The essential characteristics of how knowledge is to humans as water is to fish can be summarized as follows. Firstly, the environment must be considered. This is important because while humans realize they are surrounded by new knowledge, many fail to express how to access that knowledge. Additionally, a person’s or a fish’s ability to choose must be considered. This is important because as fish do not have a choice to live in water, many people do not have a choice about what they think about. Furthermore, selective perception must be considered. This is important because humans choose which knowledge to pursue and focus on, leaving other information about the world untouched, much like fish and the surface of the water. This paper will take each of these elements in turn and discuss why each is essential to our understanding of the analogy of humans and fish and how it relates to knowledge and water.
The awareness of one’s environment in relation to how it supports the being is related to one’s experiences outside the environment. Wallace states in his “This is Water” speech, “The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important …show more content…
The similarities are more transparent than they may originally seem as both are needed for the organism to survive. In an increasingly interconnected age, humans are more readily surrounded by information, have more choices about what to learn about and find it easier to learn about more subjects. As fish need water to sustain their environment and have no choice but to stay in the water or die. The fish’s ability to explore new environments is incredibly limited in comparison to a human’s ability to obtain more knowledge. In all, the knowledge of humans is comparable to a fish’s environment of
The awareness of one’s environment in relation to how it supports the being is related to one’s experiences outside the environment. Wallace states in his “This is Water” speech, “The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important …show more content…
The similarities are more transparent than they may originally seem as both are needed for the organism to survive. In an increasingly interconnected age, humans are more readily surrounded by information, have more choices about what to learn about and find it easier to learn about more subjects. As fish need water to sustain their environment and have no choice but to stay in the water or die. The fish’s ability to explore new environments is incredibly limited in comparison to a human’s ability to obtain more knowledge. In all, the knowledge of humans is comparable to a fish’s environment of