“There are hundreds of thousands of stems linking us to everything in the cosmos, supporting us and making it possible for us to be.” – Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace is Every Step, Part 3

All real knowledge is connected.

I have come to think of knowledge as a lens. It is the lens by which a mind accesses truth. From the farthest reaches of the earth, the mind, and history, knowledge is connected by its very existence as the lens through which truth is interpreted and experienced.

To visualize a vastly simplified physical representation of the web of human knowledge, imagine a pyramid. The pyramid is of mixed hues and transparency, and it has equilateral triangles for all four faces. Imagine truth, crystalline, clear, and pure, sits at the heart of the pyramid.

As you extend outward to the limits of the object, the clear truth is obfuscated by an assortment of tints and occlusions take shape. If you could take the viewpoint of any point inside the pyramid, the closer to the center and to truth you were to stand, the more clear your interpretation of truth would be. As you take a viewpoint further from the center, your interpretation of the central truth is altered by an increased amount of imperfect lens. Yet what you see remains a representation of the truth.

While the view from every apex of the pyramid looking inward may be tinted each with a slightly different combination of lenses, you will see an interpretation of the truth at the object’s center. No matter which apex you look through, the truth at the center remains the same. It is merely your interpretation of this truth that has shifted.

While vastly oversimplified, this visualization is helpful for me in seeing the connectedness of knowledge on both the level of any individual truth and the level of the sum total of human knowledge.

Once comfortable with this visualization of a pyramid, it is possible to consider variations of this representation, which I have only just began to do.

One added layer of complexity is to imagine the pyramid as the macro-level representation of the complex network of human knowledge. When “zooming in” to the micro-level, you can imagine the crystalline atomic structure of the pyramid extending the metaphor of the visualization. Each atom in the structure is perhaps a bit of information and bonds between them are relation or connection of those bits of information.

Further thoughts on connectedness.