An August Month Indeed

This August has been unusually eventful, and fruitful. The month started off with my presentation on the possibility of achieving immortality. I also attended several screenings at the Melbourne International Film Festival. The English Premier League kicked off once more. And in that time I finished reading perhaps five books, of which three were of the highest intellectual achievement, on neuroscience, consciousness, and ethics respectively (although of course each book necessarily encroached on the other two areas, sometimes vastly so).

Indeed, the books were of great import and demand rumination in order to fully assimilate their teachings into a coherent whole. But the mere reading of them has already changed my worldview (three times in a month, which is more often associated with schizophrenia rather than hyperbibliophagia). The best books do so; they are the books we need, not the books we deserve. Veracity is a plus, but that they are thought-provoking is the most important trait. Jarring words force you to reevaluate what you (think you) know, and whatever comes out of that you will look at things differently.

There are several more books lined up this year which promise that level of impact (and several more in previous months which have already delivered). All the worthy books will receive individual treatment in my year-end summary, although traces of some of them will have already found their way into my writing.

Earlier this year, I had promised a series of posts delineating the nature of things in the world sometime this year. That looks to have been an overly optimistic estimate, as Hofstadter's Law strikes again: it always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law. I had known then that I would have to fill in a lot of gaps in my knowledge, and take on entire new domains of thought. What I had not expected was that my regular schedule would have been so inimical to my explorations (who am I kidding, it's med school), and that the more I learned, the more I would learn how much I don't know. It's like spelunking, where one finds upon reaching where one had supposed the end of the tunnel would be forks that lead down even longer tunnels. What is more, the web of tributaries is being expanded by teams of miners all the while.

Indeed, we live in exciting times for knowledge and culture. So much has already been thought and said, but so much more is still being thought and said even as we speak. Paradigms are shifting unseen in the background!

The rate of knowledge discovery is so rapid that it is nigh impossible to play catch up. There is so much that each of us does not know, and that amount is growing day to day. Yet one of the things that really irked me this month was the ubiquity of intellectual sins, mainly the crime of people not knowing but being dead certain of their beliefs. It is especially frustrating when I know the problems with their beliefs, and the pieces of missing knowledge which would have led them to discard their erroneous beliefs, but they are unwilling to listen. Ignorance must be coupled with awareness at the very least, if not curiosity.

Of course, given the current rate of knowledge production, I too will be stuck in a state of ignorance, which surely does not bode well for the posts which I had intended to write. Nonetheless I have faith that the task I have set myself is feasible, if only because people before me (greater men, it is true), have hitherto undertaken such intellectual adventures to considerable success. In light of my learnings, the specifics of the project will be redefined, but the goal remains the same - to understand our world, and to make something of that understanding. To that end, much learning remains necessary, but fruitful months like this are big steps in the right direction. Here's to many more to come.