I am currently enrolled as a Molecular Bionic Engineer at Pázmány, and as an extracurricular activity I’m making the first steps to get a better understanding of how we understand ourselves.
My guardian angels and me. They keep me working hard towards a sunny day where we just have to sit in the grass and look at the clouds, eating strawberry.
In the last few years I learned and experienced such things that slowly revealed a goal that keeps me wondering of this life. Dozens of aspects, different paths, still I had to categorize my interests, or fields of study into two main groups:
Anatomy
Practically what is under the hood: you are given a car that runs, without knowing what makes it running. Main questions here is, what are the parts, how are they combined. The next class is rather about what is the purpose of them individually, and as an assemble?
I consider anatomy the following things: learning foreign languages, programming languages, how to use a microscope, recognizing what is under the microscope, memorizing signaling pathways in the nervous system, exploring the units of it, learning to perform tomography, study cells, breaking it down to organelles, to proteins, to chemical compounds, to atoms, solving Schrödinger’s equation - and all of this for what?
Before I continue, I would like to point out that some of the listed may be created, or discovered by the mankind and some may not, but from my angle of view they are still mysterious objects that work as are, out of the box.
Functionality
Personally I like this side of the game. When we put together what we have disassembled, we have to understand it. Even on the level of an infant. They experience the greatest discoveries, and somehow they have to make sense of input of complexity and amount that cannot be described. Yes, probably if you are reading this, you could make these steps also. But it is not as simple as it seems.
The further we dig, the more we have come to explain, and at a point everybody has to put down the shovel, come up and tell what was down there. The greatest advantage of mankind is that we can continue each other’s work. When the next man goes down the hole, he may learn (do things which I classify as anatomy) and continue the exploration, or change direction. One may find a gold mountain and one may end up in China (or in some ocean… I never excelled in geography), nobody knows.
Still the most important thing as I can see now, is to come up and tell what was down there. Until then only you know where you went, what have you seen, what did you experience. Until you have to speak about it, it only exists as some kind of a stray current in your brain.