The two processes of human growth

One aspect of knowledge is to collect new information, but another aspect is summarizing and simplifying what you’ve already taken in. Abstractions, words, concepts - all these are ways to simplify the chaos of the world. It's when we get new information, new impressions, new experiences, and give the body or the brain time to turn them into something simpler and more usable.

In the current age, it’s easy to forget that we are humans and not computers. We can fill ourselves with lots of information and experiences, but it’s when we’ve turned all of these into fewer simpler principles that they actually become usable. We're not machines with infinite memory storage. We need both the active and passive parts of our life for just this reason, and knowing this is key to mental health in an overstimulating world. Just taking in new information and experiences without processing them into something compressed and useful makes you overwhelmed. While never putting yourself through new things at all makes you understimulated.

This idea is so basic that it can almost be extended to all parts of being a human. Our body switches between fight/flight and rest/digest to both do/explore/learn/experience and rest/process/ruminate/summarize/clarify. The way your body rests after an long run to turn the thousands of steps you took into a better and more usable muscle, is if not the same then at least analogous to how your brain after you’ve read lots of words about a subject turns them into a simpler and more usable idea than the total sum of words were initially. You've gained insight, not just information. It’s the same when you have intense or many emotional experiences and can’t really make sense of them until some time has passed and you can suddenly talk and think about the situation in a simpler way than when you felt all those varying and conflicting emotions at the same time.

Information, experiences and emotions getting abstracted into simpler summaries in the long run turns into what we call ”wisdom”. Experience, wisdom, unified theories of physics, proverbs, all these are common ways of us humans advancing in the world thanks to abstractions and simplifications. The highest knowledge has always been about simplifying, which I suspect isn't because the world is necessarily simple in its nature, but because we have a need to simplify because we want to do things. We don't want to be confused and argue back and forth between all possible alternatives (at least not most of us), we don't want to get stuck, we want to go forward. We humans have no reason to know all eternal facts like a theoretical supercomputer would. This could be one of the reasons for why we can't seem to settle on one absolute truth about the world - because that's not in our interest. We're interested in the simplifications.

An abstraction is a simplification that removes details but creates clarity - it's a useful approximation. Approximations are by definition not exact or precise, and therefore there are no ultimate rules about how to make them, and this means different people will make different approximations because different people are in need of different things. Finding the one absolute truth doesn't seem to be what we generally want, what we want most often seems to be something that is useful enough.¹ A good enough solution, simple enough to fit in your head but still close enough to truth that it still works, is often the highest "truth" we want. And we want one solution, not many. Discussions can't get stuck in uncertainties and eternal arguments back and forth, the solution to uncertainties instead has to be to choose the best current thing, take action and then correct yourself along the way. If you’re going to do something, you can’t have multiple options, you need one single idea.

So, summarized: We observe the world by taking in the details we see, and then we turn these details into general principles, because we need a singular focus to function in the world and it would be too overwhelming to keep all the details in our mind at the same time. As I've already said, we're not machines with infinite memory storage, we are living creatures who see the world through one focused point which we call consciousness, and we need one thing inside this consciousness that leads us forward, and this is why we both get new information and then simplify this information into a usable form. These are the two main processes of going through life and growing while doing it.

Footnote:
1. This is how pragmatism, the philosophy William James stood behind, defines truth: Truth is what's useful.

Want to see all the weird stuff that's too dangerous for this public site?

Subscribe to Golden emails