An Autodidact's Bible, #5
Reclaiming Your Mind, Part 1, Chapter 5a
This is the fifth installment of the serial of my forthcoming book Reclaiming Your Mind: An Autodidact’s Bible. As with other installments, part of it is behind the paywall. Become one of my supporters to get the whole thing.
Catch up on earlier installments here:
#1, #2, #3, #4
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Chapter 5: The Vast Frontier
Humans are a promiscuous lot, and not just in the sexual sense. We have way way too much horsepower spinning up between our ears to leave anything alone.
The proof is in your hands right now:
We live in a civilization that creates tools that allow me to organize my thoughts on something as abstract as “learning” and “knowledge,” and then manifests market pathways and delivery devices that let you experience my thoughts, thusly organized, in the form of a bound paper book, or an ebook, or by listening to my actual voice in your actual ears even though you and I have never met and might be separated by entire oceans...
...and yet less than ten thousand years ago we didn’t even have a written language, and a hundred thousand years ago we didn’t even know how to cook food. That’s what happens when you can’t leave well-enough alone. When you always have to be figuring things out; learning what’s going on.
It’s what happens when you’re bored.
Not even curiosity is as powerful a motivator as boredom. Stack curiosity and boredom with each other and you’ve got an unbeatable combination. You can’t sit still. You’ve got to do something.
You know the feeling. You’ve been there. So have all our ancestors, whether they were wearing skins or tunics or himations or togas or knee-breeches or battle uniforms or business suits. Like you and I and a good proportion of the rest of humanity, they couldn’t leave well enough alone.
Boredom is the secret weapon of the self-taught, and the boredom of the self-taught have given us a landscape of types of knowledge that goes beyond the sorts that are obvious to our WEIRD perspective.1
Alps upon alps arise in front of you. A vast frontier? You bet. Much vaster than the mind can comfortably imagine. Jumping in with both feet is all fine and dandy, but where do you start? Do you just pick your favorite subject from school and start reading?
Where do your curiosities lie?
More to the point, what is there to learn?
In this endless landscape, there are countries connected to each other by superhighways and rivers, feeding back and informing and shaping each other constantly, even though they each represent different domains of knowledge (and approaches to it):
Physical
Our first and most direct form of knowledge comes from contact between our bodies and the world. It’s the personal knowledge of connection and safety we get from being held naked and squalling to our mother’s breast and finding nourishment there.
We use our senses—the shape of things in our hands and in our mouths, the tastes and smells they exude, the heat and cold, the way light scatters off a surface and vibrations pulse against them, the effect on our semicircular canals as we stand and sway and dance and fall—to gain first-hand knowledge about the world. How to move through it, who to trust, how to survive, how to find comfort. We use these senses to teach ourselves how to walk and run and jump and climb and sometimes to swim.
It’s our first experience with Type-1 learning, and the things we can learn to do with our bodies (given enough determination) are astounding.
The country of physical knowledge encompasses everything we know and learn and do from the interaction between our skin and the world, and there’s a lot of it to be had.
Martial arts
Dancing
Driving
Sculpture
Climbing
Fighting
Bicycling
Blacksmithing
High wire walking
Kissing
Wrestling
Sexual technique
Sword fighting
Swimming
Bull fighting
Horse Riding
Yoga
Diving
Skin diving
Carpentry
Ice skating
Rock hounding
Ice dancing
Running
Welding
Jumping
Baseball
The list goes on and on, nearly forever.
An important caveat when exploring this country in the great knowledge continent:
This is the only country where you can ONLY learn things the Type-1 way. There is no study in the realm of the physical—there is only action. You can watch other people for examples. You can learn theory that gives you an idea of what you might be able to accomplish with your body. You can learn the physics involved, and the biomechanics, and all the related fields, but until you lift a sword, or pop a clutch, or jump out of a plane, or caress your lover’s neck, you don’t actually know anything. You just know about it.
Physical knowledge is knowledge in the raw. It is the most basic kind of knowledge, and the one that serves as the anchor and re-anchor point for every other kind of knowledge. We are, after all, made out of meat. Everything we do is physical. Everything we know—and everything we learn—is encoded in our physical beings.
Ignore this field at your peril. The practice of physicality is what sets the template for all Type-1 learning. Without this practice, you will not recognize feedback loops when they happen, so you will not learn.
Whatever you do, no matter how frail or clumsy or uncomfortable you may be, practice your physical crafts. Always.
Practical
Once we get the whole business of walking and talking out of the way, our next order of business is surviving and navigating in the world, and this level of experience is the domain of practical knowledge.
Practical, adj.: Of or pertaining to practice or action.
Since “practical” is, by definition, a word referring to what is done “in practice,” you’d be justified in inferring that practicum are the bits of knowledge pertaining to how things work and how they are done in any given domain—and you’d be correct.
Practicum are rules of thumb about what to do based on a basic awareness of how things work. Every field has its attendant practicum, because just about everything in life has a practical aspect to it. These practicum are the connective tissue that impart meaning and order to what you know. Like The Dude’s rug in The Big Lebowski, they really tie the room together in your mind palace.2
Practical knowledge sometimes arises directly from experience. For example, if you’ve noticed that things have a tendency to fall down if they’re not well supported, and that oil makes a floor slippery, and that slippery floors make people lose their balance, you can (and will) divine that running across an oily floor is not something you want to do if staying upright is high on your priority list.