Hong’s Cave

I came to think that “the limited mental capacity” plays a very, if not the most, significant role in human, both as an individual and also as a society. We cannot retain all the experiences we ourselves go through in our life-span, let alone the collective knowledge across the time. We forget. Our mental capacity is limited. Even if we can use all 100% of our brain, this problem won’t go away.

So, what’s the consequences of this short-coming? Well, we will have to go through the same mistakes over and over again, inevitably. Fortunately, we have methods to transfer some of our collected knowledge across time (any kind of recording and communicational means). This allows us, as a society, to go through the same mistakes a lot fewer and the periods of these cycles longer. However, just transferring the end result without the background experiences leading to it has its limited usefulness as a perfect information transfer method if you think about it. Without all the relevant background information, the result is often mis-interpreted and we have to go through some of the past experience over again. Most parents like to tell their children that they’ve lived longer and knew better so it’s better that they listen to them. Partially true. However, I think that deprives of an individual a most exciting part about life: having one’s own experience and building one’s own knowledge as a result. That is, becoming an “individual.” It seems people would very much like to ignore the fact that pain and suffering (which are “value-added” terms, by the way) are also a part of what I would like to call a life.