Atheism, Theism, Science & Philosophy

[Ryantology]

Yes, but we'd still be communicating these concepts via textual language in a rationalist straitjacket. I think the following is a good example. Take the profound musical genius of Mozart. Only Mozart had the subjective knowledge of his own abilities. If I was a professor in musicology and had 10 PhDs, all on the topic of Mozart, no matter how hard I endeavoured to analyse and rationalise Mozart's genius, it wouldn't come anywhere near close to understanding Mozart's private knowledge, primarily because Mozart's musical genius is beyond most people's comprehension.

You have demonstrated precisely why 'knowledge' is the wrong term for what Mozart had. You don't 'learn' to be a Mozart. You can learn his music, and train your body. You can train yourself to recognize tone and pitch. You could, if you wanted, train yourself far more vigorously than Mozart ever trained himself. Mozart was composing music on multiple instruments at the age of 5. At the age of 30, even with a few years of music training in school, I could certainly not match even that. You cannot learn to be creative. You can only learn the mechanics of creative production. If Mozart had been born with my brain, he would never have become a legendary musician no matter how hard he tried. But maybe he would have been a halfway decent writer.

I write fiction for fun, and a simple fact about fiction writing is that you can teach someone how to write perfect prose, but you cannot teach someone how to be a master storyteller. There are people who try, and there are ways to make yourself better, but the masters of fiction writing, the real gods if you will, have the ability to invent scenarios and flesh them out and make them gripping in a way I only wish I could. What makes Mozart Mozart is natural talent. Talent is not learned. It is not knowledge. It is beyond everyone else's comprehension not because Mozart had unique knowledge, but because he had unique talent. His brain was wired, ahead of time, to be accidentally amazing with music. He no more understood his own talent any more than anyone else. Talent is not knowledge. You cannot learn it, you cannot share it. Maybe there is a way to quantify it, but we sure as hell don't know how, and it might not even matter.