To know or not to know?

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meltzerboy

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Do we humans know more than we do not know, or do we not know more than we know? This question apparently depends on several things: knowledge in what domain and about what subject; how we define “knowing”; whether we have an understanding of what we know and what we do not know, or some kind of metacognition about our own thought processes as well as the outcomes of our thoughts, etc.

Discuss this from whichever perspective(s) you would like. You may of course relate the question to religion and G-d.
 
This is a HUGE topic Meltzerboy! I’m afraid I won’t be able to get my head around it unless we break it down into components in some way. How can we do that?
 
Go to a university library and look at the collection of scientific journals. You’ll see that the world’s best chemist can’t know more than a fraction of the chemistry findings that have been published. He couldn’t live long enough to read it all.
The same with every other subject.

The only thing we need to worry about is knowing that which we need to know.
 
meltzerboy said:
Do we humans know more than we do not know, or do we not know more than we know? This question apparently depends on several things: knowledge in what domain and about what subject; how we define “knowing”; whether we have an understanding of what we know and what we do not know, or some kind of metacognition about our own thought processes as well as the outcomes of our thoughts, etc.

Discuss this from whichever perspective(s) you would like. You may of course relate the question to religion and G-d.
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Okay, I’m settled down now. I got excited when I saw the topic. Here is my opening opinion:

I think that as humans we create context around experience that match our conditioning over a lifetime. Therefore, we know things through the lens of the frameworks we have created, yet what do we really know about things as they are? On the other hand. creation is enabled by our senses and our experience of it, meaning that without sentient beings like us, what actually happens is questionable. For instance, it has been suggested that plants make flowers with bright colors simply to attract insects and animals with whom the plants have a symbiosis (we spread seeds and pollen for them). Without sentient creatures to attract, plants would not make flowers. How much of the world around us, I wonder, is like that?

What is the reality of our existence? This Is what makes it hard to know what we know.
 
empther said:
Go to a university library and look at the collection of scientific journals. You’ll see that the world’s best chemist can’t know more than a fraction of the chemistry findings that have been published. He couldn’t live long enough to read it all.
The same with every other subject.

The only thing we need to worry about is knowing that which we need to know.
Click to expand...
I agree about our limited knowledge in all subjects. That much I believe I know. So what is it we need to know?
 
Gary_Sheldrake said:
Okay, I’m settled down now. I got excited when I saw the topic. Here is my opening opinion:

I think that as humans we create context around experience that match our conditioning over a lifetime. Therefore, we know things through the lens of the frameworks we have created, yet what do we really know about things as they are? On the other hand. creation is enabled by our senses and our experience of it, meaning that without sentient beings like us, what actually happens is questionable. For instance, it has been suggested that plants make flowers with bright colors simply to attract insects and animals with whom the plants have a symbiosis (we spread seeds and pollen for them). Without sentient creatures to attract, plants would not make flowers. How much of the world around us, I wonder, is like that?

What is the reality of our existence? This Is what makes it hard to know what we know.
Click to expand...
Therefore you don’t know that a tree falling in the forest makes a sound without experiencing it personally? Or even that the tree fell, or existed? (Despite those Geico commercials…) But you do know YOU exist because you are sentient.
 
We clearly don’t know more than we know.

I know that I know nothing
Socrates
 
If you are married, then you have come to realize just how much you do not actually know. 😛

All of the doctors in the world since ancient times, combined with all of the laboratories on earth which are populated with all of the scientists and researchers on earth have had no effect on the comon cold virus.

Knowledge, as a concept, is infinite, and so finite man can never come to know or understand all of it. Consider the billions that are spent fighting cancer. I remarked to my hematologist that it seems like we know about 1/1000th of 1% of what there is to know about cancer. He replied, “If that”
 
If you really want to know how limited your knowledge is, just go to any large public or university library and look up their language dictionaries. I’ll never forget, years ago, browsing in the stacks of the U.C.L.A library and found a Albanian-Tibetan Dictionary and a Swedish-Ukrainian Dictionary!
 
meltzerboy said:
Do we humans know more than we do not know, or do we not know more than we know? This question apparently depends on several things: knowledge in what domain and about what subject; how we define “knowing”; whether we have an understanding of what we know and what we do not know, or some kind of metacognition about our own thought processes as well as the outcomes of our thoughts, etc.

Discuss this from whichever perspective(s) you would like. You may of course relate the question to religion and G-d.
Click to expand...
Nothing can be known, since we have no grounds for believing either our perception or reason. The grounds for accepting perceptions are either perception (resulting in circularity), or reason. But then reason must be justified. And the grounds for accepting reason are either perception (which, as shown, cannot be justified), or reason itself (and then circularity again emerges).

Furthermore, the universe is constant changing. Therefore, whatever we ‘know’ as true one moment, could well be false the next.

Knowledge, wisdom and existence are proper to God Alone. The sage knows nothing except that he doesn’t know, and even this he is unsure about.
 
Qoeleth said:
Nothing can be known, since we have no grounds for believing either our perception or reason. The grounds for accepting perceptions are either perception (resulting in circularity), or reason. But then reason must be justified. And the grounds for accepting reason are either perception (which, as shown, cannot be justified), or reason itself (and then circularity again emerges).
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Well, unless the basic beliefs of Foundationalism provide a basis, or the Coherence theory of Empirical Knowledge. In any case, the above statement is self-refuting because if nothing can be known, then the proposition “nothing can be known” also cannot be known.
Furthermore, the universe is constant changing. Therefore, whatever we ‘know’ as true one moment, could well be false the next.
Click to expand...
One of the problems of induction, but it still doesn’t prevent knowledge of the past.
Knowledge, wisdom and existence are proper to God Alone. The sage knows nothing except that he doesn’t know, and even this he is unsure about.
Click to expand...
Pope JPII doesn’t agree with you in FIDES ET RATIO.
 
Qoeleth said:
Nothing can be known, since we have no grounds for believing either our perception or reason. The grounds for accepting perceptions are either perception (resulting in circularity), or reason. But then reason must be justified. And the grounds for accepting reason are either perception (which, as shown, cannot be justified), or reason itself (and then circularity again emerges).

Furthermore, the universe is constant changing. Therefore, whatever we ‘know’ as true one moment, could well be false the next.

Knowledge, wisdom and existence are proper to God Alone. The sage knows nothing except that he doesn’t know, and even this he is unsure about.
Click to expand...
How then, according to your own argument, could we know that the universe is constantly changing? Or are you a proponent of the philosophy of Heraclitus?
 
tdgesq said:
Well, unless the basic beliefs of Foundationalism provide a basis, or the Coherence theory of Empirical Knowledge. In any case, the above statement is self-refuting because if nothing can be known, then the proposition “nothing can be known” also cannot be known.

One of the problems of induction, but it still doesn’t prevent knowledge of the past.

Pope JPII doesn’t agree with you in FIDES ET RATIO.
Click to expand...
Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. The statement “Nothing can be known” is, as you point out, self-refuting.

I meant- “POSSIBLY, nothing (including this very statement) can be known.”

And if that statement is only POSSIBLY true, it means than anything we think we know, may POSSIBLY be untrue, and therefore we can have no certainty in our knowledge. And if we can have no certainty about anything, doesn’t that come to some more or less similar to “Knowing nothing”?
 
meltzerboy said:
How then, according to your own argument, could we know that the universe is constantly changing? Or are you a proponent of the philosophy of Heraclitus?
Click to expand...
Well, even the statement “The universe is changing” may be true sometimes, but not true at other times. Heraclitus believed than change was the only changeless thing. But perhaps even this changes.

Either way, it is concievable than anything we ‘think’ we know may be proved, or become, false at some later stage, or may, in fact, already be false. So, at best we ‘think we know’ certain things, but we do not ‘know we know’.

And even if we ‘know that we know’ something, we really only ‘think that we know that we know.’
 
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