Wisdom

Wisdom is a complex concept for humans to understand.  We all share a nebulous definition of what wisdom is but when you try to define it in absolute terms, the consensus breaks down.  It seems we can only share the concept of wisdom when we point to it vaguely but we are not able to look at it directly.  For me, I define wisdom as the combination of knowledge and experience.  By extension I define knowledge as information with comprehension, and I define experience as everything we have been through in our lives, it's not always relevant to include everything.

Knowledge only comes with comprehension, without that level of understanding it is nothing more than information which in itself is just data with context provided.  Richard Feynman once said that in order to be able to effectively process life in itself we as humans need hierarchies to exist, this in essence encapsulates the concept of abstraction, whereby it is not necessary to understand how something works all you need to know is how to use it; Feynman spoke of how it is possible to take any concept and break it down and continue to break it down until you trace it back to the fundamental laws of physics but that the connections are not always clear and you often find that the more precisely you try to define something in terms of fundamental laws the harder that actually becomes because many of the fundamental laws in themselves only hold up to a certain level of scrutiny because they too incorporate a certain level of abstraction and the closer you examine these the more traditional models start to break down and why new models are needed to explain what is happening.

The idea of being able to impart wisdom is something that I believe many philosophers devoted their entire lives to the study of, in the hopes of finding a simple method; this has not yet yielded effective results and I think the reason for this is because wisdom is not discrete.  By this I mean that wisdom is actually a compound variable, comprised of knowledge and experience as I said above, but that efforts to impart wisdom have failed because they focus on imparting the knowledge contained within wisdom and although they attempt to share experience it is ultimately impossible to share the latter.  I believe this because experience is inherently intimate, it is your interpretation and your conclusion based on that interpretation.  Wisdom in this regard I therefore feel is only ever truly shared when the recipient already has the experience required and need only the knowledge to combine with it to make the whole and reveal the wisdom.  This incidentally is the same asymmetrical process that is employed in public key encryption in effect, the recipient only receives the encrypted data and the public key, they must already possess their own private key to be able to decrypt what they receive.

Without recognising the value of personal experience and the importance thereof, we end up doing a disservice to people by trying to impart wisdom before they experience the situations that wisdom relates to, this in effect can be seen through parents who try to prevent their children making the same mistakes they made when they were young by imparting the wisdom they gained - the reason this fails miserably and those children still make the same mistakes is because the experience although recounted cannot be given to another person.  They only receive the knowledge but not the experience needed to accept that wisdom. 

I offer advice when people ask me for it, but I don't expect anyone to actually act based on what I say because I know they will likely only agree with me if they have shared the same experiences that I have had, and that consequently the action they take would therefore still be the action they would have taken had I never shared my thoughts.  I learned the hard way that advice when asked for is not asked for out of a need for direction, but is rather asked for out of the desire to know if others think or feel the same way as they do.  You should feel no personal affront if someone asks for your advice and then does not take it, instead you should be confident that they will gain their own experience and in time they will either come to agree with the advice you gave even if they didn't take it, or they will still disagree with it but have attained their own wisdom in the process which will guide them in making their own choices in future.

I've come to understand that as I have said many times, two people can go through the same thing and come out the other side with completely different conclusions, that this doesn't mean that one is right and one is wrong, but that both can be right when correlated with their prior experience, or that both can be wrong, the validity of perception and interpretation is defined by the individual, not by the observer.  This is perhaps best demonstrated for me personally by the disparity that I often experience when other people wrongfully conclude that something means more to me than it actually does.  I am an incredibly curious person and I ask a lot of questions to gain an understanding, it is often the case that my questioning therefore is simply an attempt to make sense of a decision or an experience that I don't understand.  This intense interest however is often misinterpreted as an investment in the decision itself or the experience itself and perceived as judgement by the other person.

To this end, I think a lot of people would be quite surprised by how little emotional investment I have in the things I show interest in.  This blog is another example of this in practice.  I pick apart ideas and concepts and break them down, and it is often the case that the most complex and most nebulous ideas are the ones that I return to time and again to dive into, this interest however is borne out of the depth of pool I dive into, not out of a great emotional connection.  Religion for example is something I have written about, but despite the depths that I have explored the concept with in my own mind and in my own research and study over the years, that drive is borne more out of curiosity than anything else.  To assume there is a great emotional attachment would be misguided.  Likewise I discuss politics quite a lot with people because I find the depth to which you can pick it apart to be appealing, again not because of any emotional attachment.

Knowledge was once my aspiration as a child, to know everything I could about everything, I soon realised that was not possible because of the volume of knowledge that existed so I chose to learn as much as I could about the things that interested me and a little about everything else.  However with age I realised that amassing vast amounts of knowledge even that centred around specific topics was not in itself worthwhile because there was no purpose to that pursuit.  I have lived a life where I have experiences that I have had, my pursuit of knowledge now, and the depth to which I pick things apart and play Devil's Advocate are driven by a desire to extract wisdom from my experiences by combining what knowledge I have attained with those experiences= in the pursuit of greater truth, or to return to Feynman's approach of hierarchy, my interest is not to descend through the hierarchies but to ascend instead as high as I can reach.