Friday, March 28, 2008
Musings #001
I was reading a brilliant book by Alan Fletcher on the bus today and came across this page that really made me pause and think.
"At one time, the mind was considered a blank page only written on by experience. Today we favour the seed and soil theory. For example distinguishing colour, line, pattern and shape are innate, but doing anything with them can only be learnt.
The fact is that the mind thinks with ideas not information, so acquiring knowledge is useless unless one learns how to use it. A dictionary may contain all the words but no one can tell a poet which to choose or what to write."
I think this is so true and relevant in today's context.
"Knowledge is the only instrument of production not subject to diminishing returns. Furthermore it increases at a spectacular rate. 90% of all the scientists who ever lived are alive today. In the 500 years since Gutenberg invented printing some thirty million books have been printed; and an equal amount has been published in the last five years.
The quantity of information doubles every eight years. This means by the time a child born today graduates from college, the amount of knowledge in the world will be four times as much, and by the time this child is fifty it will be thirty-two times as great. By then 97% of everything known will be learnt since that child was born. "I'm not sure what this amounts to. But to me, as we evolve and time goes by, we find out more and more about less and less. We're probably not too for off from the day where we'll know everything about nothing.
Who knows, perhaps one day we might end up processing information in a way so brilliant and sophisticated that we only know and use what is needed. Devoid of unnecessary things that fill the mind, leaving us more room for ideas. Perhaps we might just end up the way we started off; the mind considered a blank page only written on by experience. Then we'll realise all that persuit of knowledge was just a waste of time. But of course we wouldn't really know that now, would we?
Posted at 12:29 AM
