I have a strong desire to comprehend stuff

I claim that comprehending is a hierarchy and can usefully be thought of as a pyramid. At the base of the pyramid is awareness that is followed by consciousness, which is awareness plus attention. Knowing follows consciousness and understanding is at the pinnacle of the pyramid.

Two aspects of this comprehension idea deserve elaboration: consciousness and understanding.

When I was a youngster, probably seven or eight, my father took me with him when he drove to a local farm to pick corn for use in the café the family managed. We drove for a significant amount of time down local dirt roads to a farm with a field of growing corn.

We went into the fields with our bushel baskets and filled them with corn-on-the-cob. Dad showed me how to choose the corn to pick and how to snatch the cob from the stalk.

On the drive home I was amazed to observe the numerous fields of corn we passed on the way back to town. I can distinctly remember thinking to myself, why did I not see these fields of corn while we were driving to the farm earlier?

Today I have an answer to that question. I now say that on the way to the farm I was aware of corn-on-the-cob but on the way back home I was conscious of corn-on-the-cob. There was a very significant difference in my perceptions regarding corn-on-the-cob before and after the experience.

We are aware of many things but conscious of only a small number of things. We were aware of Iraq before the war but now we are conscious of Iraq. There is a very important distinction between awareness and consciousness and it is important for us to recognize this difference.

To be conscious of a matter signifies a focus of the intellect. Consciousness of a matter is the first step, which may lead to an understanding of the matter. Consciousness of a matter is a necessary condition for knowing and for understanding of that matter. Consciousness is a necessary but not sufficient condition for knowing and understanding to take place.

When discussing a topic about which I am knowledgeable most people will, because they recognize the words I am using, treat the matter as old stuff. They recognize the words therefore they consider the matter as something they already know and do not consider as important. Because they are aware of the subject it is difficult to gain their attention when I attempt to go beyond the shallowness of their perception. The communication problem seems to be initially overcoming their awareness and reaching consciousness.

Understanding is a long step beyond knowing. Understanding is the creation of meaning. Understanding represents a rare instance when intellection and emotion join hands and places me in an empathetic position with a domain of knowledge. When I understand I have connected the dots and have created a unity that includes myself. I have created something that is meaningful, which means that I have placed that domain of knowledge within my domain that I call my self. I understand because I have a very intimate connection with a model of reality that I have created. It is that eureka moment that happens rarely but is a moment of ecstasy. As Carl Sagan says “understanding is a kind of ecstasy”.

When I read I almost always read non fiction. I have tried to read fiction and to learn from reading what is considered to be good literature. However, my effort to read good literature fails because I thing that learning by reading good literature is a very inefficient means for gaining knowledge and understanding.

I claim that I can acquire more knowledge in one hour by reading non fiction than I can while reading good literature for ten hours. That is, I claim that learning by reading non fiction is ten times more efficient than learning by reading fiction, i.e. good literature.

Do you agree that acquiring knowledge by reading non fiction is ten times as efficient as from reading fiction?

Generally, yes, but like all of life's difficult questions, the real answer is 'It depends'.

Not everyone has the temperment to read non-fiction for hours. Many (most?) people will be better off reading 11 hours of good fiction than having 1 hour's worth of 10-times-better non-fiction sit on a shelf unread.

Some cultural knowledge comes from actually reading the fiction in question, so as to recognize references to topics, characters, etc. contained in them.

And fiction is sometimes better for conveying more conceptual topics. Your 'corn trip' is a good example - It may have been non-fiction, but could easily have been a fictional account; either way, it probably illustrated your 'aware vs conscious' concept better than some dry text dripping with psychological terms.

Overall, yes, minute-for-minute, non-fiction is more efficient in conveying knowledge than is fiction, but in the context of real life, fiction definitely has a place, and for some people, may even be better.

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Evil

I suspect most people read fiction for entertainment and non fiction for gaining knowledge. That is what I do but I was hoping someone might be able to convince me that reading good literature is a good way to understand why humans do the things they do.

Not at all.

Quality literature is as efficient for transferring knowledge than scientific or historical or other quality non-fiction. It's the nature of the acquired knowledge that differs, not the quality. What one finds in literature is a deeper understanding of human interaction (e.g. Proust, Joyce), the nature of the possibilities in the perversion of the mind (e.g. Dostoievksi, Turgenev), a deeper insight in hierarchical/military thinking (e.g. Tolstoi), the real possibilities of language (e.g. Joyce), a deeper understanding of cultures (e.g. Salinger, Conrad, Melville, Garcia Marquez. Coetzee, Hugo...), and above all an awareness of the boundless creativity of humans (e.g. Joyce, Sterne, Tolkien, ...).

The insights garnered by the above mentioned authors (and other of course) would be far less efficiently transferred by scholarly non-fiction because it is the reader that makes the insight without being expressly told to do so by the author. This is the very difference between being aware and being conscious about an issue that you mention.

Furthermore, non-fiction with literary quality is far more efficient in transferring the message than blunt non-fiction. Compare Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe to Hawking's Brief History of Time or Nietzsche to Kant.

coberst:
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A literary critic (sorry, could not dig up his name) once wrote that after reading the Mapp and Lucia novels he no longer read the Bible, because the novels contained all truth.

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WaronIgnorance

I guess that I can be called a reductionist.

I think that understanding is reached through a long journey that consists of breaking the subject down into its component parts and becoming knowledgeable of each component and then create a meaningful whole out of all this knowledge.

It might be compared with putting together a jigsaw puzzle. Of course one can get an overall comprehension of the plot and the characters after one or two readings and this is the first appreciation of the tale. However to take and create a meaning out of the tale requires a much longer effort and that effort still does not always finish with a moment of understanding, i.e. that eureka moment when water becomes ice.

Well that is certainly debatable.

[quote=coberst;1090796]WaronIgnorance (excerpt)

"I think that understanding is reached through a long journey that consists of breaking the subject down into its component parts and becoming knowledgeable of each component and then create a meaningful whole out of all this knowledge."

Amen ! I don't think this could be better said !

At one time Public Television aired a program titled "Connections" that in a sense illustrated what you are saying. (much of the program related to the progression of the development of weapons of war and warfare strategies.

One componet led to another with with improvements (branching out in many instances to other areas of use.)

Finally these compomnent factors being well understood were used in developing the strategies of battles.

To illustrate what the lack of understanding of component parts can lead to one has only to go back to the early years of computer programming when program development was formost in the hands of programmers rather than systems analyists who simply did not have the background to put all the pieces together and thus created a whole contingent of those committed to repairing "bugs" due to lack of understandin all the components.

I have Connections I, II and III on DVD (James Burke). Highly recommended.

The original series inspired me more than anything else to spend my life figuring out answers to weird questions.

Interesting 'unsustainability' subtext in that series by the way. Hard to notice but if you look for it, its there.

[quote=White Rabbit;1094101]I have Connections I, II and III on DVD (James Burke). Highly recommended.

What was your source for the DVD ?

To be honest, I don't have clue - a friend gives me stacks of DVD's that he has made.

I'll ask him. There are no commercials if that's a clue.

Connections:

A series of DVD's remastered from tape to includind connections 1-2-and 3 is available through Amazon.com

Connections set of multiple discs is $ 149.00. The entire series is now in the public domain and can be copied if desired. (I have a strong desire to comprehend stuff - U.S. Politics Online: A Political Discussion Forum)

I am working on that angle now.

Trying to exhibit a url

Knowing the fellow whom I get all this kind of stuff from, I'd say he would have found the public domain version, downloaded it and burned the DVD's to give to me (as a gift) - quite recently in fact, only a month or two ago.

The entire series can be downloaded via bittorrent. It is also available from youtube in a ton of different parts:

YouTube - Connections, Episode 1 Part 1 of 5

Looks very interesting, I'm going to check it out.

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