Friday, June 17, 2005
If you want to do something about bozosity in the world, you have to do something about your own bozosity first. That means coming to grips with your own ignorance. Now there is a fundamental program about ignorance. It's about something you don't know about. One line of attack is to try not to be ignorant about something, that is, to know all about it. This is, of course, not possible. Your ignorance on any subject is and will remain infinitely greater than your knowledge, and besides that, some of what you know with great confidence will turn out to be wrong.
Anyway, studying isn't coming to grips with ignorance, it's trying to deny that the problem is a problem. So here is what we really want to do. We want to be aware of being ignorant of something, without knowing what that is. Some people apparently find this exercise too painful to even think about in the cases that are most important. But let us start with easy versions, and work our way up to the full problem by stages, and hope thereby not to scare ourselves silly.
It is traditional, at least since the myth of Prometheus bringing fire from the Gods to humans, or any Sun-god of wisdom like Apollo, to regard light as a metaphor of understanding. Imagine, then, standing just inside the entrance to a cavern. Where you stand there is still some light, but over there in the back it's pitch black. So you know that you don't know what is in there, and you can see where your knowledge ends and your ignorance begins. In the case of a cave, you can, of course, carry a light in with you. There is a whole technique worked out by spelunkers (cavers) for exploring unknown caves with a minimum risk of death or serious injury, and a wide choice of equipment to take. Spelunkers sum up the essence of the techniques by saying, "There are old cavers and there are bold cavers, but there are no old, bold cavers."
You can get a similar effect by picking up a book on any subject you know nothing about. A history or geography book is, to begin with, a shallow cave where you don't know the facts yet, but you know you are capable of understanding them. There are much darker recesses in the caves of history and geography, once you look at the original source documents, which may conflict, or be based on myths and travellers' tales. A book in a foreign language is quite a bit darker, but if you learn the language, you open up a wonderland of brilliant passages. For most people an advanced math or physics book is the darkest of all. You don't understand what you are looking at, and you may have no idea how to begin. And as Niels Bohr said, "If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't."
A useful intermediate case is a novel or short story, particularly in genre fiction (mystery, adventure, science fiction, fantasy, even romance) where you can try to work out in advance what is really going on or how the protagonists will cope. Or not. You don't have to try to solve the puzzle, in fact. You can just read on and see how it comes out.
Puzzles are also useful. You know there is a solution, and that you can find out what it is just by looking, but you can confront your ignorance for an extended period. Maybe you will get the answer, and maybe not, but you have a chance to see how your mind works in a controlled state of ignorance. Are you calm, or pleasurably excited, or in a tizzy? Does your brain race uselessly, or does it start making connections, or are you simply baffled?
A really hard case is facing another human being, and realizing that you don't know how that person thinks. Many of the problems that the world faces come down to an inability to believe that people really think as they do. The supposition arises that these other people must be deluded or lying. Or insane, or evil, or something that means we don't have to look into their beliefs any further.
However, there is more to the problem than that. It may be that they don't think the thoughts you find impossible to imagine. You may have been misinformed, or you may have been informed correctly but you misunderstood.
The hardest case of all is to look into your own mind. It is natural for me to assume that I have good reasons for my beliefs. I am by definition unaware of any persuasive evidence against them. Does that mean that there is no such evidence, or that it exists but I haven't heard about it (perhaps it hasn't even been discovered yet), or that I have heard it but don't believe it, or don't understand how it applies to me? But it is unquestionable, based on the history of physics, that something I firmly believe about the material world is wrong, and, based on other history, that some of what I believe about politics and religion is wrong. You too, and all your friends and relations.
You cannot directly dig beneath the surface of your own mind. There are a number of indirect methods, of which the most intense include psychoanalysis and Zen meditation, in both cases over a period of years.
It is reported that coming to grips with your own ignorance can make you much more tolerant of other people, although this by no means follows automatically. Socrates, for one, get himself killed by insisting on helping other people with their ignorance rather than leaving them be unless they asked for assistance. Which is reported to be the reason why so many Zen meditation centers are on distant mountains, where only the fairly dedicated can be expected to show up.
Anyway, studying isn't coming to grips with ignorance, it's trying to deny that the problem is a problem. So here is what we really want to do. We want to be aware of being ignorant of something, without knowing what that is. Some people apparently find this exercise too painful to even think about in the cases that are most important. But let us start with easy versions, and work our way up to the full problem by stages, and hope thereby not to scare ourselves silly.
It is traditional, at least since the myth of Prometheus bringing fire from the Gods to humans, or any Sun-god of wisdom like Apollo, to regard light as a metaphor of understanding. Imagine, then, standing just inside the entrance to a cavern. Where you stand there is still some light, but over there in the back it's pitch black. So you know that you don't know what is in there, and you can see where your knowledge ends and your ignorance begins. In the case of a cave, you can, of course, carry a light in with you. There is a whole technique worked out by spelunkers (cavers) for exploring unknown caves with a minimum risk of death or serious injury, and a wide choice of equipment to take. Spelunkers sum up the essence of the techniques by saying, "There are old cavers and there are bold cavers, but there are no old, bold cavers."
You can get a similar effect by picking up a book on any subject you know nothing about. A history or geography book is, to begin with, a shallow cave where you don't know the facts yet, but you know you are capable of understanding them. There are much darker recesses in the caves of history and geography, once you look at the original source documents, which may conflict, or be based on myths and travellers' tales. A book in a foreign language is quite a bit darker, but if you learn the language, you open up a wonderland of brilliant passages. For most people an advanced math or physics book is the darkest of all. You don't understand what you are looking at, and you may have no idea how to begin. And as Niels Bohr said, "If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't."
A useful intermediate case is a novel or short story, particularly in genre fiction (mystery, adventure, science fiction, fantasy, even romance) where you can try to work out in advance what is really going on or how the protagonists will cope. Or not. You don't have to try to solve the puzzle, in fact. You can just read on and see how it comes out.
Puzzles are also useful. You know there is a solution, and that you can find out what it is just by looking, but you can confront your ignorance for an extended period. Maybe you will get the answer, and maybe not, but you have a chance to see how your mind works in a controlled state of ignorance. Are you calm, or pleasurably excited, or in a tizzy? Does your brain race uselessly, or does it start making connections, or are you simply baffled?
A really hard case is facing another human being, and realizing that you don't know how that person thinks. Many of the problems that the world faces come down to an inability to believe that people really think as they do. The supposition arises that these other people must be deluded or lying. Or insane, or evil, or something that means we don't have to look into their beliefs any further.
However, there is more to the problem than that. It may be that they don't think the thoughts you find impossible to imagine. You may have been misinformed, or you may have been informed correctly but you misunderstood.
The hardest case of all is to look into your own mind. It is natural for me to assume that I have good reasons for my beliefs. I am by definition unaware of any persuasive evidence against them. Does that mean that there is no such evidence, or that it exists but I haven't heard about it (perhaps it hasn't even been discovered yet), or that I have heard it but don't believe it, or don't understand how it applies to me? But it is unquestionable, based on the history of physics, that something I firmly believe about the material world is wrong, and, based on other history, that some of what I believe about politics and religion is wrong. You too, and all your friends and relations.
You cannot directly dig beneath the surface of your own mind. There are a number of indirect methods, of which the most intense include psychoanalysis and Zen meditation, in both cases over a period of years.
It is reported that coming to grips with your own ignorance can make you much more tolerant of other people, although this by no means follows automatically. Socrates, for one, get himself killed by insisting on helping other people with their ignorance rather than leaving them be unless they asked for assistance. Which is reported to be the reason why so many Zen meditation centers are on distant mountains, where only the fairly dedicated can be expected to show up.
