Brain, I Trust In You

We must stop relying on a source information and practice to have faith in own thoughts. I give this caution as I, myself, had fallen for the Collector’s Fallacy. The desire to have all of the information readily available made me collect bit of information I encounter.

There’s no way to simply pull out an author’s intent. Through reading you have to make sense of things yourself, thereby creating information. It’s impossible to collect information by collecting original sources. Everything runs through our brain’s filter and is subject to our interpretation. Our own notes require less energy when we read and make sense of them than re-visiting the original source would offer.

Information depends on our brain’s filter. It’s this filter which determines what gets handed to our conscious mind, thus becoming information. All the rest, the stuff not reaching our consciousness, consequently cannot become information. We can configure the brain’s filter by directing our awareness and focus. We change our frame of mind automatically when we stand up from our chairs, leave the house, and cross the street. In other words, we pay attention to useful things depending on the situation without having to think about it. But we also have the ability to change the focus consciously.

I can suspend writing for a second and listen for the sound of cars moving on the street. Yup, it’s still there. Then I move back to writing and dismiss the noise. Let’s say information is the content of our thoughts.Thoughts constitute the conscious mind’s material. Consequently, there must be an unconscious part which deals with the rest. It’s there, somehow, but not accessible to us. Not the text as a stimulus itself, but the thoughts it inspired are important and worth keeping. Original texts are worthless by themselves besides the point of becoming sources of potentially stimulating moments for their reader. Our own ideas will vanish if not cared for. Everything else can be re-obtained from the source if need be. So don’t worry about achieving less than 100% coverage, because to work with a text in any meaningful way implies being picky and imaginative.

Reading on the web should be like reading books: after you found what’s useful, take note of it. Taking note ensures you expand your knowledge. Everything else is either wasted time or reading for fun. Then process the notes you took, integrate them into your knowledge system. This is the biggest lever of change.

The content of our thoughts thus depends on the filter of our brain. Our sub-consciousness can process things in the background and hand surprise insights to us, but it doesn’t think. Only our consciousness contains thoughts. In short, there’s no such thing as information in a text. There’s only information you created based on what you read.

All in all, simply keeping the original source itself around doesn’t increase your knowledge because you don’t obtain any information at all.