Enthusiasm for Knowledge and its Ability to Inspire.

It is a very basic tenet of my worldview that the pursuit of knowledge is one of the greatest abilities of the human condition.  That our brains ability to experience reality around us, and through the leveraging crane of consciousness to ponder, question and build mental scenarios beyond the present is what most clearly raises us above the rest of our animal cousins.

But the brain is tricky.  Consciousness is slippery.  As vast as our ability is to soak in all the information around us, our senses are of course hopelessly outmatched.  There's far to much sensory information coming out of the firehose than we could ever hope to drink.  And to that end, our brain and the tool of consciousness take short cuts, make judgement calls, filter what it is we experience, based on the vast history of our evolutionary journey to survive and procreate.

People take their internal recollections, memories and experiences to be beyond reproach, even with frequent and numerous examples to the contrary.  Eye witness accounts are rightly held to be unreliable in isolation, our memories fade and change and even become incorrect over time, we can experience things (hallucinations, dreams, etc.) that we know, and can prove to not have happened in our objective reality.  And yet, when we feel we know something, really know it, all this evidence to the contrary is swept to the side.

I contend that any pursuit of knowledge must always come from a base of modesty.  From an acknowledgement of our weaknesses and our bias' and our areas of ignorance.  It must also come from a strong sense of curiousity about the inner workings of the world around us.  That search will not be a straight and tidy path, but rather a messy and exponential expansion of ideas and theories from multiple sources, coalescing more and more over time as the culture and community of Science and technology works upon it.  It will also contain dead-ends, paths that at the time seemed coherent with our ability to understand and objectively quantify reality around us.  But that perhaps fall flat as new ideas, or new tools for quantifying reality come to light.

We should all agree to start the search with our most basic of tools, that which we can see, touch, smell, taste, hear.  And then slowly layer tools and ideas on top of that which assist us in describing reality around us, the ability to objectively measure physical phenomena as an example.  And to be cautious of areas we know can be unreliable, such as our own individual experiences, and to vet those against a methodology of critical evaluation.

I feel that our culture today is in peril of losing this sense of curiousity and enthusiasm for knowledge.  That the average person is more content with consuming the cultural and societal fast food of simple personal gratification, entertainment and politeness, than openly and honestly discussing topics that should surely be of great interest to us all.

And so I hope to provide here some paths to content that I think a healthy and curious mind will readily consume and find to be tasty food for thought.

I would ask people to try switching up, just on occasion to start with, 30-60 minutes of their normal consumption of normal entertainment, for something with a little more intellectual meat to it.

Neil deGrasse Tyson is a person I have great respect for.  I admire his ability to speak plainly, yet eloquently about his enthusiasm for science, knowledge and learning.  Spend an hour with Neil, and see if your brain doesn't feel a little more satisfied than say watching the latest episode of Breaking Bad ;)