To Know or Not to Know?

There is a proverb in Turkish: Bilmemek değil öğrenmemek ayıp -- "There is no shame in not knowing. But, there is in not finding out, not learning." Please come back and click on this after reading this page to learn more about learning 🙂. I always thought that this cultural imperative was shifting the blame, or rather the responsibility, from epistemology to science. Well, when I was younger, it was, of course, much less sophisticated than that: I don't know history much. Why did we have two world wars? Is there going to be a third one? What is calculus? What is a computer? How about a transistor? What is a byte, or even a bit? I had not much of an idea. Fine, but, then, I would better find out: I would better learn and not stay ignorant, so I could become a learned person and not suffer shame!

Only now, thinking a bit more on it, I've come to realize that this proverb is a whole lot deeper than that. In fact, it seems to go back all the way to Socrates! What I am asked to find out can't be more and more knowledge of the universe, the state, the city, my family, friends and neighbors, my self, so on and so forth, for all that is infinite, meaning there is no end to it (or is there?). How could I learn it all? Instead, what is being singled out is much more concrete and much more important: find out, in fact, realize, but realize well and not to ever forget, the obvious fact that I don't know! That's what Socrates insisted: I know that I know not! As Plato writes, there could be a slightly different word at the end: "I know that I know nothing". Hence, the first Socratic paradox. There are at least two more paradoxes Socrates uttered, and I am not sure which one I love the most: "No one does wrong willingly." "No one learns anything." Ok, I made up the last one. What Socrates said is that he never taught anybody, anything. He says he is not a teacher.  He is a friend helping you question your own beliefs. Why? To help clarify your thinking, to prove or disprove your ideas. Sadly, some people got offended deeply and got him executed. That is the most famous legal trial by a democratic jury in the history of humanity,  one among the earliest, that resulted in capital punishment. 

You heard the term "burden of proof?" The best justice systems in the world are based on the presumption of innocence and require the participants to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the defendant is guilty of the alleged crime. 

How about "I think therefore I am?" The famous Cartesian aphorism is a different kind of proof by Descartes which helped usher modern philosophy. 

Remember the Challenger disaster? Many NASA engineers and their managers said the shuttle was safe to fly. We were all shocked to find out that they were wrong. They should have known better, right?

Speaking of calculus, how do we know the value of pi (ever heard of the pie proof by Archimedes?) Or, do you really know that there are infinitely many prime numbers? What the hell is an infinity? That can't possibly exist, except in math maybe, can it? Well, it doesn't even exist in math! We simply imagine it -- to a good mathematician, infinity is a process, not a thing. It means arbitrarily big without an end: there is always a greater number than the greatest you can imagine. Just add one to it. That's infinity.

Finally, E = mcc, the famous equation by Einstein. How do we know that it is true? In fact, it is not! It is more accurately EE = pcpc + mccmcc. Apologies for duplicating E for energy, m for mass, c for the speed of light and p for momentum. My google site editor can't superscript 2 for the square sign. But, you get it, don't you? BTW, we know that c is a constant of nature [well, that's a whole other story!] so we can just give it the value of 1 light year distance per year and simplify what we need to remember: EE = pp + mm. Or, if we remember the Pythagorean theorem about right triangles, or rectangles, then we only need to remember that if p and m are two edges of the rectangle, then E is the diagonal. I love it when our sense of geometry helps us make sense of math and physics, if not all else!

OK. That's enough for now to convince you hopefully that there is a gap, sometimes a very big one, between what we think we know, or simply suppose or believe, and what we indeed know. We talked about some examples from math, logic, philosophy, engineering, physics and law. But, there are also some others like medicine, economy, history, social sciences, political science, psychology (what is the ego, superego and the id? Do we really know? Do they really exist?), neuroscience, ethics, so on, let alone religion, where we seem to know (or at least believe) many things.

What do these words mean:  to think, to believe and to know? We all think we know, right? But, is that true? It is a lot clearer when we use the words: "to say" or "to write." Not much controversy there. We also talk about "free speech" which entails the freedom to write whatever we want. But, "free thought?" What does that mean? Or "free belief?" You are of course free to believe whatever it is you do believe, but until you say or do or write, who would know? Even further, we may hold inconsistent, contradictory or counterfactual beliefs, assumptions and presuppositions in our minds, and even worse, they could be below the threshold of our awareness! Jung famously denoted as "collective unconscious" such beliefs or ideas as to be shared across the whole humanity. 

To regroup, and to conclude for now: why is there a gap between beliefs, ideas and opinions on the one hand and true knowledge on the other? After all some of us think and believe that knowledge is power. Do you want the true power or false power? And what in the world is power? Read more on that here, too. How do we think about all that? What to do about it? Would you like to find out? I trust you do. And now you might also ask, what does it mean to trust? What or whom would it be best to trust? And those are very good questions, too. I trust you want to live the good life as Socrates urged us to do in last days of his life. So, stop reading a bit and just do. And then, stop doing things a bit and just be.