What do you think about my view of life.?

Question

I am just thinking, Why do we have to read, study and waste time reading others discoveries and how they view the world instead of building our own discoveries from our perspectives, that way we could lead instead of follow? I am just wondering about how did education really start, there were no books or asigned reading to discover something. The first human beings to start this basically thought out everything without books or school.

Thank you in advance!

Answer 1

I would suggest that you read the thought experiment by Ibn Tufail. Here is a link to a wiki articile about it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayy_ibn_Ya...

The book ("Hayy ibn Yaqdhan") examines what happens when a person is reared in isolation of any other people and without any recorded history. He develops his intelligence based solely on his own experience.

It's not going to directly answer your question, but it may help you interpolate the process that would be involved in learning "from scratch". The benefit of science in particular, is that we all agree on certain constraints (context, observation, reproducibility, etc.) that allow us to judge each others' hypotheses.

People begin with observation. That makes sense, since much of science (and life) is really just observing, recording, and making guesses based on those observations. But after a while, there were questions that just couldn't be answered by observing (by simple eyesight). So, people developed clever ways to observe things over long distances, or started opening bodies up, or started developing tools to look at things smaller than the eye could see. This opened up a whole new perspective. Fortunately, the new perspective never invalidated the old one, it just clarified and added to it. This constant "questioning" is why we are where we are today.

There's no reason to ignore basic, simple observation, which is why we learn from books, at first.In the end, we have to just accept that some things are true in order to have time to examine the ramifications of those truths. If we find a discrepancy, or find that one of our "truths" are actually false, then we attempt to assimilate the new data or change the original hypothesis.

I guess, what I'm trying to say is:

Knowledge is rarely a static entity that we are "stuck" with. We're not learning everyone's past discoveries, we're learning enough so we can support or disprove them as necessary. What you learn today is nothing like what I learned yesterday.

Answer 2

years and years of trial and error, patience, observation, keeping records for others to learn from and slowly developing a data base for others to follow.  Knowing what was done before no matter how primitive does help the advancement of knowledge.

Answer 3

If we use the pragmatic test of truthfulness of knowledge, or, whether a judgment, leading to action on our part, has a successful and desired outcome or not, as the real test of truthfulness of our knowledge or as real test of usefulness of knowledge (in life) then in this situation knowledge we acquire from others becomes useless. Here we have to think in one direction in time because the object or the objective to which we have to apply our knowledge, the same (object / objective) is/becomes the source of all our knowledge. The knowledge we need to think in one direction in time cannot be divided into different disciplines. The schools only transfer information because knowledge required to think in one direction in time cannot be 'given'. "Education is that which remains, if one has forgotten everything he learned in school" Einstein