By being later, we are superior, like a large circle that contains a smaller circle.

In reality the path we take is more random: Good ideas go in and out of fashion, they are forgotten and reinvented, some are never fashionable at all. We're more like someone who explores a large room with a flashlight, lighting up one small area at a time. Now we look over here, at these ideas, these values, these insights, these beliefs, but in a decade or two we'll be tired of this and look over there instead. The room - all that we have ever done and seen and been and believed - is the same, and nothing really goes away, we're just not looking at more than a small part of it any time.

The things we look at, the things we choose to remember and believe, are a matter of fashion, a partly random process which sometimes leads us to good things, sometimes away from them. My instinct tells me that I stand at the top of a pyramid. If something important happens in the world, or if someone once had a really bright idea, I can rely on this fact to reach me somehow. It wouldn't just fall out of sight, someone would tell me. "Here, pay attention, you really need to know this."

But it's not like that. I've had this lesson forced on me again and again: There are things that are worth knowing that are largely ignored. Don't let that sentence slip you by, reread it and let it sink in. Things that are worth knowing .. go ignored. Not once in a while, but all the time.

Think of the phonyness of the news reality, all the events that never make it through the media filters. The news - even serious news - is mostly a form of entertainment, (events that are covered have in common they they are exciting, and the events that are ignored have in common that they're not), and yet we think the news tells us about the world!

The problem extends to all our knowledge. I don't mean the specialized knowledge of experts and scientists, I mean the filtered version of this knowledge that makes up the world the rest of us believe we live in. This filtered knowledge is good at drawing attention to itself, it's easy to find, easy to take seriously - a flashlight in a dark room. But I've lost faith in it. Again and again I've stopped, fought the impulse to follow the bright light, looked into a dark corner instead, and found something valuable and unexpected. Something noone had told me about, and never would, had I continued to give them my attention.

We need to learn to look away from the bright light, stop letting consensus and fashion explore on our behalf. The first time is difficult, but it gets easier with practice. I think I'm getting good at it. I'm getting to expect that I can pick up some strange book, or look into some question I have, and be astounded by what I find. I didn't know! They should have told me. Here I was, beginning to think I at least had a good grasp of the essentials - I paid attention in school, I followed the news, I read the obligatory classics - but I didn't know this.

I'm being deliberately vague. Any examples I could give would only distract from the message. "Well that's not very interesting", or "What's the big deal? I knew that." I can talk about what I find often enough, now I just want to say how I do it, partly so I can become better and more systematic about it myself.

Besides, if I tell you where to look, what use is that? The next step is your own: Whatever it is you're interested in, art and entertainment, news and politics, science, history, ideas, life, stop for a moment and try to become aware of the bright spot, the one you've been staring at all these years, so much that you've forgotten there is anything outside of it. See it, then move your eyes somewhere else, somewhere dark, somewhere you believe there's nothing to find, go there with an open mind, and see what's there. I promise you you won't be bored.