The Beauty Of Knowledge

“Consciousness“ seems to have become the domain of the new age. We all have friends, or friends of friends, in the sandal wearing hippy category. They practice yoga, burn incense, ding bells and do all of those ”weird“ things that are meant to somehow raise their vibrational field and level of consciousness. In the business world we pooh pooh these alternative ungrounded folks, suspicious of the drugs they’re smoking. However I don’t think the concept of consciousness need be ungrounded and irrelevant to our daily work and personal lives.

Nathaniel Branden, a pioneer of the psychology of self-esteem, in his book ”The Art Of Living Consciously“ defines living consciously as a state of being mentally active rather than passive. It is the ability to look at the world through fresh eyes. It is intelligence taking joy in its own function. Living consciously is seeking to be aware of everything that bears on our interests, actions, values, purposes, and goals. It is the willingness to confront facts, pleasant or unpleasant. It is the desire to discover our mistakes and correct them … it is the quest to keep expanding our awareness and understanding, both of the world external to self and of the world within. This to me is an extremely practical definition of consciousness. It is our ability be aware of our actions and their results - learning and adapting to the feedback reality provides us. I assert that continuous improvement always follows from consciousness of ourselves, our actions and our environment. This assertion may seem a bit of a jump. I plan on addressing this further in future blog articles.

Some of the popular business philosophies of the current day include lean manufacturing and thinking, the theory of constraints, systems thinking, business process management etc. A common observation of these theories is the seeming common sense reasoning they apply. This reasoning starts simple but somehow leads to uncommon conclusions and results. Being conscious is a lot like this common sense. Simple observation applied consistently and with perseverance can lead to the uncommon.

Business theories such as those mentioned above bring new language and perspective but a lot of the fundamental ideas are recycled. It is in the interest of the purveyors of these theories to propagate jargon and hype around their theories. Such sugar motivates us to apply truths which are ages old and common sense. Don’t get me wrong, I consider myself a student of the theories mentioned above and appreciate sugar as much as the next person - new perspectives are very important. And sugary treats stimulating us into action is very important too The main point I’m making is that we forget awareness, applied thought and fundamental common sense in the marketing noise made by selling of business theories. A business philosophy may give us new frameworks and tools to use but if the theory is any good these tools should ultimately be pointing to us increasing our consciousness and awareness. For us to be proactively observing, asking questions and actively thinking. For us to be taking responsibility for our circumstances and challenges rather than playing victim. And for us to be propagating this culture throughout our organisations. I agree with Fred Kofman in his book Conscious Business when he says ”consciousness is the main source of organisational greatness“.

Note: This post acts as a statement of intent for this blog. It is more abstract and longer than I want to generally make my posts. I plan on focusing and refining over time. I believe perfection is a trap - it’s better to move and gain momentum over waiting for perfection. I believe I’ve set the write tone which is a beginning

I love knowledge and learning. I am filled with a sense of wonder, awe and beauty as I learn more and more about life and it’s mysteries- on a macro existential universal level and on a micro, specific discipline, daily detail level.

What is it that I find beautiful in knowledge?

Ultimately I’m amazed at existents - at nature in its myriad forms, and particularly at our own existents, with our capacity to cognize. Learning about manifested existents extends my sense of beauty. To paraphrase the great late physicist, Richard Feynman, understanding the science beyind a flower lets me appreciate the beauty of a flower even more. When I look up at the stars at night, filled with a sense of wonder at the visual vastness, my wonder is increased at knowing that the light I am looking at has taken millions of years to reach my eyes.

I find the subjective process of learning, discovery and applied thought in general beautiful. Those “aha” and “eureka” moments make you feel triumphant and alive. (It’s probably these feelings that allow us to most closely compare love of knowledge to romantic love - love that fills you with passion and makes you feel alive!). Applied thought includes capacities to reason abstractly, solve problems, design solutions, understand environments, intuit, overcome obstacles and introspect our own psyches. The joy of intellectual play such as puzzle solving or recreational mathematics falls into this category

The usefulness that knowledge brings is beautiful. As a simplistic example, a child who burns himself on a heater learns that a certain degree of heat leads to pain. This knowledge allows the child to avoid future pain. As we develop more and more such abstractions, we build maps which lets us negotiate reality effectively. This is the driving force behind the success of humanity’s evolution. The maps we make which allow us to turn ideas into reality is fascinating. This is the beauty of applied intelligence.

What are the implications of this outlook?

I’ve stated some of the things I find beautiful about knowledge. We can use this as a rough heuristic to look at my approach to learning and the types of topics I’m interested in. For anyone who has done some programming, this is analogous to using our ideas of “beautiful” code to drive out how we design our programs.

So what kind of things do you think I might study and practice? There is a general appreciation of knowledge and an emphasis on the process of learning and thinking. This leaves a lot of topics on the table. In some ways it doesn’t even matter what the topic is as it’s the process of learning and intellectual play that is important. However, this isn’t completely true. I’ve placed an emphasis on knowledge being useful.

The measure of usefulness is obviously vague and is going to differ based on personality, need and context. Much of the “usefulness” of knowledge is going to be relative to what you’re engaged in. If I’m working as a business analyst putting a business case together for a project, understanding financial metrics, and the metrics most important to the business, is pretty useful knowledge. If I don’t know these things then it’s going to be extremely useful knowing how to find these things out - having the independence and structure of mind that let’s us think through the situation effectively. The most generally useful knowledge and skills are fundamental principles that can be applied in all kinds of contexts.

My “meta” life

This focus on fundamental principles takes us to the “meta” level of life. Which is the level behind what we’re considering. Meta-data refers to data about a data (like the tags on an mp3). Meta-physical refers to things beyond the physical. A meta-structure is a structure behind the structure. Meta-cognition is our ability to cognize and regulate our own cognition. A meta-joke is a joke that uses a familiar class of jokes as part of the joke eg An Englishman, an Irishman, and a Scotsman walk into a bar. The bartender turns to them, takes one look, and says “What is this - some kind of joke?”. You should get the general idea.

This meta level of life is wonderous. If we can master knowledge at this generic level of life we can be effective in many arenas. By having a high level of focus that lets you see a landscape of knowledge, like being high up in a plane letting you see the vistas of a physical landscape, you can see what’s important, you can see where you may want to travel and you can see where you may want to dive down into a more detailed level of focus. I thought about calling this blog “my meta life” but it doesn’t convey the same emotional sense as “the beauty of knowledge”.

As we learn general patterns we start seeing the same patterns in many disciplines. To quote Gerry Weinberg in “An Introduction to General Systems Thinking”:

How does the generalist approach a new subject? Suppose, for instance, that he decides he must learn something about economics. He might find a text book on the subject by seeing what is used in the introductory course in the local university, or he might simple browse among the economics books in his local library. When he opens such a book, however, he is not starting from scratch. He knows many general paradigms for thought and communication, and he is clever enough to penetrate their economics disguise.

I’ve had this pull to meta level knowledge early on in my intellectual development. When I was starting my career I thought about studying more meta level lofty topics such as philosophy. However the things I looked at weren’t pragmatic enough for my liking (particularly things like academic philosophy). I ended up studying engineering where ideas are applied. I came close to enrolling in a PhD (and indeed may still one day) but didn’t as I wanted industry experience. Applying what we know brings true knowledge in my opinion. When we apply knowledge we get feedback, letting us weed out misconceptions and fallacies like a scientist disproves hypothesis via experimentation. If we’ve truly acquired a piece of knowledge we should be acting differently to how we did before gaining the knowledge.

As I’ve progressed through my career I’ve always maintained a focus on meta-level topics: reading on areas not directly related to my work; continually looking for the fundamentals of what I was applying myself to and how these fundamentals have applications and connections to things that aren’t immediately obvious. At times this has been and continues to be challenging. This kind of focus requires more learning than just learning the discipline associated with work. It’s also hard for people to recognise that you’re not most interested in the work being done, but in how that work generalises to principles that can be applied in much wider contexts. In this blog I make an effort to consolidating my meta findings and and express some of the meta level focus I’ve had in my work over the years. Where can my career go if I make this interest explicit?

What will this blog cover?

I’ve now setup what I find beautiful about knowledge and learning and what kind of focus this aesthetic has given me. I’ve also briefly stated my intention behind this blog. Given all of this, what kind of topics do you think I may cover? My meta focus leads to topics such as learning theory, general thinking skills (such as the work of Edward De Bono), thinking disciplines such as system’s thinking and Ken Wilbur’s integral thinking. My emphasis on knowledge being pragmatic and useful leads to topics such as practical psychology (self-knowledge is probably the most useful knowledge), interpersonal skills and productivity. My interest in general patterns gives a cross disciplinary focus - anything is fair game. Any discipline will offer a unique perspective and chunk of theory that can inform other disciplines. From this perspective, I am a generalist in contrast to specialists. I keep my mind as open as I can. I try not to shy away from controversial or non-mainstream topics for fear or missing gems found in these areas.

One of my favourite Science Fiction novels talks about a concept called “Shih” which aligns with my perspective on knowledge and describes the ability I am working to develop:

Shih was the opposite of facts and raw information; shih was the elegance of knowledge, the insight and skill to organize knowledge into meaningful patterns. As an artist chooses colours or light to make her pictures, a master of shih chooses textures of knowledge, various ideas, myths, abstractions, and theories to create a way of seeing the world. The aesthetics and beauty of knowledge - this was shih.

Human knowledge is multiplying at an exponential rate. Having “shih” is a skill of increasing importance.