One day, during a school presentation, I made a wrong statement about the outcome of a historical fact. It would have gone unnoticed if it wasn’t for the, perhaps intentional, question from my classmate about the veracity of what I had just said. I was forced to admit, publicly, the inaccuracy of my statement. What seems like a trivial moment in my life still resonates to this day. How sure are we that history occurred the way it’s told?
Not only for history, but for the complex web of knowledge humans have constructed since the dawn of civilization. Today, it seems obvious that gravity exists, or that everything is made of atoms. But true understanding goes beyond passing down this knowledge. Inspired by Karl Popper’s “Three Worlds” concept, I would argue that true understanding involves your “hands”, because they’re the reason we can materialize ideas in the physical world.
The false sense of understanding that comes from simply reading is something I’ve noticed throughout the years. Reading stimulates your mental world, the subjectivity that only you are aware of. That’s the real value of reading: not understanding itself, but a set of facts and ideas that sharpen reasoning on the path to real understanding.
The problem is that nobody can see your mind. Only you understand the reasoning behind your conclusions, and unless they’re expressed in the physical world for the appreciation of others, it’s as if they don’t exist. Except for you.
Understanding comes when you face the physical world and apply the conclusions your reasoning created in your mental world. That’s the only way to obtain feedback, either from nature or other humans. The act of bridging the mental and physical world usually involves your hands. The most common example is writing. Whether you’re old-school with pen and paper, or your fingertips navigating a keyboard, the creative act still comes from your hands engaging with the environment.
Any pursuit of true understanding in any subject comes from connecting your experience as an individual with the common experience we all share of matter and energy. So if you’re only reading but not creating something that can be perceived by other humans, do you really understand it? That’s why I always say the unique way to demonstrate it is the blank paper test. Remove any external aid and sit in front of a blank page (or a computer without internet). Can you reconstruct the concept, technology, or idea from zero, using only your brain? If so, that’s true understanding.
There’s nothing wrong with ideas that only exist in your mental realm, but be aware that they’re more fragile, and you’ll lack the direct experience that forms solid understanding.
I understand there are fine lines. For example, if you read the Constitution and invest time to understand the legal system, and this helps you in your reasoning to vote for candidates, then it all happens in the subjective world, right? Well, no. You’re materializing your reasoning in your decision to vote for a candidate, and usually you have to go to the ballot and select your candidate. You have to materialize this.
Another example could be pure mathematics. This is more nuanced, because we have countless situations where mathematicians developed apparently useless math, and it turned out to play a critical part in the development of technology. The study of prime numbers seemed trivial thousands of years ago, but now it’s the foundation of encryption on the internet. Did these ideas live in the mental world until we found an application for them? No. The moment an idea lives beyond its creator, it’s now part of culture, naturally bridging the gap between the subjective individual mind of its creator and the world, usually through language written somewhere. Again: hands involved in formalizing math ideas on paper for the appreciation of others.
This has more weight in engineering disciplines. The theoretical world can become an independent entity once it reaches a certain point of complexity, but language still forms part of the propagation of the theory until it’s materialized with atoms using technology. There’s no proof that you understand something if you don’t materialize it somehow. Reading and practice are codependent in this process.