I loved learning as a child. I was the kind of kid who, at 6:30 am on a Saturday morning, would sneak down into the living room, pull the atlas off the shelf, and spend my morning peering over lakes, rivers, and mountains in far-off lands. I was the kind of kid who loved National Geographic and Scientific American, and who'd pull the poster insets out of them and wallpaper my room with charts of the solar system, how the pyramids were built, and maps of the ocean floor. I loved books with colorful cross-sections of castles; I loved day trips to the museum of Natural History; I knew the names of all the dinosaurs whose models I could get my hands on. As my father would recall, I wasn't so much the kid who'd ask "why? why? why?", rather the one who'd ask "how? how? how?".
The thing about trivia is that it's trivial. Meaningless, insignificant. How do people who know so much trivia keep it all in their heads? The answer is that what makse knowledge memorable is its connections with other knowledge. One piece of trivia may be insignificant, but like a game of Katamari Damacy ⬈, as these little bits and pieces stick together, they stop being so trivial, and start being meaningful. Once you've got enough of it, you realize that it all fits together into a unified whole, and the more of it you pick up, the easier it is to pick up still more.
After a long enough time of growing my personal katamari ball of scientific knowledge, I realized that the whole of the material universe, really of everything there is, all fits together like a giant jigsaw puzzle. Each little tidbit of scientific knowledge I came across was like a piece to this puzzle, and slowly but surely I was putting together, if not the puzzle itself, a reasonably sensible approximation of the puzzle.
It lent itself to a genuinely beautiful understanding of the world: every little piece of the universe just fits together in a perfectly consistent way. Learning in this perspective becomes a problem of search and assembly, and like a good game, a fun problem to tackle and solve.
Sure, I didn't have all the pieces. That was maybe one of the most wonderful things about this giant universal puzzle: no matter how much I thought I knew about the world, there was always more to know. Always new interesting discoveries; always serendipetous connections; always a new horizon to explore [1].
[1]One of the most useful concepts that I came across in my exploration was that of the fractal ⬈, where simple rules, when applied to the self recursively, resulted in startling and delightful structures of infinite complexity. I spent so much of my freshman year in high school drawing successively larger iterations of the Dragon Curve ⬈ and other patterns that it affected my grade. I didn't particularly care; I was happy :)
I found fractals to be extremely useful when struggling with the larger questions of how such simple physical rules could result in the astonishing complexities of life. How, after all, could simple sequences of neucleotides assemble themselves into beings as complicated and utterly delightful as humans?
Once I learned to see the fractals in nature, to observe how branches of trees resemble trees, how rocks resemble mountains, to see the recurring patterns at different scales in the clouds of the sky and the waves of the sea, it became easier to see the magnificence in the whole of the universe. It filled me with a sense of enlightenment to see the universe bootstrap itself from a cosmos permeated with light to taking a selfie on top of the Empire State Building.
Will the wonders of the universe ever cease?
From time to time it could be daunting, knowing that no matter how hard you study you'll still know so little. From time to time again it could be exasperating, when the pieces you're trying to fit together just don't seem to line up nicely. But I learned to understand that with patience, all these conundrums would solve themselves. I didn't necessarily know the answer to everything, but I understood that even when I didn't know the answer, the answer still existed, and that with time, and patience, and learning, the careful methodologies of science would find the answer.
I was, in short, a materialist →. Materialism is the belief that reality is composed of fundamental particles and forces, and nothing else. It's that last bit that I've italicized that's the important bit. Materialism isn't defined by what it does include, but by what it doesn't.
You see, in all that learning, in all that understanding, in all that discovery that I'd gone through from childhood and on, I never needed to make puzzle pieces out of anything that wasn't composed, at its foundation, of matter. Sure other people may rely on Gods and spirits, mystical energies and rituals, but I found that I got along just well without them. When I didn't have the answer, I didn't fill the gap with woo, but rather learned to be comfortable with the gap itself. The puzzle was never complete, so why should I feel the need to patch its holes if all I had to do was wait a long enough time, and see that the holes would eventually patch themselves?
Materialism of this sort is an exceedingly common understanding of the world. I may have taken it to further extremes than most, but I was by no means alone in understanding that reality is physical in its basis. Even the larger outstanding problems (where's the "consciousness" particle?) began to crumble under the right inspection (self-reflective emergent phenomena).
What makes it such a compelling understanding of the world is the sheer consistency of it. The way all the puzzle pieces fit together is more than coincidental, it's real. For this reason, materialism is especially appealing to smart, rational types (like you, probably); for people who like looking at the world as order out of chaos, it's about as ordered as you can get.
There's just one problem with materialism: it's incomplete. The pieces may all fit together perfectly, but there are gaps → which just refuse to be filled.