“It is absolutely essential to your intelligence that you remain actively aware of something intrinsically forgotten by adults: no one knows what anything is. The power of this single assertion to transform human intelligence is immeasurable.

We are told that children are flexible learners due to their cognitive and biological developmental states, and this is partially true. But children (and some animals) learn in ways adults cannot for a simple reason: they are intuitively aware that identity is not a concrete property — it is a game.

Unfortunately, nearly all adults have concretized identity and believe they ‘know’ the identity of objects, groups, situations, moments, etc. People we call ‘artists’ are usually at least partially aware of this problem, and ‘art’ is one of the mediating forces that addresses this issue in our culture, even though this is uncommonly understood.

It is actually impossible to abstract identity from experience. Identity does not exist as such; it is a result of the peculiar activity of our minds within our experiences of relational awareness. What we actually draw from experience are (similar to) qualitative and quantitative senses and assessments of accessible relational characteristics. And these are drawn not directly from the subjects and objects of our experience, but from a complex interplay of attention, intention, perspective, purpose, habit, arbitrary variables, and so on.

So, static identity tokens (i.e. ‘that is a tree’) comprise a method of cognitive shorthand — a ‘recording and communications vehicle’ whose function is to ‘point to’ (and render manipulable in language and thought) an array of accessible or culturally emphasized relational aspects. Most of what is actually involved is discarded to produce this abstraction, which then commonly becomes concrete in the mind of the adult.

The problem here becomes acute; the abstraction is actually substituted for the referent in the adult’s experience. This is to say that the whatever is being referred to becomes equivalent to a description, an idea almost as absurd as confusing a sketch and a human person. It is impossible for anything much like intelligence to exist, let alone develop in such a context.

Children, who are intuitively aware of this, learn in ways that are often difficult or impossible for adults to mimic. But adults can reaquire and even extend this original flexibility with nothing more than the understandings I have clearly presented here.

No one knows what anything is.”

— an anonymous informant