Education is claimed to faciliate an individual's growth. But what exactly do we mean we say the growth of a person, as opposed the growth of a tree, of the national economy, or the bacterial population? Humans are intelligent beings. (At least that's what how we describe ourselves. ) Here, we define intelligence as the capacity of an agent to achieve a **goal** by deliberately **collecting and processing information**, transforming that information into structured **knowledge**, and using that knowledge to select and execute effective **actions**. Through the lens of intelligence, I aim to illustrate the fundamental conditions and defining characterists of a human life, what do we mean by growing, and pave the road for the role of education, which we will explore in the next chapter. ## Goal Existentialism claims that we are born into a meaningless world inherently void of purpose. And it's our individual business to figure out what are we gonna do with this 80 or more years of life, apart from survival and self-perpetuation. That's exactly the dillema we face and the fundamental conditions that underly our existence. The reason that we may not be thinking about that question every day is merely because the world we live in is full of things call human constructs, both physically and mentally, set up by those who have come to this world before us, and quite unfairly, those who have a say in how should we live our lives. We were told that children go to school. We see that most people who graduate from school go to work. We observed that money and fame are things to chase for. Such examples are never-ending, because we are living in them every day. They provide comfort and safety, as they to some extent provide an answer to all the existential answers we have. Or in other words, they prevent us from thinking about the existential questions by giving us a ready-made narrative. Here's the script of life, just go play it, they say. People love imposing their own vision and goals upon others. However, it should be obvious that what other people is going for has absolutely nothing to do with what you want to do with your life, unless you truly recognize and believe in that goal. And the tricky thing is exactly that sometimes it's hard to tell if you are going for something you really want to go for, or simply because other people are going for it. The line is really blurry here. Nevertheless, the point we want to make is -- The search for a goal or purpose is the biggest challenge and ultimate question of any individual life. What decides what's our goal? Hence the next point. ## Information Collection & Processing We live in a world of information. Everything we perceive, through our two eyes, ears, and other sensory inputs are ultiamtely digital impulses inside our brain. We can never have direct contact with the reality, and we can only interact with it through information. Therefore it becomes obvious that how big of n role the information plays in our daily life. What we see, who we talk to, and our environment fundamentally determine what we think, and as explained later, what we do. Just as we explained in the previous part, the information we receive from our environment (what other people are going for, what do they say, how do they explain certain things) play an important role in shaping our goal and defining what is valuable. The information also tells us what do we need to do to get there. Thus the two-way relationship: Goal-seeking creatures need to collect and process information to achieve their goal, and the information we collect in turn shapes our goal. With such a big amount of data coming in every second, of course we don't just collect them. We process them and compress them into memories, and formulate them into knowledge. That's also where cognitive biases come into place -- inevitable sacrafices while trying to find patterns and simplify this large amount of information. Thus we could even argue that cognitive biases are not bugs but merely side effects of the evolution effort to effective deal with information and come to conclusion, by reducing entropy and saving energy. Collecting and processing information is so important fundamentally because they help us compressing the reality into a model that makes predictions and better inform our decision-making. Thus the next part. ## Actions Now, with a goal in mind and relevant information and knowledge about how to get their, the natural next step is taking actions to get there. It would be much too simple if all of our actions simply achieve the goals we want. Remember that we say that all knowledge about the world is a model -- and all models are bound to be flawed because they are compressions of reality by ignoring certain aspects of it. For example, your model might be: in order to get a good job I need to study harder. But then after you studied hard, you may end up realizing you still cannot get a good job -- getting a good job requires something else. As a result, you search for that "something else", and realized it's actually relevant skills you need. So you turned to learning those skills. Here, we see that the result of an action (information) ends up feeding back into and influence our actions -- a feedback loop. Actions produce results, and results influence actions. Another possibility is that you end up realizing that getting a job is not really what you want to go for. You realize that getting a good job does not garantee you happiness, or you don't even know what a good job is. Again, here, the newly-available information to you prompts you edit, polish, or even ditch your previous goal. Hence the interplay between information and goal, as mentioned above. At the end of the day, actions is the only thing that is capable of producing results. And that's why we value it so much. We are constantly in a race to do more and to earn more. In fact, our whole value system is based upon the ability of one to "do things". However, at the same time, most people underlook the importance the role of the information and knowledge we have, and more importantly, the goal we are cahsing for. By solely focusing on the action aspect and ignoring to take care of our knowledge and our goals, most people end up falling into perplexity and disorientation. This is a whole new topic, but for the sake of this essay, it's enough to realize that how goals, along with information and actions come together to determine the fundamental mechanism of a intelligence human being. This is the underlying source code that we all live on. ## What is growth, then? Unlike the growth of the national economy, which is the simple increase of a one-dimensional value, as illustrated above, the growth of a human being is an at least three-dimensional process -- - the search for and refinement of our goals, - the build-up and perfection of our knowledge, and - the increase in the effectiveness of our actions. All three aspects depend on one another and are fundamentally inter-linked. It is never to be stressed enough that the growth of a human being is multi-dimensional. That's also why it is quite hard to measure it, and absolutely rediculous to try to put a number on it. Of course, only if education is designed to faciliate the students' growth. --- Human Growth Through the Lens of Intelligence Humans are claimed to be intelligent beings. Here, we define intelligence as the capacity of an agent to achieve a **goal** by deliberately **collecting and processing information**, transforming that information into structured **knowledge**, and using that knowledge to select and execute effective **actions**. ## Goal