Information changes you. This is a profound fact, assumed by all of us, but given short shrift, though it’s well worth the time to study.
Each of us learn to deal with our small portion of the universe in practical ways. This is determined primarily by our physiology. Some of us learn to extend the range of our awareness by artificial means, most often by improving on one or more of our senses, say, with a pair of glasses. Some of us go beyond that, creating machines that enhance our ability to deal with our world. A car, for instance.
Some of us have a natural capacity to understand certain information better than others. The math impaired tend to avoid the sciences. The tone deaf do not hear what people with perfect pitch do. There are people with a form of synesthesia that allows them to see colors when they hear certain sounds. And the differences among us are uncountable because our senses may be combined in infinite and myriad ways. But by the time we have grown to adulthood, we naturally comprehend all of this, have generally come to terms with it, and begin to act in ways that allow for it. If we have vertigo, we don’t climb to heights. And yet, we are still each human, in the broader sense.
Information changes you. You are not the same as the person who did not know this. It is the key moment at the beginning of the Hebrew bible. As the story goes, the garden of Eden was lost in just that way. Once you are aware of your nakedness, you cannot unsee it. All knowledge is like that. All the rest of the Bible, and thence human history, follows suit. But not by wearing a suit.
What is information? It is the perception of our senses translated into language in order to understand it and thus may be communicated to others. Information becomes language through consistency of use. If you scream in pain the same way as you scream with pleasure, you have a failure to communicate.
We have created numbers to help comprehend some of that. But we know that numbers do not account for most information; only a very small part of it. And the numbers themselves are artificial. That is what allows us to play with them. Like money in the money supply—worthless unless attached to a particular consistent factor—that may itself be another artificial construct. Even so, that information changes us. It may even make us rich or poor.
If we deny the value of money, for instance, then we must create another currency to barter with. If you are an artist who has created something you value and it has taken you a week to make, you cannot then trade it for three days’ supply of food. You will die. If you, as an artist, insist on writing books nobody reads, you will have to find another means of paying for the costs of living. Selling books, for instance.
If you have learned how to shape wood, you might be a carpenter and build houses or you might be a sculptor and make totem poles. If there is no demand for your totem poles, you might have to use your talent to make bookshelves in order to eat. But a talent is a form of information. It is information which has been translated through your senses into an ability, and then used to make something useful out of the small portion of the universe you live in.
Most people learn more than one talent in order to provide for themselves and their families. The less talent they achieve, the narrower range of jobs they can do and often, the less money they make to provide for themselves and their families. This is not rocket science.
Information changes you—or not. People who act the same before they know something significant as they did after, might have other deficiencies. If your spouse treats you the same after learning you are having an affair, as before, there may be something else going on there. Information can be useless. Most of what you see on afternoon television, for instance. If you spend time watching that, you will have less useful information for the time spent than by doing something useful…There may be a consequence to acquiring useless information after all. So, indirectly, the information changes you.
Brilliant thinkers like Iain McGilchrist have studied the mind and made its function more explicable, but they cannot make us think. Dorothy Parker had that pegged just right while leading a horticulture. We cannot easily unsee what we know. We can forget but they won’t be bygones. Information changes us. The very act of forgetting changes us again.
In most circumstances, knowing is better than not knowing, but there is such a thing as knowing too much. J.R.R. Tolkien surviving his time at Somme would be an example of that. But he then translated that information into something else in order to comprehend the incomprehensible. Making the most of such information can be a key to understanding it better. Understanding the complexity might be achieved through a form of Zen, or, in Tolkien’s case, redirected through a narrative that makes some sense of great horror. But much of the literature of mankind is, to some degree, a means of interpreting what we have learned. Even the humor.
Information changes us. A child is born. Our child. And just as the child’s perceptions are first interpreting a new world, we are discovering the child. And through them we are rediscovering ourselves. And we are changed yet again.