The Many Things You Know

I was channel flipping on Youtube this morning after watching a short video about Mandarin and ended up on a clip of Avatar: The Last Airbender. How'd that happen? I don't know. Does a trip to Youtube ever turn out simple? Anyway, the clip was the introduction of the character Wan Shi Tong, the Spirit of Knowledge.

Wan Shi Tong, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Book 2: Earth, epis. 10. "The Library"

When he first appears in the episode he introduces himself by saying, "I am Wan Shi Tong, he who knows ten thousand things, and you are obviously humans; which, by the way, are no longer permitted in my study," and instantly you know where the episode's issue is going to be. I, however, got hung up on the self-titling phrase, he who knows ten thousand things. Ten thousand bits of knowledge is really not that impressive, especially for an owl-spirit that boasts its intelligence over any and all men.

To quote Bill Nye the Science Guy, "Consider the following."

If you can count from zero to 10,000, you already know 10,001 things. Then add every letter in the alphabet, every word you know, every feeling you've ever felt, every color you can think of, every taste you've ever experience, and keep building from there. Then add to the list every ability you have and every facet of them (including how to write and read each letter, group of letters, word, idiom, phrase, sentence, cliche, etc.). In short, even if you stopped right now and dedicated your whole life to listing everything you know, never learning another thing, you would die before you finished listing everything you know.

That's the awesomeness of human intelligence, its sheer ability to take in and retain information. The brain is so intelligent it even begins to take its intelligence for granted by lumping information together. (Have you ever considered how many things you have to know just to get onto the internet and read this blog?) To quote King Michael Maccini from Mimgardr, "When the will is strong enough, it is astounding what one's mind can do."


However! I must grant that in the cultures on which Avatar: The Last Airbender is clearly based, 10,000 is often used the same way we would use zillion, jillion, gajillion, etc. It is a figurative number used to indicate uncountable quantities. But in our modern age 10,000 has become a number of almost little consequence. So maybe if it had been "Wan Shi Tong, he who knows ten trillion things," we might've been more impressed (that's 10,000,000,000,000,000,000 vs. 10,000, for you visual people like me out there). But even then ten trillion things is couch change compared to the estimated 2.5 petabytes (2,500 terabytes) worth of information that the human brain can store. Again, to put that in physical perspective: the entire print collection of the Library of Congress is estimated to hold only 10 terabytes worth of information.

So, here's a pat on the back to your brain. Not only is it so complex it can contain categorized information on a gajillion things, but it's so complex that we still struggle to simply tap an understanding of the fulness of its potential.

Cheers!