The Lost Art of Learning

I was reading in Business 2.0 about Jeff Hawkins, the gent who created the Palm Pilot and the Treo. His driving passion is apparently neuroscience, and his team is currently at work on an application called Numenta, which is basically a computer that's programmed to learn like a human.

Then, somewhere down the article, the author mentions that humans don't yet know exactly how the brain works, but if they did...

And then I realized: when did we, as a society, become so quick to proclaim that we DO know everything?

I think back to my gradeschool and high school textbooks, especially in science and social studies, which I now realize, only a decade or two later, were mostly hogwash or propaganda. Not only is the Civil War (and every other aspect of history) much more complex than most schools ever let on, but now we know basic fundamentals of science -- like Pluto being a planet -- are wrong.

And yet, to watch most TV commercials, read most books, see most films, you'd think we were living in the age of complete knowledge. I'm sure this has always been the case for humanity -- to act as though it knows absolutely everything about its world -- which explains the initial treatment of "heretics" like Galileo and the idealogical wars between Socrates and the sophists.

But to admit that we don't know how something works -- that's kind of a sobering statement, in the midst of all this knowledge, no?

It got me thinking... what else do we not know? And why not?

Somewhere along the way, the art of learning became passe and was replaced by the artlessness of knowing. Knowledge is useless in a vacuum, which means we, as a society, should be forever pushing forward to better understand ourselves and our surroundings, so that we may always be improving as both individuals AND a society. And yet, how many people are scorned or ridiculed for attempting to learn more about that which we, as a society, admit we know very little?

It's almost like a generalized conservative mentality, which mandates that we NOT ask questions or seek to know things beyond our immediate reach, has pervaded the status quo and caused us to see curiosity or individuality as a weakness and an idiosyncracy to be expunged, rather than a possible avenue to enlightenment which should be supported and celebrated.

Heady thoughts, I know, and not at all what you or I might expect to consider when reading a copy of Business 2.0... And it has nothing specifically to do with our web series... I'm just wondering...