A “concentrated mind” (one under high pressure) is not necessarily a good thing. I know in a work environment I can get much more work of much higher quality done when I’m not under pressure to do it, and when I’ve had times of existential dread fearing death and the end of the world it made it much harder to think clearly. In general, I feel like I thought much better (“was smarter”) when I was younger and more carefree than I do now that I’m older and constantly stressed.

I feel like I thought much better (“was smarter”) when I was younger — Pfhorrest

Perhaps the better machine, but its grist and product? Better then or now? If then, maybe you're well-advised to quit. Better now, and that in itself might be instructive.

Anything can happen in life, that's why it's not Hell.

Remember this and you'll be fine. Or as some would say, do with this as you please.

Maybe off topic, but this reminds me of Kierkagaard’s stages of existence.

Or alternatively, do we generally become wiser or more foolish - and is there anything instructive to be taken from the answer? — tim wood

There is no general answer. One can study a person over a long period of time and perhaps draw some sort of conclusion about that person, but there can be no inclusive reply. Your comment about seeing how the specific might be explained by the general sounds a little like math Category Theory, which has never been of value to me in the intellectual world of the nitty gritty. But I would guess a seasoned historian could perceive how small social struggles fit into a much larger picture.

Lots of room for rambling here. :smile:

What a great question! Got me thinking and at a certain point in my musings, the memory of me watching a video on language flashed across my mind. The video deals with basic ideas on language and what seems germane to your question is how language carries information (something you already know of course).

At this juncture, two important concepts that need no introduction are relevant viz. 1. Knowledge and 2. Experience. Both, as you know, are essential to success understood in the broadest sense possible. Age, the received opinion is, goes toward accumulating experience and that's what makes an older person an asset rather than a liability. However, language has the ability to transform experience into knowledge with the end result that experience becomes transferable to the young (if they're willing of course).

The video describes how chimpanzees can make tools to hunt termites but due to a lack of a language this experience isn't transformed into knowledge that could then be learned by younger chimps who could possibly improve upon the skill and then pass it down to their offspring and so on. Humans, on the other hand, can teach what they've learned from experience to their young i.e. humans can convert experience into knowledge and that gives us a huge advantage over other animals who seem to be in a, well, Sisyphian cycle of having to continuously rediscover what they've already discovered but left unrecorded because they lack language.

Basically, wisdom, if one plays one's cards just right, is not a function of age.

Do you mean Erik Erikson? Either way, develop a bit?

Lots of room for rambling here. — jgill

Yes indeed, and seemingly unavoidable. My preference is for discussions that converge. But here I cannot quite figure out even my own question - so my hope the discussion might sharpen where it's dull. If memory serves, you have self-identified as an academic and old enough to know better about most things.

Do you notice any long-term trend or theme in your own life of thinking? I do in mine, but it's hard to describe. It seems to be generally a move to the simpler, in part because I come to suspect that most and maybe all things have an inherent simplicity, such that faced with something, we all might say, "Oh, ok, I get it, that's how it works." That, and looking for what makes sense, because I also suspect that there is a sense to everything, and that it can be ferreted out. Finally that sense is the great and only reward.

But not as a search for absolutes - experience seeming to show that absolutes are usually not absolute. Your background is mathematics? I buy that in abstract realms, some - many - things can be defined in absolute terms. But maths not life, but instead a tool, the value in its use. My own thinking turns to concepts like justice. Most of us have a sense of it. And some would like to have an absolute definition of it, yet I think most evolve to understanding that what is just in this circumstance may be unjust in another, but in both cases justice.

And in the case of justice, e.g., one learns to move not from genus to species, in the sense of first finding a rule an then applying it to circumstances, but rather from circumstances and attempting to find commonality in them. Sense so far?

Basically, wisdom, if one plays one's cards just right, is not a function of age. — TheMadFool

Any insight as to how those cards are played, and which ones?

My own thinking has evolved, ... due to learning and a willingness to learn, and humility got the hard way. That is, school, experience, hard knocks, time. Wisdom, imo, something else and also not the subject of this thread, ... does our several thinking evolve, and more-or-less in the same way? Is any of it a function of age and appreciation of mortality, of what is important in the face of no-longer-being? — tim wood

Let's think about death later, much later.
According to people in the know the brain evolves from infancy to old age in quantity and quality. Others say that the mind also evolves in style in stages suggesting periodic reorganization of whatever resources it has to work with. Most of this reorganization goes on unnoticed except that others can see it. For example, some topics, like philosophy and physics need to be taught in gradually more sophisticated versions several times years apart because most abstract conceptual and logical facilities require an adult mind. The historically annoyingly noticeable distinction between knowledge and wisdom breaks down to a gradual decline in ability to learn and know and to a corresponding increasing ability to judge. But not always.

Any insight as to how those cards are played, and which ones? — tim wood

It's a truism that, roughly speaking, until people are in their early twenties their priorities are "different" - they're not in the least bit concerened about knowledge save, of course, the few who are precocious. Given so, it's not going to be as easy as I thought to impart knowledge to the young unless we manage to make it adequately appealing to young palates. Here I'm talking of formal structured courses in schools and colleges but these institutions don't have a monopoly on knowledge - family and friends can play a big a role in the education of the young.

Methinks it's possible to create the right environment for rapid learning that would, if all goes well, concentrate and condense experiene accumulated over many many years into a lecture or a book. The main worry is this: motivation (you can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink).

it's possible to create the right environment for rapid learning that would, if all goes well, concentrate and condense experience accumulated over many many years into a lecture or a book. — TheMadFool

My view is that experience is the one thing that cannot be taught. What experience teaches, but not the experience itself. And by "teach" I mean being told the consequences of doing this instead of that, when this is bad and that is what should have been done.

Knowledge, in this sense, then, is a template. "Go through these motions in this way if you want to achieve the desired result." Experience is the means by which knowledge comes into possession as owned, the template no longer needed or even desired.

I think of wisdom as owned knowledge, and thus not teachable in a classroom. Examples are at hand. What is needed to rebuild an engine, e.g., is teachable. But in practice it takes a skilled mechanic to do it. And certainly how to work wood - or how to work almost anything.

Knowing, doing, two different things. And the emphasis in schools for some decades has been not even on knowing, but how and where to find the information needed. Skilled doing --> learning what to do --> learning how to learn --> learning how to find where to learn what to learn. The failure of this approach written on the face of every teenager/young adult at a cash register buffaloed by having to make simple change. Most will learn eventually, though handicapped by the loss of years in public schools, and at what cost as they learn at the community's expense? But some won't learn, and the cost of them sometimes spectacular.

So much for the problems of education. As to the concern that children don't want to learn or cannot or are not interested, that is a conclusion only drawn from children that aspiration has been crushed out of.

I agree, though, that knowledge must be condensed. The real task of educators worth the name is to figure out how to present difficult thought in a way accessible for a given group of students - necessarily a solvable problem, though in my opinion most so-called "educators" (not to be confused with teachers) are incompetent nor even able move in the right direction.

I think by ninth grade a student should be conversant and able to work to some degree, in terms of general principles, with most of what his community needs him to know. High school a focusing and refining, and college a place of investigation and discovery, Today, much of college is remedial, and in many cases and places a four-year college degree, while not quite a joke, is close.

Engineering, physics, math, chemistry, biology, history, philosophy, ethics, etc., all by age 15/16? Yup. And necessarily. Of course all in basic form and general principles.

Do you notice any long-term trend or theme in your own life of thinking? — tim wood

At 83 I'm still able to engage in math research (of a sorts), but the aspect of thinking that I have noticed the most change in is an increasing inability to multi-task. I leave that to my wife who is ten years younger. :meh:

At 83 I'm still able to engage in math research (of a sorts), but the aspect of thinking that I have noticed the most change in is an increasing inability to multi-task. I leave that to my wife who is ten years younger. :meh: — jgill

Well, that goes to the machine. My test is in the supermarket. I used to be able to walk very fast scanning both sides of the aisle and quickly discern what I wanted. Now I have to walk slowly and look at things - altogether a different process.

But an old mathematician: if you're active, are you active in the same way on the same kinds of problems? Or different somehow? I've taken on a math problem or two, enough to get a taste of the dangers of it. But I cannot speak for anyone else, like an old(er) dog I don't chase every squirrel - or even any squirrel, except for some exercise. It seems to come to a kind of respect for thinking and things thought. They do not have to be any kind of cutting edge, but I can appreciate them as I can appreciate good music, and even find something new in something old.

How are you with poetry? Well travelled in "the realms of gold"? Or does age open a door to understanding that had been closed? Or perhaps a general movement of thought from object to subject, from things to people, from what one always did to that which one finally decides is important?

As noted above, this a rambling topic. But I'm finding a turning to humanistic subjects, with less of a dogmatic approach, with less dependence on absolute definition of abstract concepts applying absolutely to particular instances. E.g., justice in principle and practice not always exactly the same thing. Which means that there is not, if there ever was, one answer to many kinds of problems, but instead many possible answers, and that thinking needs to find the right one or the best one, and so forth. That is, a kind of thinking and subject matter right for the thinker whoever he (she?) is.

I must've misspoke. I don't mean to say that experience, the whole nine yards of it, can be reduced to knowledge. Reminds me of qualia and the like in the alive and kicking issue of consciousness in the philosophy of mind section. Mary of Mary's Room fame, some say, learns something new when she actually sees the color red even though before that she had all the bookish knowledge on redness. Likewise, doing something, which is what experience is, brings with it a different kind of knowing so to speak.

Perhaps we need to look more closely at what knowledge and experience are, at what the difference between them are, and if one can be reduced to the other.

I'll skip the first step in the above line of inquiry and dive right into the difference between knowledge and experience. No matter how comprehensive the knowledge bank on a given subject, it's almost certain that there'll be gaps in it. You spoke of knowledge as a template and this view of knowledge is the right place to start if we're to know what distinguishes knowledge from experience. Knowledge is, as you've pointed out, a template and being so it needs to be as general as possible to ensure maximum relevancy. That means knowledge has to avoid details as much as possible and focus on painting with broad strokes in a manner of speaking. This being the case, there'll always be some aspects of a subject that'll be missing from knowledge - the details as it were. To know the details, we need hands-on experience.

But an old mathematician: if you're active, are you active in the same way on the same kinds of problems? Or different somehow? — tim wood

Getting your degree (a kind of union card) involves learning a little about various branches of mathematics as you begin to focus on a specific area of thought. It's a research degree, so you start along a particular path, forming relationships with others in your clique. I began this process a half century ago, and wrote and published a bit as I taught college math, until I retired in 2000. Then I moved into an unpopulated mathematical realm and started creating results for the pure enjoyment, posting notes on researchgate.

As I write this I have just solved another trivial problem I set for myself, concerning the convergence behavior of a path line in a time dependent vector space. I find I still am able to delve deep into a challenge, but when I was younger ideas came to me as I sat with pen and paper, while now I have to get up and move around to accomplish the same. And sometimes what I write must be corrected, since it doesn't correlate with what I am thinking! One has to accept this as a penalty for aging.

As for poetry, here's a line I wrote a while ago in response to the author of the thread on whether or not growing old is desirable - he said one gets "stupider": And so you pave your road ahead, a passage fraught with loathe and dread. :cool:

That's actually a pretty good line!