The shape of knowledge

I think of knowledge as something like an octopus, a splotchy, wriggling ink-blot shape that stretches out in many directions and across dimensions.

There is what is possible to know - if that is even a thing. There is what you do know - or what you think you know. There is the outlines of subconscious knowledge - what’s available to all of us, to some of us, that makes us human. Then there are those edges of knowledge that we don’t know we know - perhaps learned muscle, or mental muscle memory.

Beyond that are the frontiers the areas we might explore - some easily accessible from our current basecamps, some distant, blocked, requiring more exploration to reach.

Exploration is another theme here - I think of knowledge as a vast vascular landscape. Unknown horizons, hidden valleys, mysterious forests. Education, conversation provides us with maps, with outlines - a rough sense of what might lie beyond a particular horizon, or of a path to that cut-off goal. Mentors are sherpers, guides travelling with us, helping us understand the landscapes they already know - or co-navigating the new based on their hard-earned knowledge of similar terrains, climates, unknowns. Or sharing a map - hastily scrawled or meticulously annotated. Perhaps right, perhaps wrong.

As we come to know lands, we settle them. They become familiar, easy. We learn the terrain, where to place our feet, how to ford the streams - where to brave the dangerous. We shrink the known in our heads. We reduce it, defuse it. We underestimate what we know.

The common traps are underestimating the known or underestimating the unknown.

Underestimating the known results in imposter syndrome. The sense that because our hard earned knowledge is now easy, it is somehow smaller, it’s ease to us now somehow represents its ease to everyone - and there’s some truth to that. It’s easier to climb a mountain with a guide - we can make something hard-earned easier for others to earn. But that doesn’t diminish our earning of it, and that brings me on to the next challenge - the assumption that something being hard means we are no good at it. Learning is hard. Most things that are worthwhile are. How hard, or easy, we find something is separate to the value of the knowledge itself. How hard it actually is may make it more valuable as fewer people might do it. Underestimating the known often also results in us not seeing the overlaps, the areas where our knowledge maps out, wraps around an intriguing unknown that is there, ready for us to explore. The more you know - and the more disparate that knowledge - the more intriguing cross pollinations there are. The more opportunities for you to see similarities, shapes, opportunities.

Underestimating the unknown is equally damaging. We can think we’ve seen it all, know it all. Underestimate others, their achievements, quite how far they’ve got - or how much work it took to get to the point they are. We can over-estimate our own knowledge as a result of this. We can reduce the horizons and declare that our world is known. There is nothing new to discover - limiting ourselves, our ability to grow, and limiting our ability to interact, to engage with others. We also cut down those cross pollination opportunities - our own internal black sails, what we can’t comprehend, or imagine, can’t possibly exist. That takes us to a kind of self-satisfied fatigue. A comfortable discomfort.

And on the subject of comfort. This vast, personal unknown hovers somewhere between raw excitement and barely contained horror. That something so alien - a fog of war so dense - can exist next to us - next to, and surrounding every tendril of knowledge - is both unsettling and invigorating. We have so much to explore and the more we know the greater that frontier becomes - an ever expanding sphere, who’s surface area grows exponentially. That surface can grow so large as to daunt us. To shut us down. So large that it ceases to exist to us - like a sky, the idea of the universe.

Then, there is the knowledge we can’t see, or reach, or perhaps comprehend. This might manifest as unreachable lands - things you can’t figure out how to reach. Areas that seem blocked off, utterly alien, knowledge that we can’t comprehend understanding. Areas of expertise that seem so daunting that we don’t even broach them. Sometimes the answer is a guide. Sometimes it is just to throw yourself in. Other times that knowledge suddenly becomes accessible - a missing piece of the map fills in granting access. A sheer, unclimbable surface tilts, becomes walkable.

Knowledge islands. Little patches of unconnected experience, or education. Sometimes these islands persist. Sometimes they are useful routes in - like parachuting in to the unknown and tracking back to the comfort of home, and the known. That track you form - that fresh tendril - then offers other fresh opportunities. New surface area to explore and extend. The more you learn the bigger the surface area to the unknown. The more, exciting, daunting, wonderful and terrifying opportunities.

And each of us has our own map - our own territory to explore. Not only is our knowledge unique to each and every one of us, but so is that available knowledge. There is overlap, there is commonality, there are features that are similar enough to be the same for all of us. But we each bring our own outlook and experience to defining it. Even with guides we all snake our tendrils off in different directions. A class full of students, or readers of a textbook may learn the same things, but the knowledge they gain - their take on it - will be utterly unique to them. And their next steps - the paths and trails they take, follow or blaze will be theirs alone.

So go and explore, but take a look back. Celebrate the map you’ve made so far - that weird, multi-dimensional tendrilled beast that is your knowledge. But look outwards too. Chip away at the unknown. Parachute yourself into it. Take a guide or guide someone else. But enjoy just how far you’ve come and how much more there always is to see.