I was listening to Sean Carroll’s Mindscape podcast with Ziya Tong, who talked about demodex mites crawling on our faces, consuming, mating at night, and finally exploding due to their lack of ani.
She mentioned her interest in the porosity of human being, and consequently how hard it is to come up with an accurate definition of ourselves — there are innumerable organisms that have quietly become part of you. Sean gave an example to illustrate how convenient it is for us to have a coarse-grained representation of the world and our relation to it: when we introduce ourselves to someone on a date, the most helpful description is perhaps not to list the mites on your face — the more comprehensive the list is the less helpful it is.
This reminds me of the idea that the number of bits required to convey a piece of information could very well be inversely proportional to the value of the information: wisdom could be imparted in a very short sentence. The process to reach this conclusion (wisdom) may have generated lots of entropy, but the “information” communicated could require very little effort.
This ties in neatly to a question that has been haunting me for a while: What am I learning as a student? What do I want to gain from my college experience?
To be fair, I asked these questions to myself way before my penultimate year of college, and certainly thought a lot more about them during Zoom university, but it just seems that I’ve gotten further away from the answer. Every year during registration period, I chose my classes carefully, hoping that I would come out of each class transformed, or at least, inspired.
That never happened. The classes themselves are not to blame though. It’s just me. I did something wrong. Perhaps it’s the lack of intentionality (not in a Sartrean sense) — if I don’t know where to go I get nowhere..? Who said “just let life’s natural flow lead you”?
