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
Random thoughts and used ideas