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Leonardo da Vinci, parrots, geniuses, nature
This article is a collection of thoughts stemming from a bit of reading on Leonardo da Vinci. I read a little bit of the Leonardo biography by Walter Isaacson (up to the description of Verrochio's Baptism of Christ painting, where Leonardo's contributions outshined his master's), as well as the first section (called "experience") of a compilation of his notebooks (titled "Leonardo da Vinci Notebooks", published by Oxford World Classics and compiled by Irma A. Richter).
Speaking of his notebooks, for some reason it is very hard to find more complete transcriptions of them. I'm pretty sure that aforementioned book compiling some of his notes only includes a fraction of them. I just looked this up, and it seems that in fact most of those notebooks are not even in the public domain at all. If I'm correct about that, then those avaricious museum boards should be ashamed of themselves, closely hoarding all those insights and hiring "experts" hoping that they can decipher the genius contrained within, maybe even publish and sell their own "analysis" of the notebooks to continue pinching pennies while targeting all the "practical" people out there who can't be bothered to find the answers themselves.
Seriously though, it would be great if I could find more of those notebook transcriptions. Hopefully there's a bigger compilation out there once I'm done with this one.
Like the previous article on yin and yang, this article was written stream of consciousness without any significant editing. As I wrote this, I realized that there were several sections in a row, specifically, the stretch of sections from "(mis)education" to "negativity and criticism for prestige", that have a negative and even slightly misanthropic communication. Note to self: when writing a "proper" article, definitely spend effort editing structure, tone, and communication aspects just to make the article more pleasant. Just a heads up to whoever will read this article (probably exactly one person), don't be turned off by the string of toxicity ahead; beyond that there are some pretty uplifting sections.
Art, math, and science
In every document praising Leonardo's greatness and genius, there is the inevitable section on how he saw art and science as complimentary. A manifestation of this is in his notebooks, filled to the brim with both sharp physical observations and deep theorizing, and complex imaginative sketches; both elaborate details of inventions and engineering techniques, and their intricate drawings and blueprints.
In popular culture, math/science and art are considered different worlds. Not only are math and science looped into the same category (in reality they are as different as science is from art), the category being that of coldness, pure logic and rationality, with tight rules that cannot be deviated from, and without any attention or valuation on emotion, but exhibiting "intelligence"; but they are seen as completely distinct from the world of art, considered sensitive, emotional, expressive, apart from the realm of logic, with complete freedom. Most people clearly identify more with the "art" concept, as it entails a degree of the beloved societal archetype of "rebelliousness"; not to mention the common perception of math as uncool and boring (science, less so).
This is a false dichotomy; completely detached from the reality of things. These naive descriptions of art and science do not do justice to the inherent value of either subject. Indeed, the greatest theorems in mathematics are great because they are beautiful and meaningful (art); and (in general) the most glorified artworks are glorious because of their precise depictions of reality and their close fit to common archetypes (science). In terms of my article on yin and yang; this is equivalent to that tao symbol; imagine math as order, and art as chaos; math (yang) would envelop a circle of yin, and yin (art) would envelop a circle of yang.
The most celebrated and meaningful of artworks have a close and inextricable link with reality; both on the physical dimension, and the "aesthetic" or archetypal dimension. This article is inspired by Leonardo da Vinci, so let's use his paintings as an example. Among their high aesthetic qualities are their portrayals of perspective, of motion, of lively and immersive nature imagery, of accurately rendered human anatomy, of physically accurate interplay between light and shadow, of folds on garments, ripples in water... the list goes on. In fact, just reading that list, I feel the aesthetic value radiating from such concepts, even before they hit the drawing board. There is an intrinsic aesthetic value in the perfection of these things. Notice that these are all physical concepts. They are all observable in nature; and to understand them, and get an accurate and realistic representation and depiction of them, requires scientific experimentation and theorizing, in the same way that a physicist would enquire about gravity, or an anthropologist would investigate the interacting systems of musculature and skeleton in humans. To get to these masterpieces, one needs to be a scientist. In fact this very concept of perfection of those aspects of art involves some underlying reality, that can be matched to varying degrees of success, and science is all about observing reality and understanding it, and such understanding allows one to reliably harness and interact with nature. One such harnessing of nature is to emulate it; and this is what these Renaissance artists aspired to do. There is also the archetypal dimension. Emulating nature is one thing; but clearly all (accurate) portrayals of nature do not have equal aesthetic value. For example, compare the Mona Lisa, to a painting of a wall. The painting of the wall can be extremely scientifically accurate (there aren't too many degrees of freedom to match with reality, after all); but one does not look up to it with any semblance of the awe with which they fawn over the Mona Lisa (unless they're at the modern art exhibit and need to impress their partner with dramatic displays of their "complex aesthetic sensibilities"). The cool, nihilistic types might take this and shout on their megaphones: "clearly math isn't everything! It's all subjective man!" before kissing their Nietzche compilations and burning their algebra textbooks, while chanting "nothing is real" as a rallying cry. But actually, the deduction is the opposite: that math once again matters, on another metric of value. "Adherence to reality" can take on many forms; one is the aforementioned "physical" reality of things, accurate reflections of perceivable laws of physics, but there is also adherence to "aesthetic reality". Once again, if we can see that not all depictions are equal in their artistic impact, then clearly we have stumbled upon some aesthetic ordering; otherwise we would never be able to make any such judgement. This is not to say that there is no subjectivity in these orderings; indeed, if three different people were to honestly rank their top 10 artworks, we would get different lists; there is clearly a subjective assessment of art's relative impact on an individual, but I am arguing here that there are also strong overarching, general principles that govern the value of an artwork, across individuals. I won't write any in depth analysis of that here, as I do not have time at the moment; but profound art tends to link to common emotionally potent archetypes. For example (obviously incomplete list), narrative concepts such as heroism, subtle yet powerful emotion, visually beautiful color schemes, and the aforementioned value of adherence to the laws of physics. There are universal principles, and artists seek to understand. fulfill, and experiment with those principles; that is science.
The link between math/science and art also holds from the other direction. The concepts of both mathematics and science are far more wide-reaching than they might at first seem. I will use mathematics to illustrate my points, but the argument is symmetrical for science. The notion of "mathematics" applies to an infinite amount of systems; the well known concepts of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and calculus are only concepts of specific systems; in reality the vague concept of "mathematics" can be applied to ANY system. We run into a philosophical problem of "where to look". Mathematics itself is a free floating trade; the ones pursuing and realizing the trade of mathematics (the mathematicians) are autonomous yet limited agents; bound by time and intellectual inefficiencies. Nobody can "discover" all of mathematics at the drop of a hat. Even for the systems we currently adhere to, we haven't discovered everything, though theoretically everything is "already there", and only needs to be discovered by some smart mathematicians who can see these things and prove them. But all possible theorems are already inherent to the mathematical system; it is like a "nature" or universe of its own, waiting to be probed and understood by intelligent explorers. Linking back to the problem of "where to look"; there is an infinity of theorems we can prove, and furthermore, an infinity of systems we can define. However, mathematicians have an inherent concept of things that are "meaningful" to prove, and systems that are "meaningful" to pursue. Clearly not all theorems and systems have equal "value". What governs such value? Clearly this value is beyond the rules of the mathematical systems themselves, which exist in a void when perceived from this detached fashion; therefore there comes a point where the system of "valuation" of meaningful theorems and systems is not governed by rationality, but by "black box" axioms outside of the system of mathematics; and such unexplainable/unprovable yet real axioms of valuation belong to the world of aesthetics. Indeed, mathematicians and scientists are not "coldly calculating and analyzing" per popular perception; the greatest mathematicians and groundbreaking scientists perceive a strong beauty to incredible mathematical theorems, baffling physical observations and consistent theories about them, and the harmony of their systems. Mathematics and science are beautiful. Nature itself, the arbiter of mathematics and science, is beautiful; and art imitates nature. They are inseparably linked.
Here is an interesting tangent. The previous two paragraphs both make statements that are obvious, but unproveable. That almost sounds like a paradox. When talking about "the math in art", I mentioned that there are universal archetypes of value in art, and as a demonstration of that, stated that the painting of a wall is less beautiful than the Mona Lisa. That statement is very obvious, and understandable; it is almost universally visible. But it is completely unproveable. It involves a concept of the inherent components of aesthetic value; and these components can never be fully known or proven, perhaps it cannot even be rationally demonstrated that they actually exist at all. However, any fully rational judgement or comparison of aesthetic value would have to be grounded in knowledge of such components, and their relative weights in the "aesthetic value function", and any given artwork's exact decomposition into those components; none of which we know or even think about. Rationally, we are reduced to that abhorrent nihilistic problem of the meaning of things; from this purely rational lens there can be nothing said about the value of anything. But (thankfully), from here, succumbing to the nihilistic decision of "there is no meaning" is a contradiction, as it assumes that there is a meaning to the idea of lack of knowledge or explanation of the base components, namely that their unknowability implies nonexistence. That in itself is a decision unsupported by reason; that in itself is faith. In fact, it completely ignores the "scientific reality check" so dear to them; that my comparison of the wall and the Mona Lisa actually ends up being meaningful, though we can't see it all the way through. People equate science with rationality; and through such scientific observation, and thus rationally, we can see the existence of an aesthetic judgement that shines so bright that statements such as the aforementioned one are extremely obvious even though they are extremely unknowable and non-understandable. That argument is yet another indication of the intrinsic link between art and science; using science to reveal a truth (mathematic) in art. The reason it is incorrect to say "there is no meaning" links to this inextricable tie; it attempts to isolate math from art, while going beyond the mathematical laws to do so. There is also a link between the concept of "obviousness despite limits of rationality" and faith, but I'll save that for a later article on faith. Likewise, in the section on "the art in math", I stated that there are clearly theorems and systems that are more meaningful than others; and that is another example of a rabbit hole that ends up in a black box, yet it is immensely obvious, and is another reflection of this point. If you think about it, looking back at those statements, and the keywords "meaning" and "aesthetic"; words are meant to convey information, ideally non-ambiguously, such that the listeners can easily and consistently understand what is being communicated, a word generally envelops a concept. These statements make immediate sense at the level of words and language and communication: "the wall is less beautiful (aesthetic value) than the Mona Lisa"; "in the year 2023, proving the Riemann hypothesis is far more meaningful than proving that if x + 3 = 2023, then x = 2020". Yet, as mentioned, "aesthetic value", "beautiful", and "meaningful" are so ill-defined, and always will be. However, they make immediate sense, and with immediate impact; across cultures and civilizations and time, there are few words more meaningful than "meaningful" (yes, that was tongue in cheek). The concept of "meaning" is held as the most important ideal; we model our lives to chase after this unknowable concept that lies far beyond the grasp of any rationality. Our entire lives, and conceptualizations, revolve at the core around this aesthetic value lying beyond our understanding of the laws of physics; and we only care to discover those very laws of physics, or associate any meaning with them, or philosophize about rationality and nihilism, because of the profound aesthetic fabric driving our regards and action towards those things instead of other systems.
(Mis)education and readers of books, axioms, nature
The first subsection of the compilation of Leonardo's notebooks I'm reading quickly develops steam; starting from the second paragraph, he rallies against the "many men" who insult him and confidently write him off as foolish, because his "proofs are contrary to authority", and because Leonardo is "not a man of letters" ("a man without learning"). Leonardo alludes that these folk merely recite the words of their beloved authority figures, looking away from Nature and Experience ("the mother of all certainty").
As much as we don't like to admit it, this behavior which Leonardo rallies against remains extremely prevalent today, and probably always will. The above complaint written by Leonardo is understandable to anyone who reads it, both in terms of its content and the emotion behind it. The concept is constantly immortalized by its endless appearances in popular media (films, television, songs, stories): the genius misunderstood by the world, trying so hard to showcase the beauty of nature, and in the process discovering the most amazing, groundbreaking truth; only to be shunned by his peers, those stubborn upholders of authority and rules and the establishment (notice that obedience to authority is never portrayed in a positive light in post-Renaissance art), who keep on irrationally deferring to the obviously incorrect dogmas of their time. Just imagine that represented as scenes in a movie; the viewer, detached by distance and time (the viewer is necessarily in a far more modern period of time), watches the sequence, horrified by the cold and brutal ignorance of society. "They stick to dogmas that are so obviously incorrect!" shouts the viewer at the screen, not aware that the word obviously only comes into play because of the efforts of the genius he is detachedly observing, rather than through his own faculty of intellect. To the viewer of the movie, it is unfathomable that the hard efforts and utterly sound logic of the movie's hero are eschewed by the "opiated masses" of that archaic society; and for some reason, it is equally unfathomable to them that this movie they are watching is necessarily overly romanticized and simplified, packaged and presented so that he would predictably think those exact things that he is thinking; doesn't realize that he himself is opiated. "Thank God, I live in a much smarter society than that; thanks to science, we've made so much progress since those barbaric days", he opines to his friends after economics class at university (that quote would be a more accurate portrayal if he replaced "thank God" with "thank science" or "thank rationality"; yes that was tongue in cheek). He probably deludes himself into the fantasy that if he were alive in those times, he would have been just like Leonardo as portrayed in the movie; the romantic hero, the tragic bastion of rationality and intelligence in an ignorant world, bravely fighting for Science and overcoming the horrible societal stigma. His fantastical storybook will end with himself proving everyone wrong, and being hailed by everyone as the Genius that he is; everybody applauds him for being so brave and so smart (more on this last sentence in a later section of the article). Most people seem to think that modern Western society, or at the very least, they themselves, have the keys for overcoming irrationality, for being able to determine what is true and what is not true using their heralded rationality, being able to detect the fake news and manipulation that plagues the other "irrational" political party. They praise the modern world where rationality trumps religion, and where education rather than faith is the new cure for blindness; they hail higher education as the way to "be like Leonardo" and conquer blatant irrationality. Failing to see that by this same tenet, they fall into the same trap as those "many men" of the archaic society they continue to mock.
We are fed the concept that university is where you "learn to think". The means of this desired end are textbooks, graded assignments and exams, and sometimes "research". Students struggle to get high grades in their courses, and are (ideally) forced to pore over their textbooks, spend time and effort on difficult assignments, and use their plethora of note taking techniques to learn enough to pass their final exams. The idea is that to get the high grade (the explicit goal), the student has to perform well on those assignments and exams; and the only way for them to manage this is to study and work until they get the good grade; which is seen as the reflection of the student "being able to think" or at the very least "grasping the subject" (implying strong knowledge). This ubiquitous structure, however, achieves the opposite end: people become inclined not to think past a shallow level. Clearly, that explicit goal that students aim towards, the good mark in the class, is arbitrated by a direct authority figure - the professor. Indeed, the metric of performance in the class is pretty much defined entirely by the professor, the specifics and weightings of "right" and "wrong" are determined by the professor; and thus the direction of the student's effort is determined by the professor. We tend to conceptualize good performance in a course mainly as a function of a student's effort and hard work; forgetting to think out of the box, that the professor is really the one dictating everything that goes into a good grade. The course suddenly appears less associated with the subject itself; and far more associated with agreeing with the professor. Even deeper; the course becomes about following that trajectory set by the professor. Students have absolutely no leeway for discovery and exploration in these courses; they must grasp the exact material presented by the professor, perform the exact assignments put forth by the professor, and aim for the grading metric devised by the professsor, which entails agreeing with his opinions, exactly following his desired structure in assignments, and answering the questions that are written on the test according only to the "knowledge" put forth by the professor. Extra work, exploration, and passion has absolutely no credit or worth whatsoever; not to mention actual creativity, true outside the box thinking; and students better not dare to try to correct the professor or the textbook according to their own theories; if they trespass upon this unwritten rule, they are subjected to the mocking laughter of their peers, initiated by the professor's slick and sardonic non-answer to the student, clearly signaling the student's lowly position in the hierarchy: "don't you know I'm the expert here?" The students gleefully laugh among themselves, taking great pleasure out of the idea that this inquisitive student is such an idiot, and thinking to themselves how much smarter they are; dreaming of how they will impress the professor. They gossip for a few seconds after class: "who does this arrogant brat think he is? Like, he thinks he knows more than the professor?" Does that remind you of the movie I mentioned earlier? But I digress: the point is that university is clearly not at all about thinking, at least thinking outside the box. You may be given a few examples of individuals who thought outside the box, perhaps thinking that by diffusion this skill will traverse onto you; but indeed the students are strictly trained to think inside the box. Sadly, most students suck at thinking even inside the box: despite the clear methodology of studying the professor's material, very few students get above A- in any given course compared to the entire group; and this is just thinking inside the box. They are not even taught properly on a meta-level about how to best grasp the material presented right before their eyes; and for some reason, they think university prepares them to look elsewhere (thinking outside the box)?
I mentioned university does not cater to outside the box thinking. I will go even further: university is against outside the box thinking. For most students, university ends up having its stressful moments; the feeling of pressure and discomfort due to time, difficulty, balancing with other priorities, is a common experience across students; for that reason, to achieve the clear direct goal of university education, which is to get a good GPA, students have to be disciplined, and spend a lot of time studying, and doing their assignments. Since students tend to take mutliple courses at the same time, things tend to pile up, and there is so little time that students really have to "grind" on those assignments and studies. Some of these note taking techniques probably take hours in themselves just tracing the pen across the paper. With all this said, there is clearly no time at all for any outside the box thinking. All they can focus on, and in fact want to focus on, is their "inside the box" catering to the exam and assignments. It is not merely a problem of lack of time, but also lack of motivation; outside the box thinking is never fostered at all; and definitely becomes something to avoid completely when faced with the pressure of maximizing GPA in the face of stress and time constraint. Also, anyone with a higher education degree can recite the idea that "things are never fully known" and that "science is always improving and theories get refined" (for some reason, people are seen as really smart when they recite such common and obvious slogans in their conversations). Perhaps they have forgotten that this applies to their professors as well. They are not gods, they are not even geniuses; they are definitely wrong about at least something. It is entirely possible that a genius taking the class is able to think outside the box and material he is presented to come up with contradictions in the professor's material; and debunk them, and even offer up a better theory (that is necessarily incompatible with the original). Clearly this brilliant student deserves the highest possible grade in the course. However, this genius has few outlets to shine; in the structure of university courses, he is only graded based on tests and assignments. Well, if our bright student decides to spout his newfound breakthroughs in these mediums, choosing option A when option B is the one expected by the scantron; or completing the assignment according to his discovery that the earth is round, rather than the professor's frame of the earth being flat; our student will unfortunately find himself without a degree. The genius angrily storms in the professor's office, which is adorned with his awards and medals and honours, including one Buddha statue for each citation he's received; and demands to know why the professor wrote him off so foolishly and blindly, without even deeply considering the truth of his answers. The professor rolls his eyes, then, steepling from his high chair, bemoans "come talk to me when you have a PhD", which the TA's find funny because they think to themselves that a student with such a low grade could never get a PhD, let alone get accepted into this prestigious program that they themselves are currently pursuing, happily patting themselves on the back about their relative intelligence. They escort the bewildered genius out of the room, wonder how "normal people can be so bad at this subject", and start bragging about their own grades they received when they took that course while using "I didn't study that hard" as an excuse to soften the blow of the fact that their fellow doctoral student got 2% higher than them in that course.
Any genius has to confront two extremely potent obstacles in this system of higher education: the fact that any ideation that would make him a genius is both not nurtured and in fact selected against in the jungle of GPA, and that the established theories and experts are egotistical and willfully blind and not smart enough. Let's think about the immediate examples of some geniuses throughout history; let's say Leonardo, Darwin, and Einstein. Why do we consider these men geniuses? Well, we wouldn't place them in such high regard if they stayed within the realm of their contemporary established theories and methods. Genius is necessarily defined by pushing the envelope and thinking outside the box; this is the difference between genius and skill/talent/mastery. Second (this may seem obvious, but it matters): these examples come to our minds because we have heard about these people; meaning that they have been (perhaps posthumously) heard and accepted and taken seriously by society, to the point where they have been glorified and commemorated, and their theories seep into the establishment (the concept of establishment is not fixed; it changes across generations. Even though Einstein introduced the paradigm shift, what was once a paradigm shift is now solidified into the establishment; for that reason it is no longer "genius" to believe Einstein's theory; context matters). The portrayal of university clearly counters both of those things; by putting strong force against the edges of the box, to the point where the people inside don't even care to pry it open; and by mocking the few who do pry and see outside, depriving them of any of the validation, respect, or glory that are needed for others to even hear about their theories. Notice that any chance for the genius to be recognized is in fact in the complete power of the institutions of higher education and no one else; the only way for a genius to be accepted and renowned is when the currently recognized and respected experts stamp their seal of approval; widespread perception of any individual as a genius is an inherently social process, with the existing "elites" of the research community being the sole controllers of that gate. Linking back to the "movie" portrayal of Leonardo that I came up with; thinking about the reason that the "genius shunned by his irrational society" cliche comes up so often; it is precisely the same reason that the viewer of the movie very predictably mocks that "irrational society". We haven't changed since those times. University does not help with that. We say that college is different from university; that college merely prepares you for the workforce while university teaches you "how to think"; but no, university really is just the same thing as college in the end. In neither case do you think outside the box.
Someone could say, however, that university provides opportunity for research; and that this "research" is the true elixir of free thinking rather than undergraduate classes. This is almost always untrue; resarch itself has a sort of "grade" attached to it. Not all research enters those established and prestigious journals, or is approved by the supervisor, or met kindly by peers and experts. The egoism and lack of genius among even the research community remain in place and strongly define the metric of "success in research".
Further along the line of research at universities, the vast majority of those researchers, and supervisors, and the ones dangling the research grants, and the research community as a whole, circle jerk around core "textbooks" (I use textbook in the slightly abstract sense here). Any further research is done relatively blindly, taking prior textbooks and papers as "axioms", assumed without proof or investigation. In these research fields there in evitably ends up being a cascade of papers using previous papers as an unexamined foundation; in other words, unproven theorems (both objectively and from the perspective of researchers) and biased results and misdirections of the subjects are treated as axioms for the next research papers, across a long chain. This is akin to building a high vertical structure by stacking coke cans on top of each other, but the researchers at the current top level look every direction except down; if they looked down perhaps they would realize that they are on a foundation of literal coke cans, and if brave enough, could find vectors where they could topple the whole structure to a point (if they can both topple and rebuild the structure with different material, this is the point where they are can be considered candidates for genius). Instead, they look away: sometimes upwards, but mostly to the sides (if the metaphor was lost, upwards involves continuing the current structure and perhaps "improving" upon it, the sides is research that says something meaningless, kind of like the aforementioned discussion of useless theorems in math, they've proved something that adds more information to the current state of research, but that something is utterly unimportant in the grand scheme of things). In looking away, they take an easy route; akin to a stateless process, where it is assumed that the "current state" of the subject is correctly defined according to the current structure, and can easily just extend it from there, and not worry about having to examine any of the prior states. This is far easier than actually having to consider all the states below; and possibly finding a way to topple it and rebuild it; which is tasking not just in terms of intellectual and creative prowess and work effort, but also in terms of the social arena of the current research community, who love their own "intelligence" so much, and will fight to keep the idea of their own intellectual prowess shining bright. But the reality is that researchers strongly believe in the strength of their foundation, but consistently and deeply misjudge the actual level of the solid ground, and in fact reside on a shaky foundation of falsehoods and biases that they assume to be the hard rock. At the same time, they refuse to probe the actual level of the ground.
And this is just the researchers, those held as the "ideal" thinkers of today. Do we even need to mention the undergraduates? The prevailing theme here is that even at the levels of higher education; people are the opposite of thinkers, they are mere readers of books. They are memorizers rather than thinkers. They read the book and do not write their own; the papers they produce are shallow riffs and ripoffs of the core textbooks written by the prior geniuses, which beget ripoffs of ripoffs. Not thinkers, but automatons. Leonardo himself writes "they are only by chance invested with the human form, and but for this, I might class them with the herds of beasts." That line is not just some burning zinger, it has meaning; the distinction between man and beast is classically understood as man having "free will", whereas a beast is entirely swayed by the natural process; and indeed university breeds beasts and not men, parrots and not thinkers. Machine learning is a hot topic nowadays; so many people enthusiastically discuss the potential for "general artificial intelligence" and impatiently await the day for it to trump those more classical, relatively "unconscious" methods; predicting that one day AI might even get close to human potential and performance; failing to realize that they themselves are no better than gradient descent on data points fed to them, never seeing or exploring anything beyond that training data.
The problem reduces to a blurring between the perceptions of fact and mere theory. I've looped in the concept of "theories being treated as axioms"; but the problem is usually worse: theories are being treated as fact. "Axiom" is intrinsically linked with system, which has a conceptual level of separation from "reality"; in universities, however, theories and material are laid out and presented under the frame of "fact". To be blindly believed, absorbed, recited, and used downstream. Lecture material and reading material, or at the very least the professor's take on the reading material's pros and cons (which is itself usually derived from another thinker), are cast under this illusory light. The mistake of the institutions here is that the lens and spotlight are cast on the professor, the book, the material; rather than nature itself, which is, as Leonardo puts it, the true "mother of all certainty".
Readers and their motivations
That description of professors and academics is quite jarring because it is almost the opposite of our mental model of "scientist". This applies to other disciplines as well, all of which entail some sort of "science" inherent to the investigation and perfection of those subjects. When the word "scientist" is heard; the image that immediately comes to mind is that of wild-haired and big-eyed Einstein, or the nerds in science class who isolated themselves at lunch break to read books about space (and were probably mocked for it by Chad and his leather jacket-clad minions). However, we can reduce the description above of academics, and professors, and students, to its base components: arrogant, hate being wrong, look down and mock the "lowly" students who end up being the real geniuses, without ever having the perception of those students being right or brighter than them, yet at the same time religiously adoring of the textbooks fed to them by their own professors, making only meaningless contributions to their field and being more than satisfied with that, and proud of their status as "experts" in the field. Let's switch the context of academia to the context of high school; the domain of the theoretical "nerd" I previously described in this paragraph. At that point it becomes clear that those traits I just described are not those of the nerd, who is the one that comes to mind when we think of "academic"; but they are the traits of Chad's minions; the snobby popular kids, the bullies.
In the end, very few people in the world are intrinsically scientists. There are very few kids in schools who beeline to the astrophysics textbook during lunch break; they are called "geniuses" in retrospect by their classmates years after graduation (cue the "it's so depressing that he was bullied and mocked by the kids in our class; he was so smart and never hurt a fly" diatribe that always gets expunged by those very bullies or mockers or at the very least uncaring bystanders). That's because most people do not have any inherent passion for astrophysics. Same thing for mathematics. Or biology and evolution and fossils. Art fares a bit better here but even then the more genius artists get ignored in favour of those who are more dramatic and obvious (compare Mozart to Nicki Minaj, or Da Vinci to whatever "crazy" artwork was spewed by OpenAI Dall-E 2). It seems any subject in itself has very few true admirers. However, let's look now at the normal kids in school, as well as the bullies and popular ones; in this case they reduce to the same. What do they care about, if not astrophysics, or math, or good art, or any subject at all? The answer should be obvious if we put ourselves in the shoes of high school students: the perception of them. That includes things like their social status, the number of friends they have, the quality of their social interactions, their view of themselves, their achievements and whether other people know about them, the way people perceive them, being right, etc. Not to say that this is a necessarily horrible way of life or anything; the point is merely to see the complete disjointness of the motivation of the scientist (the "nerd") and the motivation of the "normal people". The genius/scientist (I use the terms interchangeably; and I use "scientist" in a broad way) loves nature. He loves subjects and reality and is truly interested in them; to the point where he picks up the astrophysics book; he is genuinely interested in the subject, and the universe itself; the universe and reality are an end in themselves. On the other hand; the normal people do not care for subjects, or the beauty of the reality of nature; they care about utility; and utility for them, in the end, comes in the form of some sort of social acceptance and high regard from others and themselves. There are certain people who are clearly smart and who read a lot, perhaps even about physics and mathematics, but it is clear that they are doing so not because of the inherent love for these things, but because they want to be perceived as geniuses by others and by themselves; it is an ego thing; and I would classify these types as "normal people" here rather than "genius" despite appearances and the common action of reading a physics book. For these types, any engagement in a subject is never the end in itself, it is always a means to and end. People want to feel smart, to show themselves as smart and knowledgeable, to show off their prestige, sometimes to apply the content of the book to their work which will get them the status and achievement they want. The distinction here is one of motivation; normal people are motivated by these social and ego-gratifying utilities rather than nature or the subjects themselves. On the other hand, Einstein has wild hair; forgoing the socially important action of combing his hair, because it would take away time and focus from his beloved explorations of the universe.
Now we can better understand these professors, academics, and students; and the reason why they act so differently than what we could expect according to our concept of "scientist". It is in their best interest to be readers of books; since they don't care about nature it does not make sense to spend so much effort trying to really explore the truth outside the box, due to a plethora of "practical reasons" including time, risk, mockery of others, lack of intelligence; while reading the book and being able to recite it with slight variations is enough to get them what they actually care about: prestige, acceptance among their academic peers, the perception that they are "experts" (expert is defined by being able to recite the book; it is definitely not about writing a new one), ideas of intelligence. And writing a new book adds nothing to that; it has absolutely no utility from their perspective. A mindset such as this explains the ostracization of the actual genius: put yourself in the shoes of one of these "experts" being talked at by some student who "thinks he's figured it out". It is an attack on the ego; "who does he think he is, talking like that to me, the expert? How utterly arrogant? I'm gonna show him who's who." All of these thoughts probably come to mind, and it is this frame that is acted upon, rather than the frame of a mutual desire to understand nature. The students who witness the resulting techniques of dominance which hit the genius like a freight train are swayed by what they see; not only do they perceive the authoritative expert, but they also perceive the way he coolly wrote off the student; he is now doubly authoritative. Academia is truly a social arena, run by those very same normal people from high school; it's not like they rebuke their old ways and turn 180 degrees towards nature; they are the same people, who have found that academia is a nice strategy and conduit for getting to these utilities they crave. Note that I'm not saying these people actually don't have an inkling of care for their work; of course it probably does appeal to them, I'm just saying that it's not their passion, and it is a means to an end.
The motivations of readers of books, normal people, are generally irreconciliable with those of the genius; and it is therefore hard for them to genuinely connect. The normal person views the genius as only into science, having little humanity; while the genius sees the reader of books as inherently hypocritical and unknowing, swayed beyond their control by people above, below, and level to them, a social animal.
Secondary and tertiary sources; degrees of degradation
From Leonardo's notebooks (in the same section as before): "the abbreviators of works do harm to knowledge and to love, for the love of anything is the offspring of knowledge, love being more fervent in its proportion as knowledge is more certain." This links back nicely to the previous section, and is a very clear manifestation of the discrepancy between the genius and the normal person; a diluting manipulation of subject matter for more "practical" purposes is contrasted with Leonardo's passion for seeing the whole thing as it truly is in nature. Readers and scientists, in one sentence. But let's take a bit of a closer look at the action and result of abbreviation. Leonardo rallies against it here because it hides and limits the beauty of the truth, as it is necessarily incomplete; but further than that, it actually misleads and hides the truth not only by passive omission but by misdirection, whether intended or not.
Many subjects have a particular science associated with them; meaning there is some truth behind it, and ways of getting closer to it, and logically reason and theorize about it. Any such subject has its works of abbreviation, but one clear example of this, and one that Leonardo uses as a metaphor in this section, is the field of history. Leonardo's point is about the incompleteness of abbreviation, so his example refers to an abbreviation of a historical timeline that strips away the glory and heroic aspects of the events and renders it cold and "bald" and lacking on important details by ironically focusing on the "meat". Focusing on the meat can very often induce the opposite result, and you end up with vitamin deficiencies and a lack of skeleton and signalling, causing this meat to rot and sag; people aren't even wise enough to know what the meat actually is; but that's an article for another time. These abridged histories have many more problems than what Leonardo mentions. "Abridging" is a specific example of "deviation from reality" of a subject. Deviation from reality entails either incompleteness, bias, or straight up falsehoods; all of which are usually intertwined; and for history specifically, a concept of "context gap" necessarily leads to some degree of deviation from reality. Context gap can be a time gap (different generations or straight up different time periods between event and writing), or location gap; these intimately involve some sort of bias and lack of knowledge about the historical context from the current context. Writers of history necessarily suffer from both; not to mention the writer's ideals and beliefs, which he hopes to maintain even if they strongly conflict with the accepted beliefs of the time, and which seep through his work. In history, there is the concept of "secondary sources" and "tertiary sources"; degrees of separation between the event and the writing. Primary sources themselves, such as artifacts or contemporary records (which are sort of a "strong secondary source" in themselves) are subject to the interpretation of biased people far removed from the event. Primary, secondary, and tertiary sources sort of all work at once; primary is the hard "proof" of the event, but they need to be interpreted to create a timeline of what happened that can be understood by the historians and communicated to others, thus there occurs a chain of secondary sources which involve some degree of error. A further layer of interpretation generally occurs; people don't usually care much about the timeline and events in a vacuum, but rather a meaning of the timeline and events; usually that work is offloaded to the historian "experts" (see previous two sections) who try to reason about such meaning and interpretations to various degrees, and then present them back to the audience, and we get a plethora of (perhaps conflicting) "tertiary sources". Human consciousness in general can probably be boiled down to an internal chaining from primary (perception) to secondary (low level logic) to tertiary (interpretations; meaning; theorizing; emotional justification) sources but I'll save that for a later article. Some people are better at producing tertiary and secondary sources than others, but in this chain, which as I've mentioned is almost isomorphic to human consciousness, there is plenty of room not only for omission of things (which necessarily happens when producing secondary and tertiary sources, as information is filtered out), but for straight up misinterpretations that funnel through, and even direct misleading when one of the normal people with an agenda for power comes marching through, squirting an absolutely absurd bias onto the carving of history, seeping in and eroding its rocks for the sake of the author's "creativity" being renowned (more of this in the false geniuses and narrators sections).
It's pretty clear that for the subject of history, the funneling from primary to secondary to tertiary source necessarily leads to deviations from the truth, to varying extents. This applies to every other subject as well. Every subject has such funnelings, both conceptually and in communication. Science, for example; what the general population knows about science is through extremely abridged and untrustworthy tertiary sources. Due to the consumption only of tertiary sources, people think they know about science, without realizing they know absolutely nothing about science. For example, people believe in mass, and acceleration, and Newton's laws; try asking them more in depth as to why they're true, and they'll look at you funny, as if you were some pathetic idiot; yet it is plain to see they really have no idea why it's like that and not something else, why these are the components at play in that exact way, and why there are no better alternatives. They have absolutely no idea, nor does the idea of having no idea cross their mind. Now extend this to the theory of relativity, or quantum physics, or the Big Bang; so many normal people without physics degrees (population-wise, most people who believe these things are non-physicists) believe in these things without even knowing what they are, at all. Tertiary sources, in their quest for dissemination of knowledge, and perhaps the fat paycheck of the author who capitalized on dumbing down complexities to serve as junk food to common people who hate science but love being seen as smart, have stripped away meaning, truth, concept, reality. They pick and choose concepts and occurrences and experimental results and theories and "evidences" to show to the public, and even if the reader is discerning (they usually aren't), if they stick within "the universe of the book" rather than the universe itself, they are seeing a very biased subspace of reality, to the polint where other, better, truer possibilities are hidden by omission. This gets more and more annoying the farther one gets away from mathematics and physics; for example, psychology is marred by the author's frames of superiority and hypocritical sprinklings of his twisted morality; and since both of these things are almost omnipresent unwritten rules of communication in that field, a lot of value is lost, and the papers themselves are "noisy".
Of course, there is no getting around the funneling from primary to tertiary source. It is intrinsic and necessary for every single science. But a lot of the problems mentioned in the previous two sections stem from adherence to tertiary sources. "True science" should not be done on the level of tertiary sources. Tertiary sources are inherently misleading and deviant from reality. If one cares about nature, as a true scientist would, and as Leonardo did, one should take the (sadly rare) leap into the realm of primary sources. Primary sources, on the general level, are the the experience of nature itself, without any higher baggage. There is nothing more true than this. This is the way outside the box of tertiary sources. Leonardo makes many references to experience being the greatest teacher. This is embedded in the concept of the scientific method. His rallying against the "educated" folk who love abidged texts and discussions far gone from logic are a rallying against the love of the tertiary source. This is not to say that tertiary sources are useless; all true scientists read tertiary sources (at least the good tertiary sources), as it accelerates the process of getting to the truth by absorbing a "fast forward" of all the previous innovations, discoveries, and theories over the past millenia; which tend to have at least some salt to them even if not entirely correct. This is the concept of "standing on the shoulders of giants". Not the truth in itself, but an acceleration towards it. The point is not to hold the tertiary sources as the Holy Grail, but rather to consume them as a Nitro boost for the rocket ship towards the Holy Grail.
Negativity and criticism for prestige - false geniuses
I've been emphasizing a difference between the genius/scientist and the reader of books. The reader of books does not care to put in the effort to go to the primary sources and act according to a love of nature; their objectives, as outlined before, involve satiations of power and social desires, which are irreconciliable with the love of nature, and thus readers of books do not go to the lengths that geniuses do, and as a result, never actualize any genius in their actions or results.
Aside - before I continue, now is the time to introduce a caveat: sometimes, we see leaders, businessmen, and politicians executing absolutely brilliant strategies, even though they clearly follow the motivations of the "readers of books" (love of power and social status), so this would seem to contadict that previous sentence. I write more on this in a later section on "subjects in themselves". In short, these folk are not mere "readers of books", even though they share the same motivations, but they are not "scientists" either as they do not have the "love of nature". Perhaps I should make a distinction here between "genius" and "scientist"; genius contains scientist, but genius is distinct from reader of books. In this section, any time I use the word "genius", I am referring to "scientist".
Another caveat that might as well be mentioned now. It is not like all scientists are completely free from any desire for social glory or power. I doubt there exists any such person on this globe. One might be tempted to produce examples of very arrogant and "egotistical" scientists, but this is not what I am referring to; there is a difference between an "arrogant" social persona and an intrinsic lens directed overarchingly towards these social objectives. Though these scientists clearly have social desires, and sometimes a penchant for power; they are scientists because their overarching lens is guided by nature rather than these social objectives.
Back to the readers of books. The following discussion also applies to the aforementioned "leader geniuses" or "businessmen geniuses" when they preach about other subjects. These people love their glory and social perception, so it is natural that when they read about the geniuses of old, such as Leonardo and Einstein, that social flame is fueled. On a meta-level, it is hard not to feel some level of jealousy when reading about these geniuses: they have entire books written about them, are so highly regarded by modern society (though perhaps this was not the case in their own times), have their glorious deeds of intellect immortalized in these endless volumes of analysis and praise. Jarringly enough, these glorified scientists have beaten the readers of books at their own game. As the readers peruse their books on these geniuses, several of them act upon this jealousy. Ironically, the main takeaway from these books on geniuses is not actually how to become the genius (as doing so would require the "nature lens"); the takeaway is that geniuses are well regarded, and the lesson becomes one of being perceived as the genius. It turns out, this is a great strategy for the ends of readers of books. Many of these people become "thought leaders", with millions of adoring fans, editorials heaping praise upon them, being showered with awards and honours, being looked up to by the vast majority of people they meet. It's a dream come true. This perception festers itself, as the next wave of social strategists watches the YouTube videos of these "fake geniuses", who are merely readers of books dressed up in lab coats, and sees the view count on the videos, and the comments emotionally relating how they "changed the viewer's life"; and feels in himself the burning desire for the same glory, and makes the association between this desired outcome and its means - being seen as smart. Most people don't even consciously realize or perceive this; they truly believe that they are smart, geniuses even, like the second coming of da Vinci, despite the obvious simplicity and downright incorrectness of their confidently stated and widely consumed "wisdom".
So, readers of books start to practice "the genius strategy". However, it is clear that since most of these people are not actually geniuses, and since they do not care enough to dig into primary sources and find anything truly meaningful there, they need an alternate route. Intrinsically, one unconsciously registers the "essence" of what makes someone a genius. By definition, the genius is the one who does something meaningfully differently. As mentioned, most people cannot achieve that meaningful part, but thankfully for the reader of books, since the masses themselves are easily socially swayed, and either not genius enough, or not willing to think about things at all, they cannot appreciate which contributions are meaningful. All they need to focus on is the difference part of the equation to achieve their end. Unfortunately, they tend to run into another roadblock. They are generally not intelligent enough, and since they decided to skip the scientific exploration, have not honed the vision or patience to uncover any true difference from the norm. Remember, the norm itself was crafted over millenia by scientists across history and cultures; we are at the point where so much has been carefully integrated that it is not straightforward to thoughtlessly deviate from everything history's geniuses or experts have melded into it. Tough luck; thought is needed even to rationally deviate at all from the norm. But, to all the readers of books reading this book: fear not! For there was an important keyword two sentences ago: rationally. "Thought is needed even to rationally deviate at all from the norm". And remember: the masses aren't exactly thoughtful or intellectual enough to have much perception of rationality. So we still have leeway here! We still have so many ways to deviate irrationally from the norm. In fact, to the joy of all readers of books who have made it to those upper echelons of society's intellectual guilds, it is better to deviate irrationally than it is to deviate rationally from the norm. Once again, the masses form a mass of readers of books, who do not care about nature, and thus do not care about the truth (which is one to one with nature) and thus are bored to tears by rationality; but much prefer the irrational social sways they are constantly subjected to. The more drama, the more conducive to current trends, the more enthusiastic the audience is in lapping up the cheap incense tossed by the false prophet.
So we have outlined increasingly specific levels of social strategy taken by the reader of books. Their goal is a vaguely defined objective of social power; one way to achieve this goal is to be perceived as the genius they so often read about. To be perceived as such a genius without actually being one, it turns out one can irrationally deviate from the norm. Now let's strategize about the specific goal of irrationally deviating from the norm. The most obvious and potent way to do this to achieve the "end of ends" of social power is to disagree with one of those geniuses they read about in school. By some law of pseudo-transitivity; if they disagree with a genius (and are perceived as correct); then they must be greater than the genius, therefore they are a genius. The logic is obviously flawed but I don't need to explain that; the point is the "nature of perception" obeys laws separate from the actual laws of nature (that's an interesting mathematical concept; the laws of perception are defined by the laws of nature, but at that level are separate from the laws and logic of nature, leading to false perceptions of nature; this could have interesting implications for some hierarchical systems). Once again, exploiting the fact that we have great leeway to be irrational; people tend to find low hanging fruit, such as questionable aspects in the lives of the geniuses, or false interpretations of their logic and theories and ideas, or wield some "immoral view" (according to the current sway of society) held by the genius in his society against him and his logic. This is a doubly nice strategy because these geniuses tend to have died generations ago, and are not able to open up their coffin and defend themselves from the incoming slander. Then bam! In the eyes of their peers, and journalists, and then the general public (notice that the chain here is literally defined by a funneling of authority; the journalists trust the peer "experts", the public trusts the biased journalists, rationality is not part of this funnel); our reader of books is now a genius. One could say that such scheming will not get into the funnel thanks to the heroic "peers" who will bravely stop this villainous reader of books from publishing such nonsense. However, history constantly proves that this situation of "heroic peers" does not happen and is indeed a fairy tale; and logically, the peers themselves do not stay up at night to think about the validity of their fellow intellectual's claims, and are easily fooled by the lustre of certain presentations of arguments and "backing evidence" that make the reviewers forget about the concept of "alternate, more valid theories" or the fact that these presentations of "evidence" can be easily misconstrued, taken out of context, have their meaning changed; thus changing the system in itself, and if we take the false genius at their word, the remaining arguments might be valid. Few people care to differentiate between the true axioms and the false.
When reading any tertiary source, remember this. Most books are written by readers of books, very few books are written by actual geniuses. Readers of books have a certain agenda. Often, their points and "theories" are very lazy, can be riddled with logical bullets, or are unprovable, or rest on immense assumptive gaps, and false interpretations. This gels nicely with their agenda; they do not have to care too much about the airtightness of their logic, only that they appear smart enough. If one wants to go towards the truth, they must not take the words of readers of books at face value, for these reasons I have outlined. Far too many readers take their books at face value, immediately believing in them; anyone who does this is a reader of books, and since they do not think, they can be looped in with the "beasts" which da Vinci mocked. Sadly, these chains of readers of books create a "false progress" and chains of "false innovation" in society. People mistake criticism for progress and innovation; and all the rush of unfounded criticism and corrections definitely causes "intellectual movement"; but rather than movement towards the truth, it is movement away from the truth; it is like grabbing at the nearest firefly instead of marching towards the north star. With all of the confusion and widening noise caused by the compounding of irrational contributions to the "state of the art" of subjects, it might seem a bit disheartening to be a scientist, a lover of the truth caught in a haystack of false wisdom. However, this does not go against the spirit of science; science at its heart is about first principles, and primary sources, with experimentation and theory revolving around them. This spirit circumvents the tornado of irrationality; it doesn't matter because the scientist will be using logic and experience anyway, and can thus perceive the lack of such components in what he reads, and use those components to offer a more logically founded theory. In fact, being the scientist is the only way to circumvent this tornado to get to the truth. If one trusts the books, he stays within the inconsistent system of irrationality; if one trusts nature, he can look outside of that ever festering system.
The whole of nature versus subjects in themselves
I want to say a bit more about nature as a "whole"; and attempt to communicate the intrinsic draw that the "nature lens" has.
I have written about the love of nature, and have differentiated it against the love of glory; and further argued that the aspect distinguishing the scientist from the reader of books boils down to which love is the predominant one. The greatest geniuses in history, from Aristotle to Leonardo da Vinci to John von Neumann, all exhibit a degree of "polymathy"; and both link and meaningfully pursue several different subjects. To be a polymath is considered in popular culture to amount to a titanic feat of intellect; as it is easy to believe that juggling so many separate subjects or skills is far beyond the capacity of "normal people" who usually don't even master one. I would like to reframe this idea. I believe that subjects are not as disparate and distinct as one would initially think; it seems that all subjects have reflections of a very similar essence. It's a bit difficult to explain this in detail, but such a concept is not just new agey handwaving, it is backed up empirically; there are clearly recurring fundamental themes, links, concepts, logics, archetypes, meanings, and other isomorphisms between these "separate" subjects; several such isomorphisms between subjects have been uncovered, and in fact constantly operate in our own schemas of the world, though not necessarily consciously. The point is; rather than seeing subjects as being separate from one another, perhaps they are all of the same root, all operating under the never changing and non-discriminative "truth of nature". Viewed under this angle, polymathy becomes slightly less mysterious and out of reach; it makes sense that polymathy is realizable, because these inherent connections are made use of by these famous lovers of nature. Though it becomes less mysterious, I would say it becomes more exciting. This harmony of nature, and its deep extent, makes it even more interesting, enticing, and beautiful. It is enough to make one want to explore and uncover its harmony. So many people are fascinated and enamored by the polymaths; in a previous section I mentioned (somewhat snarkily) that people mostly care about glory when reading about the geniuses, but many people would also at least romanticize the idea of being a polymath. If the concept of being a polymath is understandably romanticizable, then the root of polymathy, nature itself, has a clear draw.
As I've mentioned in the first section, aesthetic value itself operates under nature; there exists an aesthetic truth. If aesthetic value, which renders things meaningful and beautiful and worth pursuing, is governed by nature; then clearly the most optimally meaningful thing is to pursue that very thing that births aesthetic value: nature itself.
The concept of polymathy is directly associated with love of nature. Nature is the governer of all things; and as such, all things are intrinsically linked, and with surprising regularity of concepts; and nature itself is the provenance of the highest beauties. Clearly, the geniuses like Leonardo, scientists and lovers of nature, are almost necessarily drawn to polymathy. We always hear of the new-agey adage of "loving all things", which is usually stated devoid of meaning, but when thinking about the intricate links between the subjects of nature, and see the world through its beautiful lens, it becomes clear that to love nature is to love all things. All things are linked in nature; all things are nature. To ignore some subjects is to intentionally paint an incomplete picture for the sake of some convenience, and to have any such motivation is clearly to look away from nature, and to sink into the role of "abridger of works" that was mentioned previously.
Love of nature clearly contains in a sense a love of everything. Perhaps this would seem contradictory to the rest of my article which blasts "readers of books" for their hidden social motivations, but one could argue that since a lover of nature would love all things, they too would love the same things as the reader of books, and thus themselves be a reader of books. However, this is an invalid viewpoint; the difference between readers of books and lovers of nature lies in the lens. The lover of nature, who at the limit loves all things, would love humanity, while himself remaining detached from the irrationalities that he sees; as such irrationalities would detract from his love of the whole of nature. Not to dehumanize; but the concept can be related to observing wildlife, let's say a pack of lions; one observes the lion coldly hunting and devouring its prey, and can admire the grace and beauty of the lion, and the purpose of its adaptations as they play into the cycle of life, and the harmonious dynamics of ecology; all of this without wanting to be the lion. There always exists a degree of detachment between the self and the things it observes; as the self is not the same entity as those things outside of it. One can admire humanity, in a warm and virtuous manner (meaning one can and should even go beyond the confines of "cold, analytical appreciation" as some lab experimenter unsatisfied with his wage would do); and strongly feel the moral nature of things, which generally involve interactions with others; without acting in the same manner as them when doing so would go against that moral nature or otherwise detract from the overarching love of nature. When I describe "love of nature" as "loving all things", that of course involves the "things of nature"; and "moral nature" here would take precedence among alternatives which go against moral nature. I will write another article about moral nature's embedding in life in the future.
To be a "reader of books" is to tunnel oneself into a very specific subject within nature, at the expense of all the rest. Previously, I made a distinction between readers of books and "leaders"; saying that leaders are not readers of books, as they do not merely "read", but if visualized as a Venn diagram, they share an important similarity: their motivation. The "leader" loves something very specific over all the rest (glory, self validation, social status, whatever); one aspect within the infinity of nature. As all things are part of nature, including those loved by the leaders, such tunnel vision is an abridging of reality, ignoring everything else; and as all things are linked, they ironically miss out on immensely valuable concepts that would illuminate their own chosen subject. Just like Leonardo da Vinci became far more influential, revered, glorified, and famous than so many of these people who actually love these things at the expense of all else, and focus all their energy on getting such result in the end; the one who is best equipped and most capable to make an effective splash in any subject is the lover of nature, the one who is ironically not particularly attached to such a subject, but rather all of them at once. Leonardo made greater art than most of those pure painters of his time; came up with engineering plans far more sophisticated than any of the pure engineers of his time; understood human anatomy far better than any of the experts of the human body of his time... the list can go on. And this is no coincidence. Leonardo had the paradoxical advantage of not loving any subject in particular, but of loving the whole; and such a lens enabled him to appreciate the isomorphisms and make the links that his contemporaries never had any chance of thinking about in their one-dimensional pursuit of specific subjects which exist as subspaces in a plane of infinite dimensions.
There is also some link between the love of nature as opposed to one-dimensional pursuit (or, sadly often, zero-dimensional pursuit) and the balance of yin and yang mentioned in this article. In that article, I mention a link between a "way of no desire" and a game theory optimal strategy, as such a way would have no points of exploitability. In contrast, ways attached to some desire are immensely exploitable, and are exploited, constantly, by the volatility of life, leading to the dissatisfaction that such passionate ways are meant to mitigate in the first place. The readers of books are lumped there. However, I also noted at the end that the game-theory optimal "way of no desire" is boring, unachievable in reality, and not ideal at all the perspective of anyone not already following this way. Here lies the key to deal with all these problems at once: love nature. That means love all things (in the way I mentioned before, of following the "moral/aesthetic reality"); the polar opposite of the way of no way, the way of desiring all at the same time - this way is both exciting and unexploitable. Framed in terms of yin and yang; nature, objectively, can be seen as pure yang (natural reality is pretty much the definition of yang/order arising from some initial state); and yin enters the picture only when we take the perspective of a conscious being; who is always dealing with incomplete information, and false beliefs, and is perpetually in a state of figuring things out. The lens directed towards nature removes both the volatile brutality that can be inflicted by yin and the boring numbness that can be inflicted by yang; yin has no bite when one realizes it is the (only) way to a deeper understanding of our reality (errors and lack of information lead to the pursuit of the truth, which is what drives the lover of nature), and the omnipresence of yin is a pointer to the beautiful immensity and infinity of nature and all that remains to be uncovered - yin leads towards yang. And this infinity of nature means that there is no end point to the goal of the lover of nature (this is very much unlike the social strategists). There is always something more to be uncovered. Thus, the way of nature (a personal life code; yang) is never fruitless and never settles into numbness or dissatisfaction, and this is (perhaps jarringly) thanks to the fact that we will never fully understand nature. This way is never exploitable, since at any point in time there is never any obstacle to this infinite goal other than failures of our own will, meaning that one would never be a victim of unpredictable yin getting in the way of some ambition.
Another striking difference between the love of nature and the love of specific subjects (the way of the readers of books and leaders) is that the love of specific subjects is intimately tied with selfishness, whereas the love of nature is the exact opposite. In fact, one could even say that if one loves a specific subject, then that specific subject is always oneself. To love any other subject, meaning a subject outside of oneself, would involve loving all of nature, because as explained before, the intricate connections between subjects means that fully pursuing one's love for a particular subject would entail exploring all the others, and since all subjects are intimately connected, from the love of one subject, one would love all the others. I would in fact define the lens of nature as loving the things outside of oneself.
Before continuing that thread, that last sentence might seem very jarring, as I'm sure everyone is bombarded with the opposite advice; that one should only love the things within oneself in order to avoid being disappointed by the volatility of life, and that the lens should be towards working on oneself. I won't go too deep into this, I'll save the meat for another article, but there are a few quick things I can say about this. First of all, those espousing this idea do not actually believe it, for if they truly practiced what they preached, they would feel absolutely no need to go out and spout such ideas for all the world to hear; clearly they have some motivation to interact in such a way with the outside world (hint: they care very much about what people think about them, ironically), so clearly this internal state they love so much is in fact very dependent on their perception of their external state. Completely unsurprisingly, these people are hypocrites, and are another example of people who actually want to be leaders rather than monks. Second, people only like this concept because it helps them do the opposite: when people think of "working on themselves", and focusing internally rather than externally in order to soften the inevitable whips of yin, they love the idea because of its practicality. They believe paradoxically that by following this mindset they will get those things they want in the outside world more effectively; the lens remains external. Third, even if people put the concept into practice without error, they would be vegetables. At the limit, it reduces to "the way of no desire", and no one actually desires that (yes, that was tongue in cheek), and even then there is a further contradiction, as having any concept of self at that point would be against the premise of not desiring anything external, and there comes a point when "specific thought patterns" involve something external in themselves; thus there would eventually be no internal focus, or any focus at all, and the premise becomes ridiculous as there is no internal focus that matters if there is nothing external that we would care to think about or aim towards. I see "the right way" as extreme on both the internal and external fronts: acting in a way that never deviates from moral nature (I want to talk about this in a later article, where I'll explain this more fully). This clearly involves both a strong internal and external focus, and moral nature can be unpacked to include a lot of things, one of which is to have a lens outside of oneself; this is the only way to be truly moral anyway. And outside of oneself is the realm of nature.
As mentioned, I believe there are only three possible things to love: nothing at all, oneself, or the whole of nature. This is sort of like that theorem in linear algebra which states that equations can only possibly have no solution, one solution, or infinitely many. To love nothing at all is either to be dead or unconscious. To love only oneself is "the way of the world", and is irreconciliable with the love of nature, and frankly is difficult to call "conscious" as it always reduces to a utility-seeking algorithm on some level, to the extent that was necessary for evolutionary success, like a machine learning model that never has any concept of peeling back what its own loss function and concept of utility even mean; the only real difference between this and loving nothing is that I assume that any such agent in this category has the free will to choose between loving oneself or loving nature, and chose to act like an animal would, and thus loves oneself enough to look away from nature.
To love nature, equipped with the lens of morality, is tantamount to loving God. More on this in another article.
Practicality's oasis is a mirage
In society, whether during Leonardo's time, or our own time, there has always been a push towards practicality. The things to be pursued and done generally are expected to serve some "practical purpose", and society's respect for individuals tends to hinge on the practicality of their current works, way of life, and past achievements. Some examples include the hustle culture and emphasis on "hard work", pursuing more "practical" subjects, and making a lot of money.
I believe, however, that the notion of practicality is both ill-defined and absurd. What does it mean to be "practical"? Clearly the notion involves directing effort towards the optimization of some metric, but what is the metric? Nobody seems to know, or even ask, this question, not even those who are considered "practical". "Practicality" is merely a term thrown around by society, and is generally matched to people or actions according to their affinity to a certain archetypal behavior pattern. This behavioral pattern is that of the reader of books and the leader. Practicality is a very social notion without much true salt to it.
The fact that the "practicality metric" is not well known is important. It is frightening that people can believe they are on some right trail due to society uplifting them as practical go-getters, without ever knowing where they are actually headed, and not knowing the true essence of what actually matters; this is the path of "following ego and praise" rather than anything more. All that hard work and "grind" for the sake of ego, and nothing else.
The point here is not to go against "work", as that would be a horrible idea; rather to question following the highly societally inflected notion of "practicality". What kind of things are considered practical? Let's list a few "practical" careers. Software engineer, doctor (more on this specific one later), lawyer, investor, startup cofounder. Why are they "practical"? It cannot be because of their "inherent value for society", otherwise the less "prestigious" careers of cashier, janitor, construction worker, roofer, and bus driver would take far greater positions in that hierarchy than software engineer, lawyer, investor, and startup cofounder ever would. It is not hard to see that bus driver is far more valuable for society than software engineer or startup cofounder. Neither of those are essential or even needed, most of the time they in fact provide absolutely no extra value, and society would not get any worse in their absence. One could try to argue that I am taking a short-sighted and conservative perspective, and that "software engineer" or "startup cofounder" are more highly valued for their "intellectual value" in terms of "potential to move society forward". Obviously this does not apply to software engineers, so we can already cross that out, so let's look at startup cofounders. Sure, innovation is more likely to happen at this level than the "essential worker" level. I could rationally argue that most of this "innovation" is not actually meaningful at all and has no real value compared to the previous state of the society it affects; but ignoring this, I can also say something obvious, which is that the vast majority of startups amount to nothing. In fact, the vast majority of startup cofounders don't even have good ideas at all. If we are to claim that startup cofounders have some impact on society, we must first cut out the 99.99% haystack from the very few needles, but taken altogether, a rational actor would think about the statistics and realize that whenever they meet a "startup cofounder", they have high confidence to state that this person is not at all and will not at all contribute anything to society. The expected value of the distribution of "startup cofounder" is staggeringly less than that of essential workers, although the extreme tail may be larger (even then, that can be debatable but I won't get into it). Then "practicality" would have to be defined some other way, as "practicality for the self" rather than society. Indeed, despite their general lack of value, software engineers and startup cofounders make a lot of money or receive a high social standing. From the perspective of an individual, they will receive more value by pursuing such occupations. This definition of practicality becomes a very bizarre one to respect for many reasons, as it amounts to uplifting selfish ambition while spitting on those who actually enable the foundation for such selfish endeavors, but I won't focus on that here; let's go a level deeper and look into the "practicality" of those rewards such as money and social standing. In a vacuum, one could argue that it is obviously better to have more money than less, and more social standing than less. Even in a vacuum I would be wary of this reasoning, in fact the concept is untenable since neither money nor social standing even matter at all in a vacuum, so the theoretical system would need to be more complicated than this even at its most simple. Still, let's pursue that view of "more money/status is better than less". This is taking a cross section of one dimension of life, but now let's be realistic and add more variables. Perhaps there are other things that could matter in life. Such as love, exploration, use of time, doing good things, and deeply pursuing those things that actually matter. That last aspect, deeply pursuing those things that actually matter, is recursive on purpose. Once again, since "practicality" is ill-defined, people don't tend to pursue or think about what actually matters. I've mentioned that they don't know what actually matters, however, very often, people feel something along those lines. Just think about all the practical go-getters in this world who feel utterly unsatisfied (perhaps this is why they need to keep going and getting again and again). People achieve their "goals" only to want more, because after achieving their goal they are back to some state of emptiness plus some ego boost, and need more, and the cycle never ends, but gets worse; people need more and more, festering even after those desires inevitably become untenable or destroy others. People become addicted to power and money rather than those things that power and money were meant to provide. All this because they don't know what they actually want and get maladaptively stuck pursuing some other "practical" thing. And those things which maximize money and social status are realistically always against those things that are truly meaningful. Relentlessly pursuing practicality is contrary to love, exploration, and doing good things, all of which are "deeply unpractical", and is against figuring out those things that are actually meaningful, because one was too stuck chasing practicality than figuring out what is actually meaningful, because such an action is "unpractical" according to the current lens. The optimization problem is more multidimensional than one would initially think; and if we want to associate practicality with "value", then blindly following society's trend of "practicality" is ironically the least practical thing you can do.
One could argue on the contrary that one should be practical to maximize those things that are actually of value later on. For example, making a lot of money and accumulating a lot of power so that they can pursue the "things that actually matter" without limits. At best, this course of action entails walking a tightrope for no reason; as one must always be highly aware and disciplined enough to effectively pursue these things and make great gains without ever being corrupted by them or endlessly pursuing them, as doing so would lead to never pursuing those promised meaningful things. Those things that actually matter are independent of money or power anyway, and can always be pursued, and these folks' concept of "limits" on these things is unfounded and reductive; so they don't actually gain any meaning by focusing on money or power first. And frankly, those who espouse this view to begin with are merely justifying their ruthless ambitions for power and money, and generally will never make the incredibly inconvenient (for them) and discontinuous switch to the "meaningful things" or "good actions", which would require forfeiting or making irrelevant all that power and money they accumulated in the first place, but then why would they pursue the riches and power in the first place? Make no mistake, a lens carves itself both in the present and the future.
I want to say more about the "doctor" profession, which is one of high prestige and high salary, but has the added advantage of actually having a good impact on society (ideally at least; we all know how disgruntled and uncaring some doctors can be). Despite the positive impact on society, now let's take the individual lens. How many doctors actually love their profession in itself? How many really, in retrospect, believe this was the best path they could have taken? Of course it can lead to a nice position in society, and a big house, but at some point the thrill of those things will always wear off, and one is left with brutal working conditions in an environment one doesn't even care about. I want to say more about the "good effect of an action" and "morality" in a later article, but this doctor concept will be relevant there.
The most practical thing you can do is think about "meaning" and "value" for yourself, beyond society's books and lectures on "practicality". Sound familiar?
Societally, mathematics and art are viewed by society as being opposite poles on some spectrum of subjects, the one being the extreme of "logic" and the other being the extreme of "expression" (I personally disagree, as seen in the first section, but that's beside the point). But even from society's perspective, those two subjects have one common thread: both are deemed impractical under the nose of society. Thankfully society has really has no weight here. Imagine a "go-getter lover of hustle culture" at a party, and meets both a mathematician and an artist. He scoffs at both of them. He avoids the mathematician altogether, because a mathematician is bound to be the least cool of them all and shouldn't even be there (I state this sardonically), the hustle bro thinks to himself, "I can't believe there are people out there spending all their lives studying topology and group theory; like who even uses that abstract stuff bro? These dudes should go outside, and actually make a difference in the world!" Note that our protagonist here has not done anything either, but let's proceed with the story. He then meets the artist, and thinks to himself, "well he's quirky, creative and stuff. But who really cares about these paintings man? I can just look at a photograph or get OpenAI Dall-E to generate stuff. I can't believe people pay millions of dollars for this stuff, it has to be to bump their own status, right? (He's right about that one generally) Well maybe we can give this guy some use, he can design the template for the website of my amazing life-changing startup!" Obviously his startup idea sucks. But here's the punchline: Drake is more popular and rich than he ever will be. And Euclid contributed infinitely more to civilization than he ever will. At the limit, nothing has more universal appeal than art, and nothing has more universal applicability than mathematics. Perhaps those "extreme subjects" of math and art are in fact the most practical subjects one can pursue.
Since the whole notion of practicality is a hugely inconsistent and misleading mess to begin with, if one is passionate about art or math, or anything "non-practical" (love of nature is deeply non-practical according to society), the most practical thing they can do is to pursue their passion. Just being in that state of pursuing one's passion puts the value in one's life far above all those who work so hard yet achieve nothing they truly value.
The glorious fuel of neglect; the importance of everything
Two aspects of da Vinci's childhood stuck out to me: his intense curiosity and frequent experimentation, and the fact that he was a bastard. Leonardo was the illegitimate son of a notary, who was often absent to deal with his more legitimate affairs. Both his father and mother married other people and had legitimate children of their own. Leonardo clearly played second fiddle even at home. Not to mention that in society, bastards like Leonardo were seen as being beneath those born "respectably" and legitimately. Leonardo was not afforded the luxuries of education or prospects that his legitimately born contemporaries could take for granted.
This situation is evidently both emotionally taxing and societally limiting. However, this is no sob story: we hear of Leonardo far more than his "nobly born" contemporaries, most of whom faded away into obscurity or achieved nothing to begin with; and Leonardo achieved far more than any of his contemporaries ever dreamed of, despite those hard societal limits. I actually believe his situation played a significant role in this immense success.
Paradoxically, the fact that Leonardo had this initial "handicap" of bastard status allowed him to achieve the unthinkable, or at least to have a greater chance at it than his peers. Leonardo was out there drawing, experimenting, and observing nature and its beauty from a young age. Perhaps this was only the case because his parents cared more about their legitimate children. Leonardo, feeling the whip of neglect and the pain that only a second fiddle can understand, could always find solace in nature; whose immense beauty and infinite vastness could never let him down. If Leonardo was instead born legitimate, his parents would have been stricter, and strongly pushed him towards those "practical" subjects, or at least to follow the paternal path of notary. He would have been indoctrinated into those arrogant belief systems of readers of books; believing himself to be greater than those bastards, believing his profession to be of value and prestige, learning to focus on the societal system instead of those "distractions" found in math and art, and upholding the latest trendy books while mocking those who disagree so that he may cement his own intellectual superiority. Indeed, this was how Leonardo's legitimately born contemporaries were reared. Since he had no such push from parents or peers, he was pushed by nature to look up to those natural things, rather than the unnatural and superficial. Since his parents did not have strong feelings about him pursuing a noble profession, he was free to spend time drawing. Since his parents were not hit by that strong parental protective instinct, he was free to wander the countryside, and observe nature with a child's eyes.
Leonardo's handicap was his blessing. Those with everything have nothing to do. Those who are always satisfied have nothing to be motivated by. Those with rough lives wish they had a normal life, but those with normal lives might hate their cards even more, resenting that the world gave them nothing interesting or pity-inducing to give them meaning. Normal lives are boring, and those "good lives" without hardship have complicated prognoses. Trauma can destroy, but it can also act as a door that others have no concept of. Leonardo's feelings of neglect were the fuel that led him to an immensely satisfying life in concordance with the nature, the greatest provider of value of them all. Everything matters, in ways that may not be visible in the present, and those unwanted things might actually be the most meaningful.
3D on a 2D paper - the map of consciousness, and its high dimensionality
There was another line in the first bit of the biography that got me thinking. One of Leonardo's tenets was that closely simulating the three-dimensional world within the two dimensional confines of the canvas should be a main objective of the artist. The concept of mapping paper to three dimensions is an interesting one to dig into.
When one looks at a good drawing or painting, they can perceive it as "3D", despite the fact that the drawing is on a 2-dimensional canvas. Perhaps it is not surprising at this is possible. When someone perceives something with their eyes, one can imagine that as a snapshot, and print it on a piece of paper. What the eyes perceive is similar to what can appear on paper; it appears as a bunch of objects framed in some approximately rectangular area with some length and width.
Since art is intrinsically tied with perception (art is meant to be perceived), then it is important to distill the components of perception. Perception itself is linked to the observation of some underlying objects in reality. When we talk about the "three-dimensional world", we are referring to a certain view of the world of objects; that matter in reality has the three dimensions of length, wigth, and height. Likewise, paper, according to its usage in art, would only have two dimensions when viewed as an object: height and width. It would seem impossible that we are able to use this two-dimensional basis to form three dimensions. The reason we are able to do this is because we "change the lens" away from the world of objects and exploit the idea of perception. Indeed, one realizes that the "object" portrayed in art is not actually the object itself; one cannot touch a painting of a rock and feel a rock, they will only feel paper. They only see a "depiction", albeit one that is perceived like the real thing. If we can exploit perception and conceptual understanding as things that can be detached from the real object itself, one should think about the aspects involved in linking perception to object, so that these aspects can be used to create a "realistic simulation".
Going back to the view of the visual field as "printable" or "screenshottable", clearly one can very closely simulate anything one can possibly see. One can generate any visual field by using a basis of only three elements: height, width, and colour. Imagine paper as the real vector space R2, like a grid with infinite cells within a strict bound, where each grid has a specific pigment. If you think about it, any visual field can be simulated like this, and since the space of "meaningful" visual fields (meaning, things a human would actually perceive in real life, as opposed to random splashes of colour at each location) is clearly a subset of the set of all visual fields, then we can "simulate nature" as a human would see it using just this basis of perception.
Here is something interesting. I mentioned that the "meaningful" visual field is very specific, relative to the mass of all possible colour grids. Art (at least the classic style) relies on this meaningful subset. It turns out the "basis of perception" and the "basis of objects" (for example, height, width, and length to describe objects in reality) cannot be directly mapped. For example, it is absurd to say that a random color grid has any concept of height, width, and length of individual objects, but from the perspective of "immediate perception", it is impossible to differentiate these from those artworks with actual objects depicted in them. On a meta-level, there end up being far more than three dimensions involved in perception and understanding of things. From the immediate perception of the visual field, the human brain makes association upon association, as directed by electrical signals, until it gets to a point of (perhaps faulty) understanding, and it is at this point that the "world of perception" is mapped to a more meaningful "world of objects". The initial basis of height, width, and colour was only sufficient to produce statements about the color scheme itself (immediate perception and nothing else); but integrating far more components, the mind can suddenly identify objects, and then loop in those popular concepts of height, length, and width; and also identify where there is no object, and differentiate a "meaningful" grid of colours from one with nothing. Artificial neural networks do this with great success; they can take in the raw pixels of an image, and produce identifications of the objects in it. Note that it can only do this due to training labels already provided by human beings; all the neural networks do is figure out some composition of functions which accurately map the world of perception to a specific "world of objects" as specified by the human labels. Those neural networks have clearly shown that such complex mappings are possible and statistically significant, at least to some extent. One wonders if all human consciousness can be computable in the fashion of function composition applied to streams of input, and whether some dynamic equation can simulate the trajectory of a human being in a similar environment. I believe the answer boils down to whether there exists a free will indepedent of physics, or not, and I do not believe that question is answerable via pure rationality on either side (I will write an article on this later).
I've mentioned the notion of a specific world of objects that is mapped to from the world of perception. This is because one can incorporate more and more aspects of nature into consciousness; thus extending the basis for reality, or even providing a different one altogether. For example, when one views an artwork, the ones we consider to have higher aesthetic value involve far more than mere "collections of objects". Once again, paradoxically, the subspace of "meaningful" artworks diminishes even further, but now we incorporate higher-order concepts such as movement, detail, specific color schemes, and so on; but even further, great artworks have some sort of emotional appeal, or link in to some meaningful archetypes or abstract narratives. All of those things are impossible to describe simply, and are high dimensional and complex to represent.
Artworks are a nice example, but this applies to conscious life in general; the map between the raw perceptions of things, and their conscious representations, is very high dimensional. When mapping from perception to some understanding of reality, this map is still very flawed, in the sense that it is always missing something meaningful (the basis is not large enough to encompass the "space" of nature), and very often is even wrong in its conceptualization (the basis produces elements that diverge from the space of reality). Now map in things like emotion and aesthetic perception, and there ends up being an inextricably entwined dance of action and observation; something is observed, the map of consciousness transforms the stimuli into concepts, which is inherently tied to both "factual beliefs" and "emotional attributions", and stimuli is not only used for raw, cold facts, but ties in to these aesthetic perceptions and emotions as well; both of which are useful for action and strongly influence decisions, thus creating both a new state of the outside world which is perceived again by the agent, and also a new "internal" state of both consciousness and unconsciousness, and the loop continues. This process occurs everywhere, including when perceiving an artwork. Even 2D canvas is transformed into a titanically complex conceptual representation by the mappings in the brain; linking not to a cold "world of facts and objects" in isolation, but also to the world of aesthetic; and the world of aesthetic that one finds themselves immersed in always does influence the "facts" and "objects" that are perceived. Math and art are always in a dance (see first section).
It is pretty evident (though inherently unprovable by purely rigorous means -- see first section once again) that our maps between the world of perception and the world of objects is not completely spurious or meaningless. Even if a lot of the map is indeed incorrect, good chunks of it seem to be relevant. We can generally (to some degree of error) make good predictions of the world around us, and conceptualize it in ways that remain harmonious and consistent with our perceptions across time and space. Our own consciousness is immensely complex, but even the machinations of this consciousness are a part of the nature it attempts to piece together. If our consciousness is so utterly high dimensional and complex, imagine how utterly complex the whole of nature must be. Even with simple perceptions, so much complexity is involved; and since this map is not totally incorrect, it is not a stretch to say that even very simple things actually are correlated with the complexity involved in the conscious processing of them; in fact they are infinitely more complex than that, as there are so many things that we have not yet understood about nature. Paradoxically, nature is at once infinitely complex, but also atomically simple. We have discussed nature from the perspective of a conscious, limited observer, who relies on perception; at this point nature is immensely complex, composed of infinite intricate links, and never completely understandable even then. However, if one thinks of the definition of a "basis", it consists of independent components which mix together to form the space; the fact that nature is intricately linked (see discussion on polymathy) means that this basis, in reality, is small. If we can make close isomorphisms between the subjects of nature, then there is not much that needs to be added to the basis of nature to obtain any subject from these "first principles" (ground zero basis) of nature; because if we did there would be something else independent, marking irreconciliable distinctions between subjects. If you think about it, the humans of prehistoric times would empathize wholeheartedly with the idea of an "infinite basis" of nature; there is so much unpredictability, so many unexplainable events, so much that is hard to boil down to the essence, so much that has not yet been discovered. But fast forward to now; according to our own models of physics, the universe is distillable into only very few basic components which interact from some initial state (standard model of physics, etc). Nature is both simple and infinitly complex, depending on whether we take the view of God or the view of humanity (limited but conscious). The view of humanity is the one balancing yin and yang; our understanding is never provable, and always limited, but does reflect some reality. Nature itself is only yang from the initial state.
Closing thoughts: the answer always lies closest to nature; the self of self-help
I'll close this with yet another musing on readers of books, and a thought that I believe is useful. In fact, this is the most useful thought I could ever hope to divulge, but perhaps also the most anticlimatic and the one people don't care to hear; but bear with me.
The self-help industry is booming. Books are getting sold. Gurus on YouTube are getting listened to. People uplift each other in comments sections. Society is pulling more and more towards "working on yourself", and preaching to us the best ways to do it. So many of us are so unsatisfied and always hope for something better, whatever that is. We read all of these books and listen to all of these gurus in hopes that their advice will solve our problems. But they don't; if they did, this wouldn't remain such a booming industry. Even if we claim to be "forging our own path"; the path we forged has been influenced by the words of these books and gurus, and we are still following the book, and always will until we peel back the pages of the script and wonder where we're going and why.
The truth to everything is in nature. Those things that are meaningful, are meaningful; that is also part of nature. Listen to nature, who is always right, and not a book written by a limited human being who wants his money and fame. In fact, by blindly following a guru, you do the opposite of "self-help"; as the guru forges the path for you. How can anyone call that autonomy? All the right answers are in nature. The best thing to do for yourself is really to do it yourself; to figure things out oneself, one has no choice but to look to nature, and that is always the best thing you can do.