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Lost Forever


If you consider all the knowledge, abilities, skills, and memories people possess, you note enormous knowledge resources contained by society, but maintained by individual agents.  However, when one of these agents passes, this information is abruptly lost forever. Not reclaimable, redeemable, or reconstructible, it is just gone. 

For example, the unrecorded thoughts of Socrates, Kant, and others are gone forever. Sir Isaac Newton, on the other hand, wrote thousands of words on his ideas in multiple notebooks (many bizarre).

Every day, individual deaths carry vast amounts of lost knowledge, factual, operational, skills, and data.  Over all time, you have wealth and knowledge, but you can’t take either along.  You can leave behind wealth but not your knowledge.  Your mind, with its lifetime of accumulations, is often the more valuable. What you know uniquely is lost and must be rediscovered.

So very much of my parents has been lost forever.

Such is the tragic loss to humanity, every day of every year. Yet it’s never much recognized because it has always been. To preserve wealth, we set up trusts, wills, bequeaths, etc. For knowledge, the best we can all do is to communicate with the living while we are living. Family events, writing, speeches, just conversation are a few pathways.  Showing, tutoring, and teaching are others. Loving, caring, and friendships are more still.  Yet, so much is lost, promised for a future day.

What else can we do? Plenty.  There is the trusty diary to record your random memories. You can make a blog to record all your thoughts*. There are now oral history apps you can use with your cell phone.  You could create a private channel on Youtube.com and make notes there.  With this option you can also make picture shows and upload them.

Incidentally, this knowledge loss must affect the entropy of all knowledge.  This has not been discussed in the literature, though the entropy of knowledge has.

*This blog was begun in 2012.

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For me... The best adjective descriptor of Russian President Vladimir Putin is “reptilian.”  Perfect.

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