On frameworks of new learning methods.
How to obtain knowledge is an on debate question for thousands of years and it seemed to be exhausted, at least in terms of “how” for a while. Now with the fusion of internet and our everyday life, finding objective knowledge has become one of the easiest tasks of your routine, just google it and in fractions of a second you can find pretty much everything and as deep as you want to know about a subject.
When all the objective data is there to be taken, how relevant is the gathering of information processed by logics in your brain? Knowledge once was known as memorization of certain scriptures followed by faith and trust on your teacher or your clergymen. That concept was gradually and slowly been replaced by a more scientific approach, such as a greater consumption of physical data, basically reading, and ours predecessor’s analysis followed by your own logical process of understanding. That represented a great shift on human development, as knowledge could accumulate and therefore evolve, making it possible for our society to expand several areas of study and even the biosphere itself. The equation, knowledge = data + logic, represents a fairly accurate simplification of humanity’s historic path towards “enlightenment”, especially if you consider time as the enabler of accumulation.
During centuries the accumulation of objective knowledge was an individual’s personal path of constant discovery iterated by logics, but as the conclusions became broader and more precise, that path tends to get smaller to practical matters of your life, but only deeper due to one’s specific desire to expand that frontier. This process, made the world more objectively defined for us to live, some might say simpler in this axis, but also, followed by human curiosity, created greater a demand for subjective knowledge. If every objective knowledge is available to me on demand how can I really satisfy my desire for the unknown? The problem in obtaining subjective knowledge is that is a very personal and specific process that needs to be felt and not consumed. Feeling something started to substitute the data on the Knowledge equation, and to feel something, humans need experiences to enable that sensation of understanding something for the first time, the drug that feeds curiosity.
Someone very sensible to its surroundings and stimuli might not be able to learn anything without proper experience and someone who lives every possible human experience and lacks total sensibility to it, surely will not learn either. So it seems that equation has changed to Knowledge = Experience x Sensibility, as in the absence of any of its factors, knowledge will result in zero. Also, both factors have a much deeper connection than Data and Logics, as the growth of any of them impulse the expansion of the second, greater sensibility allows deeper experiences and deeper experiences enhance our sensibility.
Today, a great issue is not how can I obtain knowledge anymore, but how fast can I learn subjective wisdom in order to deal with the new objective knowledge offered to us hourly. That new learning framework, when analyzed by the same perspective of accumulation and therefore adding the concept of time to it, seems to provide a big mathematical scale leap in our mission to satisfy curiosity and a greater fit to the challenges we face today. Mediation, empathy, team work and specially collaboration are qualities very supported by subjective knowledge of the world. Respecting a different opinion, not as a logical-data-supported onslaught on who’s right or wrong, but as a viable possibility of subjective conclusions of different human experiences, opens highways of human collaboration rather than competition.
That mindset’s fit to our moment as species, has never been so aligned to our needs. The time we took to learn and logically analyze the data provided to us is no longer compatible with the time scale in which new content appears, so our chance to keep up with the changes is learning how to cope with people and tools that own that knowledge. The subjective capacity of selecting, organizing and collaborate with knowledge sources is essential to our survival in this century, it needs to be faster and more accurate as time goes by, and it seems that the virtuous cycle of experience x sensibility x time is the only well defined framework that can keep up with the hunger and need for knowledge we have. It might be a little bit far from the content we wanted to obtain initially, but they are the abilities demanded from us in order to keep our relevance as the intellectual dominant specie on this planet, specially facing new algorithms of mass data consumption and light speed logical analysis of today.
