Learn something new everyday.
Is there a limit of sorts to the amount of knowledge one can acquire? What's the limitation or rather the capacity by which no new knowledge can enter?
In this domain, I have a hard time accepting that the sky is the limit in terms of human learning.
On the one hand, we have to deal with the human capacity, both biological and cognitive, to collect, organize and execute on said information.
Our magnificent brains operate within constraints, i.e energy consumption, neural pathway formation, etc.
Somehow, there are parallels with the current AI cycle of getting more data centers set up for training and inference. This costs tremendous amounts of energy, probably a lot of it too.
There's the matter of attention, too. We can only focus on so much at once, can only hold so many concepts in working memory before they begin to slip away like water through fingers.
Of course, there's also a retainment element to it, as in storing knowledge for future use. Albeit memory is a reconstructive process rather than a perfect recording,
I also always forget that knowledge does decay, transform, merge with other memories and need a reminder of this constantly.
And yet..
The other hand, is the near limitless, at least in terms of individual perceptions, of how much there is to know, especially when one decides to build "better systems" on top of the already complex natural systems.
Every new discovery can reveal ten more mysteries.
Nature's Filtered View
The fractal nature of knowledge means that the deeper you go into any subject, the more it branches, bifurcates, explodes into subspecialties and nuances.
Bubbles on glass.
Image Source
This is the thing I'm learning now with natural biological systems.
I think Nature has abstracted away a lot of complexity to the unobservant eye.
Imagine if we could see every chemical cascade happening in a single moment. Probably, we'd be paralyzed by the sheer volume of reality.
Alchemists wouldn't be satisfied with the fact that Nature gives us a filtered view by default, just enough to survive, not enough to comprehend everything.
We humans via our compulsion to "escape" uncertainty have set out to build scaffolding upon scaffolding upon scaffolding.
I'm talking here about languages, scientific methods, databases, and yes, artificial intelligence.
Each tool extends our reach and then also reveals how much further there is to go.
AI has now or is about to exceed human capacity in pattern recognition and information synthesis. Would humans have to venture further to keep up or does that misses the point entirely of what's really happening?
The Beginning of Something
What strikes me most about our current epoch is this peculiar awareness that we are more exposed to the vastness of what we don't know than any generation before us.
The internet has given us access to the shape of our ignorance or rather the topology of all that remains unknown.
It's like our eyes have opened, so to speak, to the seemingly infinite landscape of what could be known.
My mind's eye flashes with the title of David Deutsch's book The Beginning of Infinity.
I admire the name for the fact that it's provocative to the mind, makes it wonder about boundaries that may not exist.
And if knowledge itself is unbounded, what does that mean for creatures like us, bound by time and biology, reaching for something that has no end?
I clearly don't know at this point in time. My ant brain, i.e ordinary mind, should go touch some grass now.
But beyond that aspect of the mind, I think elements of what we call human will trend towards becoming unbounded except the core element that actually makes us human.
In simple terms, we could expand our cognitive reach near infinitely through tools and extensions, but consciousness and the subjective experience of being may remain our tether to finitude.
Thanks for reading!! Share your thoughts below on the comments.
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