On Learning - The Super Positioned Layers That Make Us a Person

On Learning is a lyric-philosophical essay that opens with a long dedication to four teachers and turns on a small pandemic-era project: teaching oneself the Rubik's Cube, layer by layer, "the way anything worth holding together gets built." From the cube it moves outward — through Schrödinger's cat and the quantum lens, the labor of self-teaching, and a digression on conception and women's rights — to the essay's governing question: when, and how, does a mind learn? It sets Plato's anamnesis (learning as recollection) against Locke's tabula rasa (the mind written by experience) and refuses to choose: "we arrive empty and arrive remembering." By way of Rilke, Ecclesiastes, and Boethius, it lands on a practical humility — Socrates' knowing-nothing joined to Aristotle's becoming-by-doing — and a closing instruction to take the "ego headphones" off, listen to the person beside you, and learn.