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

On Learning is a lyric-philosophical essay that begins in gratitude — a dedication to four teachers — and uses that dedication as its first argument: that learning is drawn out of a person, not poured in. From there the piece moves through a pandemic-era act of self-teaching (the Rubik's Cube, solved layer by layer) into the claim that the mind can build any structure worth holding together the same way: from the ground up, one layer earning the next. The essay holds two classical accounts of learning in deliberate tension — Plato's anamnesis, in which we recollect what the soul already knew, and Locke's tabula rasa, in which experience writes on a blank slate — and refuses to collapse them, proposing instead that we "arrive empty and arrive remembering." Schrödinger's superposition supplies the governing image (the author's recurring "quantum lens"): a self, like a state, held in many possibilities until observation forces a choice, and a person assembled from superposed layers. The closing turn reframes learning as an ethic of attention — humility over ego, listening over planning, the willingness to be wrong — situated within the author's "jays" framework of a life that leaves legible traces through time.