Erik Naggum's Ideas and Principles

Knowledge and Information

People search for the meaning of life, but this is the easy question: we are born into a world that presents us with many millenia of collected knowledge and information, and all our predecessors ask of us is that we not waste our brief life ignoring the past only to rediscover or reinvent its lessons badly. The purpose of human existence is to learn and to understand as much as we can of what came before us, so we can further the sum total of human knowledge in our life. I believe the computer is the most significant tool invented, as it is unique in mechanizing part of the process of learning and understanding, or at least giving us that potential. All other tools have been extensions of muscles and limbs, whereas the computer is an extension of the brain, and it is that which we make of it.

Fundamentally, the knowledge and information collected by humanity is much more important than human life. When people kill each other in mass destruction, there will at least be hope for a future if the knowledge and information is not destroyed with it.