I am reading "What is Wrong with Us".Thank you for mentioning it.Very interesting."
I quit working through "Geometry" early last night, around 9PM, and then proceeded to read What's Wrong with Us?
I was surprised that it kept my attention until around 2AM when I forced myself to just lay on my cot staring into the darkness. I checked to see how much I had read, and i appear to be half way through it. There is something about Feltham's style that is agreeable to me. I think he is honest. I appreciate his doubts about the academic scene.
When I woke up this morning I was looking through some notes from a couple years ago when I was studying Number Theory. While I remember really comprehending what I was writing, first thing in the morning, 2 years later, it would take at least a week for me to get back to where I might understand the code I wrote at the time.
It helped me to think of your pessimistic theories about our inability to retain much, that progress in retaining knowledge may be a grand illusion of self-deception. This helped me from sinking into depression. I also looked at a physics text I had wanted to start, but I am determined to get through these Geometry texts. Why? So I can forget about it?
Being human is a difficult predicament to be in. Part of our brain makes plans or sets a goal, and the animal part of us has to comply ... the animal part is stubborn and lazy and continually protests that it cannot see the point in following through.
I think what I appreciate most about What's Wrong With Us is that it kind of supports my suspicions about the tremendous amount of self-deception involved in the acquisition of "knowledge". Those of us who are intellectually honest may be at a tremendous disadvantage compared to those who more readily engage in self-deception, false confidence, and ---- I am struggling to recall a term ---- it has to to with projecting this public image and has to do with acquiring "credentials" so as to be taken seriously ...
Part of what's wrong with us is that we deceive ourselves, and hence we must in turn deceive others. In the end, this must create a total farce. This must be what Shakespeare [whoever he was, we're not certain if his plays might have been stolen from Marlowe] meant with "Nothing that is so, is so."
Maybe the fact that this message board has few participants is what helps us to enforce brutal psychological honesty with ourselves to ensure we resist this seemingly inborn tendency to self-deceive, to delude ourselves and others. We make a conscious effort to remain DISILLUSIONED.
I continue to study in spite of the fact that I expect to forget everything.
How and why?
I don't know why I study what I do, but I will now formally concede that a more honest expression for what we call "studying" would be "exploring".
I do not "study mathematics" so as to "know," but I "explore mathematical ideas" to see if I might understand in the present moment.
The whole nature of education is questionable!
What do I know? Nothing! I am the Will. It is not the nature of the Will to know anything.
Why do we write things down? To kind of capture what is fleeting?
I work out a problem or come up with a solution, even if it is rudimentary or trivial. There is a desire to capture the idea, to solidify it, to own it ... but we must admit that our mental states and our memory are not solid things. We do not own our memory ... The joke is on us, and the comical aspect of the horror of our existence is that so much is dependent on our deceiving ourselves.
It's as though we might not be able to function in human society if we just became completely honest. It's not a level playing field. Since we know that most every functioning adult most likely is deluded and deceptive, we have no choice but to "pretend" we have a grip on things.
Those of us who "drop out" of the show may have reached a point of self-honest that we might not be able to keep up the farce enough to play a role in the farce of society.
The teachers must project this image that what they are teaching will be retained. The teachers must live this lie. They only seem to understand the material so well because they cover it year after year (and have the instructor's solution manuals to the texts [or they wrote the text]).
Got to go ....