Sublime

Accounts by philosophers Ilhan Inan and Lani Watson, for example, characterize curiosity as an individual motivation to find out a specific referent or to acquire certain epistemic goods, respectively.

The professional has an incurable curiosity! They don’t just wonder why the grass is greener on the other side, they climb over the fence to see how the grass is being fertilized and learn the brand they’re using.

Berlyne had put his finger on a paradoxical attribute of curiosity – it is stimulated by understanding and by the absence of understanding. This tells us something important about the motivation to learn.

There remains, however, an important limitation to this work. It functions largely on the information gap theory, according to which curiosity is an intrinsic motivation to fill a knowledge gap. Within an information-seeking framework, curiosity remains acquisitional, a project of acquiring—and amassing—information. But this is not curiosity’s only

Curiosity has long been the driving force of survival and progress. Across evolutionary time, curious animals were more likely to survive because they understood and adapted to their environments.