Knowing everything

These days I feel heavy. I feel like I’m dragging, but not physically or even mentally. I feel there’s a huge pile of “things” in front of me whose depth I cannot really fathom. I remember back when I was going to the National Library in Tehran. Gosh, I think it was 6 years ago. I was listening to Clint Mansell’s “The Last Man” from my all-time favorite soundtrack album, The Fountain (highly recommended, by the way; the movie, too). Back then I was working on my M.Sc. thesis on ferrofluid micromixing. I wanted to cure “cancer.” I’m serious. I fell in love with the movie, I was doing a tangent research, and I thought I could fix it all. Little did I know back then, but I thought I knew.

As I’m lying on my apartment sofa in Dallas, I wonder: does thinking about things ever stop? I’m a finite man with finite resources and finite intelligence, but I wanna do infinite things and know everything. I don’t even know the source of this drive or the “why.” But then, I get back to my engineering trainings. I remember that every solution the engineers offer is somewhat imperfect, or rather, justified given the resources. I remember things move despite that 20% efficiency that theory says we could squeeze. I remember Aristotle’s phrase:

The purpose of knowledge is action, not knowledge.

And boy, beauty lies within implementation. No matter how much time you spend by the whiteboard, no matter how much you plan the outcomes, there’s always something you learn about your environment (especially if you are an RL agent).

Despite this passion to “boil the ocean,” I take action toward that: building things. Because I know, the greatest gift one is given is agency, i.e., the audacity and valor to look in the eyes of uncertainty and say “I will figure you out in some way.”