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~uirapuru

That is true, when you dabble in several fields, but not deeply or don't integrate them, you are a dilletante. Alas, I cannot claim I'm a polymath yet, only that I'm pursing this path. For many years I've felt constrained and kind of burdened whenever I spent much time in something other than my main area of study, feeling that if I did that I would be mediocre at most in all of them, now I don't feel like that anymore, but I do try to organize my pursuits. I have a tendency to get obsessed quickly with something and then forget it, but not forever, I transition between topics of interest regularly, that is what I'm trying to organize to best use my focus.

Another interest point is, what is "deep enough"? That is why I think about "working knowledge", which is the point where you can start to integrate disparate fields meaningfully. Of course you can always improve from there.

I like your way of thinking, trying to see the pattern and structure of things, and this is engrained in yourself, like the holistic being you are.

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~mellita wrote:

Working knowledge is a solid criterion, for sure. I think another good measurement for "deep enough" is to compare where you began with where you presently are. Do you have the same feelings toward what you're studying as you started with? Then you can hardly have studied it to any meaningful depth. Have your feelings changed? Do you regard your subject, and thus the world, with a markedly changed perspective? This is a good sign of having learned something. A certainty of learning is that everything changes.

I think I must be holistic, if only to the extent that I'm a bounded receptacle of energies. Perception, registration, adjustment—education is only so many alterations of such kinds as these to the internal activity. All this I take for consciousness is just the crest of an already receding wave. But even if the node is meaningless without the network, we can still speak of it individually, and the pattern is at least partly present in the node, too. I mean that I'm a synapse, I have a role to play. I can do so in depth, or not, as I prefer.