The virtues of relentless curiosity
Curiosity is not an act. It is a character trait. And it can be cultivated, often with steps more straightforward than another markdown third-brain or a convoluted bookmarking setup tied up with a host of water-chugging LLMs. Grab your water bottle instead and read on - let me share some of my own observations on what works.
I am no savant, but I know a thing or two about curiosity. When I was 11, I spent most of my summer holidays digging into encyclopedias and running off into the yard to test out whatever I learnt. An image of a Mandarin fish popped out of the marine biology chapter, and off I went to find a live specimen in the nearest fish market. The bewildered faces of our local fishermen annoyed and then amused me - they had no clue if this fish was even real. But I wouldn't budge. I had to figure out how this fish got its coloration.
And so it began, first with fish scales and their geometries. I discovered that fish scales are extensions of the integumentary system of fishes, growing out of the mesoderm layer. This was a new term, one I'd heard before but never quite understood. So I meandered into the system, its components, its variations across species and its genetic connections. Turns out my skin, hair and nails are related to a fish's scales in the way genes get decoded to form proteins. Keratin was a familiar name, and so I decided to know more about these proteins.
I then went down a wonderful diversion that led me to the cellular machinery, the genetic "algorithm" and the central dogma, and suddenly the grand tapestry of life started to make sense. Nature was an optimizer, and a brilliant one at that. All these atoms collected into troughs in the energy landscape, losing some of their energies in favor of a stable configuration, a molecule. And then molecules did something similar, coagulating in space to form complex compounds. These compounds twisted and turned to form shapes, each shape determining the final behavior. Deep in time these compounds danced around in a certain rhythm, forming an algorithm in space and time that led to a stable end result. Thus, life emerged.
And then simple rules repeated over and over generated more intricate rules, leading to more stable configurations in the infinite energetic landscape of possibilities. An archaic cell emerged, lived and died in a tiny slice on a barely hospitable planet. Then another, and another, and the cycle kept repeating itself with tiny variations each time, seeking out an island of stability in the fray. A cell first, then a group of them, and then finally a fledgling organism. A triumph of the algorithm.
Now I was looking for a fish, and my feet had already drifted too far into the weeds to turn around. I was now looking for the meaning of life. The big questions. Did the patterns on the Mandarin fish scales have anything to do here? Did I have a faint anchor leading me from these deep waters into a more contextual trail?
A resounding yes. Why, these patterns were not random! They were nanoscale carvings on the scales of this "percomorph" - ray finned fish - that had emerged and thrived in the Cenozoic era, right after the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary 66 million years ago. Sixty six million years of survival inside seascapes of fear and predation, under the surface of a world disappearing into waves of migration, catastrophe and civilizational upheavals, only to be stuck inside glass boxes with plastic seaweed and fake stones in a filipino market waiting to be sold off to a Marwadi aquarium shop in Etawah. The irony is astounding.
But surely these nanoscale carvings had some deep reasoning behind them? So I waded deeper into the pelagic zone, again, looking for clues in the convective cycles and predator-prey relationships that define marine life. I discovered each color, each pattern was a result of millennia of optimization to find configurations that guaranteed an incrementally stable survival strategy. A second more of evasion for the Mandarin fish got encoded into its genetic material as a marker of success, to be carried forward into the generations ahead. An Austrian monk would later formulate the systematic study of genetics in his garden, quite oblivious of these remarkable games of optimization at play. Or perhaps in the grand landscape of ideas known and those yet to be known, an inkling of this fact waited for capable minds. An English explorer perhaps? Or his contemporary in the jungles of Sumatra? The faint thread that connected genetic movements with reality would be known, this was a certainty. Only when, was a question left as an exercise for us.
In the 1940s, a tortured scientist battling great emotional turmoil and a mental battle of cat-and-mouse would toy around with a hypothesis that would come to shape an entire field of study in his wake. The hypothesis was - wings of Butterflies developed patterns according to an algorithm. Suddenly, the morphology of pufferfishes, coral reefs, eels and - you guessed it - Mandarin fishes, was not some bump in probability anymore.
Life indeed had a structure. And the scientist who caught this ephemeral thread? Well, his work would be pivotal in building intelligent machines, from LLMs that can prove theorems to robots that can soothe a crying baby. His name was Alan Turing, and he would not live to see any of these revolutions.
That is the tragedy of curiosity - you discover truths for the "pleasure of finding things out", as Feynman would famously quip. That act would then automatically insulate you from any attachment to fame or material wins. And the fruits of your odyssey would continue sprouting trees for posterity. Your ideas would be the fire upon the deep, guiding intelligence towards more remarkable islands of stability. The universe is indeed structured with intricate patterns. This structure is inherent to reality, or the slice of it we get to experience in our tiny lifetimes.
And it's waiting all around us, for the mind(s) that could travel deep enough to unravel it. Regardless of the limitations of time and space. Regardless of the perils. Relentless curiosity is the only key that could lead us there. And at 11 years of age I was nowhere close to grasping any of this.
Now however, the virtue of this character trait is clear as daylight. Or perhaps, clear as the pattern on a Percomorph scale.