You’ve been born.
The empty, glaringly white walls tire your tiny pupils.
The vacant beeping of the machinery barely registers as a sound.
You perceive the bare minimum.
What do you know, then?
Perhaps nothing.
Even if you do have any thoughts, they might not be of the same conscious nature.
You are the first person to ever exist,
Because you know as much as that “first” person did: nothing.
Everything you’ve come to know you’ve perceived and stolen.
It might be a little early to get into epistemology, sure,
But it might be easier, in fact.
You’ve not been influenced by:
-People
-Thoughts
-Your environment
So, what do you know?
Here’s what you know:
Well, we must first know how we come to know things.
As I said,
Everything we know comes, at first, from the external world.
Your environment dictates what you think of certain elements of it.
If light hurts your eyes, you will *know* to not stare at it.
If a bee stings you, you will *know* to not stir its nerves.
If you trip because of a curb, you will *know* to be more attentive next time.
Then, people are part of our environment.
We observe what they do and how that affects us, what they say and what reaction that triggers from us,
And we categorize them into friends or foes.
Their opinions, then, become what we prefer or get repulsed by.
Then, you might say that thoughts are entirely ours.
To that I say:
You can deconstruct EVERY thought and backtrack all the way to its origin: the external world.
Do you believe that Earth is spherical?
You likely read that somewhere or heard it.
Do you believe that the sun is at the center of our solar system?
Well, I guarantee you did not reinvent heliocentrism...
Sure, thoughts DO arise independently of the external world and they ARE internal,
But, the ability of thought came after you had experienced the world.
The things that you believe you invent within your mind,
You actually just discover.
Your thoughts are like strings in a spider-web, like tools for the construction of bigger ideas.
When multiple strings meet, a new, so-called original thought is produced.
I say “so-called” because it came from already existing strings which came from the external world.
As humans, we work with what we have.
We learn resourcefulness, not creativity.
Our duty?
If we steal what we know from the external world,
That thought material still has to be present for us to steal it.
Some people in the past truly got clever,
And they discovered new things through elite abilities of resourcefulness.
To continue this cycle of cleverness, we need three things:
-Knowledge of what has been done
-Knowledge of what we can work on now
-Knowledge of what would be helpful in the future
We need to know each of them in this exact order.
Why?
Well, we need a view of the landscape to traverse it,
An idea of where to step next,
And an idea of our destination.
Electricity exists thanks to some clever people.
What if they never wrote records of how they came to such a discovery?
Each generation would have to reinvent it.
Thankfully, we do keep track of what we have done.
It’s called history.
To improve electricity, we must know how it works.
Then, we have to know what our technological limitations are in the present.
If we don’t know that, we can’t begin working, since. our goal could be a daydream for all we know.
After we know those two things, we can set a deadline and some expectations.
Perhaps, our duty is to be the first person to ever exist,
Then to learn what the other first people had to learn,
And to create more material for future first people to learn.
Conclusion
We were all once the first person to ever exist,
And we had to adapt to millennia of discoveries.
Here’s an interesting question:
When will human knowledge get TOO vast for the new generation to relearn before they advance?
Simply, never.
You don’t have to learn everything.
Here’s some practical advice:
-Learn a bit of each field so you can just have a view of the landscape, since most of what we know is wrong anyway.
-Don’t focus solely on one field, since they are interconnected (e.g. philosophy can help with science and the other way around)
-Don’t take “knowledge” as truth.
If this post has helped you develop any interesting ideas or has taught you something, consider subscribing to The Echo Sanctuary newsletter in order to have more opportunities of learning:
Furthermore, you can share this post and comment in order to keep the discussion going: