Toadfish Thought of the Day

[Opsa]

"We'll be saying a big hello to all intelligent lifeforms everywhere and to everyone else out there, the secret is to bang the rocks together, guys."

Douglas Adams

LOL!  

[Bob in a quantum-state-of-faith]

"If I had a large amount of money I should certainly found a hospital for those whose grip upon the world is so tenuous that they can be severely offended by words and phrases and yet remain all unoffended by the injustice, violence and oppression that howls daily about our ears."

― Stephen Fry, Paperweight

[pieces o nine]

^ very nice choice. I had not read that one from him before.     

[Bob in a quantum-state-of-faith]

In the age of Information
Ignorance is a Choice
-- anon

[Bob in a quantum-state-of-faith]

"Never argue with stupid people, they will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience."
   -- Mark Twain

[Bob in a quantum-state-of-faith]

"You can't be a scientist, if you are uncomfortable with ignorance. Because we [as scientists] live at the boundaries of what is known and unknown in the universe."
   -- Dr Neil deGrasse Tyson

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSJElZwEI8o&feature=related

[Opsa]

But don't we all, really?

[Bob in a quantum-state-of-faith]

But don't we all, really?

Indeed we do-- but you must be paying attention to realize it.  

The majority of people ignore their own blind-spots in awareness and/or knowledge.  I suspect this is because they seldom are challenged by the limits of what they do know; they exist comfortably within the borders of what they know, never pushing to the edge.   Unfortunately, we are all standing right at the edge of what is known, and a blind misstep can take us right over.  It seems quite an easy thing to do, too.... witness all the examples of people who have made really stupid decisions and ended up injured or worse. 

The really horrible thing about that, is even then, these people fail to recognize why their decision was stupid.  It was stupid because it was made in ignorance; ignorance of the consequences, ignorance of what could go wrong, ignorance of the limits of whatever technology they were trusting to be perfect or to be constructed in a perfect way ... things like that. 

Most often, they blame things and/or people who are really not at fault at all! 

As I said:  one must pay attention to the boundaries of what is known and what is unknown, for we are standing on the edge pretty much all the time.   Safety is at best, an illusion.

[Opsa]

I agree. And for that matter, how much of what we know is actually fact and not theory? For all we know it's all unknown, except that which we think we know from our own personal experience. Ya know?

[pieces o nine]

Oh, Opsa, you're not inadvertantly channeling Mr. Known-Knowns, Known-Unknowns, Unknown-Knowns, Unknown-Unkowns, are you.....




Also, after one types "known" 2 or 3 times it cease to look like a word!

[Opsa]

I know... right?!? 

[Bob in a quantum-state-of-faith]

 

[Bluenose]

Actually, this is a serious subject that does not often get discussed or thought about.  I would put it this way.  In fact most of what we "know" is not so.  Our knowledge is for the most part just a lot of rules of thumb, approximations and, as the authors of The Science of Discworld put it, "lies to children".  I would say that all knowledge is at best tentative and if we are being brutally honest with ourselves, we cannot be absolutely certain about anything.  However, you cannot live your life forever contemplating the great mysteries of existence so we use our rules of thumb in our day to day world, but I think it behoves us occasionally to stop and realise that all this we see around us and which we think we understand so well, may not really be quite the way we think it is, or even very close to what we think.  Just my 2^c, of course.

[Griffin NoName]

^^ Bluenose

[Aggie]

Actually, this is a serious subject that does not often get discussed or thought about.  I would put it this way.  In fact most of what we "know" is not so.  Our knowledge is for the most part just a lot of rules of thumb, approximations and, as the authors of The Science of Discworld put it, "lies to children".  I would say that all knowledge is at best tentative and if we are being brutally honest with ourselves, we cannot be absolutely certain about anything.  However, you cannot live your life forever contemplating the great mysteries of existence so we use our rules of thumb in our day to day world, but I think it behoves us occasionally to stop and realise that all this we see around us and which we think we understand so well, may not really be quite the way we think it is, or even very close to what we think.  Just my 2^c, of course.

  Human knowledge, although pretty coarse-grained, is fairly reliable. However, it's primarily word-of-mouth and there's no way for an individual to really know firsthand the bits of knowledge that we can learn and store over a lifetime. Our oral tradition (teaching, discussions with friends, television and radio factoids) keeps a certain cloud of knowledge alive (and often out-of-date); one generally needs to go to written material to access the remainder. Neither of these is firsthand understanding in the way that the scientists responsible for the facts understand and know it. Our group knowledge often depends on the firsthand experience of an individual, verified by a very small group (who are often prone to fashions in thinking*).

It's worth emphasizing that science gets out of date. When theory gets refined, the old "right" version of How Things Happened gets thrown out and the new "right" version is adopted. This is one of the strengths of human knowledge and scientific inquiry, but leads to the rather odd situation in which some bits of knowledge are only temporally correct. Some remain "correct" but get a big fat asterisk added to them, like Newtonian mechanics.

Plus, as Bluenose alludes to, we experience the world as human beings using our sense organs to gather data and our brain to process it into our experience of reality. I am willing to wager that our way of thinking about the world around us is not the only way of thinking that exists in the universe (on this planet, for that matter). There are modes of thinking that our brains simply are not biologically equipped to handle. Computers mesh so well with the human brain precisely because they are designed to think in a different way than we are.  Computer-assisted thinking and drawing has allowed us to visualize knowledge about subjects that we may otherwise not have been able to visualize. Anything approaching omniscience is impossible unless one can access all possible points of view.


_{*Hey, if people who get by on their appearance are often preoccupied in following stylistic fashion, what do you think people who get by on their thinking ability follow?}