If there's one thing modern humans have had 35,000 years of evolutionary conditioning to spend developing, it's our ability to recognize patterns. Patterns tell us how our actions will impact the world. Patterns tell us what we can expect from our environment. Pattern recognition is a primary prerequisite to learning.
Pattern recognition in this sense is constrained by at least two conditions:
First, we must be able to observe the events that make up a pattern. We call this experience, and naturally, experience is limited by our ability to sense the world and by our ability to act on it.
Second, we must be able to intuitively link the events we observe. This is easy in the case of flipping on a light switch, or in the case of putting our hand on the stove. It is not so easy to make an intuitive link between smoking a cigarette and one's poor health later, or waking up early for a test in high school and being successful in one's career later.
These examples reflect our trouble thinking about temporality, but the two conditions above are muddled severely in any number of ways outside of our difficulty with time; for a primer, consider stopping by my favorite page of all the internet: this wonderful list of cognitive biases.
Exposure
When it comes to interpreting the world, we are limited by a third thing, which I'm calling exposure. Exposure represents the whole of all things you've experienced - even those things that just sit subconsciously in the back of your head, waiting to be combined with other ideas. Exposure includes those things that you cannot intuitively and consciously comprehend, but exposure is limiting in an absolute sense - one's cognition can only draw from the pool of things that it's been exposed to.
This is pretty intuitive on some level, but it's important to note that it means that ideas do not come from nowhere - this idea can potentially get controversial.
It means that every idea - no matter how novel it seems - is in fact the result of two or more disparate ideas coming together in a novel way. An idea is created, but not from nothing.
As such, our interpretations of the world are limited to our exposure to it; I'll reference this image again:
Predictions
The primary function of learning is so that we can make accurate predictions about the world. To that end, we've developed a superb ability to make predictions using linear, short-term models.
Our primary challenge is that reality doesn't care about our human limitations. The world couldn't care less about what we'd like to think about it, and the long-term world is non-linear no matter how good we are at intuitively predicting patterns linearly. Hence the model at the top. When it comes to long-term thinking, we are consistently thwarted by the reality of the world.
So clearly, the problem is a bit more complicated than I've illustrated above. What I'd most like to get across right away is that we factually cannot even conceive of ideas that lie outside of our experiences (again, ideas do not come from nowhere) - and we're often too shortsighted to wield the long-term thinking necessary to recognize non-linear patterns. This complication can be illuminated by the idea of perspective, to be covered in part 2 of this series.
