I must have had ten different ideas for an entry today. So I just spun the wheel and it landed on thinking versus knowing.

Like I have said before in this space, I think there is a difference between a mind focused on having a lot of knowledge on hand and one focused on having a lot of think about.

Some people collect facts with amazing alacrity, and file those facts in very neatly organized filing cabinets in their minds, with robust cross-referencing and intelligent indexing, and are able to bring up whole rafts of related information at a moment’s notice whenever they like.

Basically, these are organized people with organized minds, and I am always amazed at their ability to bring so much knowledge to bear in any situation and to be able to search their internal database from whatever angle they want and get very thorough and accurate results time after time.

As you may have guessed, my mind is not like that at all. Oh, there is all kinds of stuff in there. Like any good intellectual, I love to learn, and I am quite intellectually omnivorous. I can feed on and enjoy all kinds of intellectual faire.

And I can remember it too, in the right situation. That’s why school was so easy for me. I am test-bright, which means (according to my theory) that I get a lot of information out of the question itself, thus making it easier to fill in the space remaining and remember the answer.

But I need that information from the question. Otherwise. I am stuck dealing with the raw contents of my mind, and that is where things break down, because my mind, like my life, is not organized like a reference library.

In fact, it is tempting to say it isn’t organized at all, but there are some things which it can do very swiftly and with great accuracy and deadly efficiency, so clearly my mind is more than a scattered heap of unrelated pages.

It’s just that I have never had knowing things as my highest priority. My highest priority is always understanding.

Now you might say, “Aren’t those the same thing?”. And it’s true that to understand something is to know something about it, and vice versa. But that doesn’t make them the same thing, merely intimately interrelated.

Knowledge is about facts. Known truths, established inferences, the pleasure of knowing.

Understanding, on the other hand, is about the relationships between those known things. The greatest pleasure for a theorist, philosopher, or other understanding-based thinkers is to deduce or inference something new from existing knowns.

It is the pleasure of revelation. It’s that wonderful feeling you get when you discover a previously unknown pattern or make a novel and valid connection and suddenly the chaos resolves into a simpler and more orderly form.

That’s as close as I can get as to why someone like me pursues understanding so passionately. The long term benefits are enormous, but the short term reward, the thing that keeps you gathering information and distilling it down, is that extraordinary jolt of electric mental pleasure I get when I figure something out.

They say that we INTJ types have a model of the universe in our minds that we are constantly updating and optimizing. If so, then the pleasure of revelation represents the moment when that model becomes smaller and more compact and efficient.

And that’s fucking awesome.

Because my mind works this way, seeking understanding, the things I learn never end up in neatly organized files in my mind. Most of what I learn is boiled away in the distillation process, and the rest is fitted into that model of the world in a formthat might well be radically different from what I began with.

It’s like I am making an enormous sculpture out of whatever junk I happen to find lying around. Odds are, that entire microwave oven won’t make it into the final piece… but the handle might.

So compared to others, I am no walking encyclopedia. I know a lot of things, but whether or not I can bring it up whole and complete is a total crapshoot. The odds get better the closer you get to one of my many pet topics, like politics or science, but for the most part, I extract what insights I can from my knowledge and discard the rest as irrelevant.

Luckily, just as knowledge can be used to produce insight, insight can be used to recreate knowledge. I am almost certain that a lot of the times when I do remember things, it is because somewhere in my mind there is just enough of the information in question for me to inference the rest.

In computer terms. my mind is very good at compression, though it is far from lossless.

I also have the ability (another INTJ tool) to sound like I know exactly what I am talking about. We can do that because of that highly integrated and optimized model of the world we carry around. It lets us be very sure of what we know and what we do not know, and that then lets us speak with a firmness and certainty that really impresses people.

It is one of the ways we end up in leadership roles without ever really wanting or seeking them. One of the most natural forms of leadership for human beings is to be the person who sounds like they really know what they are talking about.

Thank goodness I usually do. There were some incidents when I was in my late teens where my mouth got ahead of my brain and I ended up talking utter nonsense plucked straight from my anus, but I learned the necessary amount of caution from those humilating moments when someone looked at me and said “What the fuck are you saying?” and, well…

I had no idea.

So in conclusion (I bet the knowing types are better at staying on topic) I am a thinker, a theorist, a dreamer, and a philosopher before anything else.

That’s all I was really trying to say.

See you again tomorrow, you wonderful people!