In Which I Confess My Ignorance

One of the main goals of learning - or at least one of its main side-effects - is to reveal progressively more and more how ignorant one is. If learning is done properly - and it takes some real-world experience to learn how to learn - one's preconceptions are always being tested and challenged, and the notion of what one really knows and what one does not really know is at the least being refined and sometimes actually revolutionized in some way. Real progress depends on this.

The more I know, the more I know about how ignorant I am, or, the more I know how much there is to know that I do not yet know.

I don't know if there is an afterlife. I don't know if there is an ultimate particle. I don't know if there are aliens who visit the earth. I don't know if Oswald was a lone assassin. I don't know if the free market is the best approach for the greatest good for the greatest number. I don't know if democracy is necessarily the best political system we can come up with. I don't know if there even is global warming, let alone if human activity is responsible for it, or if greater carbon dioxide emissions are the main human cause, etc. I don't know if the nuclear family is the best situation for bringing up children. I don't know if the present members of the human race have all descended from a single prehistoric mother. I don't know if explaining differences between the sexes by recourse to the notion of our prehistoric hunter-gatherer heritage has real merit. I don't know why the Roman Empire declined and fell. I don't know why so many Americans seem eager to expose themselves to any humiliation or degradation in order to get on television. I don't know why most if not all people do so many things which cause themselves more harm than good. . . . And I've hardly started. I do have my suspicions, opinions, prejudices and preferred beliefs, as well as bits of second-hand knowledge about these matters, but real knowledge - no.

Once you develop a certain level of expertise in your field, you should become more comfortable with the fact that you will never master it all and that there is much that you do not know - and that it would be unreasonable to expect anyone to have "encyclopedic" knowledge of a subject. We are most impressed by that rare individual who does seem to possess both a sound overview and a grasp of the controversies, minor issues, and minutiae of the field. Even such a master can be exposed by a crank or a lucky student who happens to find some area of weakness or a seemingly small flaw which might turn out to be the key to a basic error in his whole point of view. Science and knowledge often make leaps of progress through such anomilies.

I could almost become proud of my ignorance - but such pride could be justified only if I had earned the right to be proud, through much dedication and effort on trying to overcome my ignorance and through the commitment to continue the struggle and always strive for improvement.

Simple ignorance is the easist thing to attain - or, rather, one cannot even attain it because it is a lack, an emptiness: one does not achieve nothing. Pride in such everyday ignorance is something to be despised, as it is pride in deliberately refraining from using my intelligence to better myself or my world. Mind you, there are many things that are not worth knowing, and an essential part of the process of learning is developing a system to filter out the "noise"; this filter must always be refined and upgraded to avoid creating a simplistic worldview which consigns important issues and signals to the ignored "noise" category. Each person has to find the level of knowledge, ignorance, and filtering which seems optimal for survival and growth.


The next question: is one allowed to freely express one's ignorance?


I can see opponents to my point of view marching in protest, waving placards on which their slogan is printed:

"Down with Ignorant's!"

God, Science and Creationists

God is greater than logic: there is no way to logically prove or disprove the existence of God (However, there are ways to logically expose flaws and contradictions in my - and your - inadequate conception of God). God is beyond the reach of science: by what controlled experiment could God's existence be proven or disproven?

Caution to scientists: The fact that science cannot (currently) explain something does not disprove its existence (unfortunately, all too many scientists and their boosters need this reminder).

Caution to creationists: Do you think that the words God uses to speak to us can be simply read and comprehended without effort, without struggle and growth on our part? Do you think that in the holy texts there cannot be metaphors and allegories, paradoxes, used to convey ideas which are beyond the capability of our merely human languages to express? And do you think God incapable of setting into motion a process of evolution through which humans can come into existence through the development of God's other creations? (higher from lower, perhaps, a process of ongoing perfecting). Even the most literal-minded interpretation of Genesis 2, vii must cede that Adam was created from the earth. . . .


The point of science is not to provide a belief system to replace religion and mythology, but to provide a process for discovering the truth bit by bit, step by step, with the unrealizable aim of understanding, explaining and allowing us to control everything. It is a never-ending process, and it oversteps its abilities when it presumes to state the answer to the ultimate question, "what is everything". Religions and personal beliefs provide answers to this question, however short they may fall from the full truth. Scientists must always guard against the natural human desire to explain and know the ultimate answer - the desire for completion or "closure" - and the desire to be seen by others to possess such awesome and prestige-endowing knowledge.

The Believer, the Atheist, and Arrogance

It actually makes more sense for me to declare that there is a God, and that I know that God, than to declare that there is no God. For, since no one can truly comprehend what God must be, the concept of "God" has a multitude of meanings, each and all inadequate to fully account for a true God. To the extent that what we call God is to be found within us, I might be forgiven for finding something of that truth within and - mistakenly - presuming to speak as the voice of God. I would certainly be guilty of overreaching and misinterpretation, and my actions "in the name of God" might have dangerous consequences, but I would at least be basing those actions and interpretations on something that I experienced. On the other side, if I declare that God does not exist, the implication is that I am either denying the reality of a particular notion of God (for example, the old white-bearded man in a white gown who micro-manages our individual lives), or I am denying the reality of every one of the myriad conceptions of God, or I am presuming to fully comprehend the universe and to be in a position to know definitively that there cannot possibly be any kind of God whatsoever, or, if such a possibility exists, nevertheless there happens to be no God in existence.

Who is really more arrogant, the man who, raised in a longstanding religious tradition, becomes carried away by his religious enthusiasm to the point that he believes that God is speaking through him; or his neighbor, who believes that he knows enough about everything to be able to declare that every notion of God held by humankind throughout history is rubbish?

Intelligent Design ?

If there is a noosphere - and in some way there must be - it implies a principle of intelligence in the universe higher than the inorganic and organic realms though not necessarily excluding them. By this principle of intelligence, in which we participate, we discover truths, or "laws of nature", which we subsequently prove through practical application of those laws (e.g., technology). Through this process of scientific discovery and application we infer that there is something essential to the universe which complements and responds to our own intelligence. When science progresses, our understanding of the universe progresses incrementally, or, more rarely, in radical or revolutionary ways.

When I hear the term "intelligent design", I think it would be a suitable, slightly poetic term to denote this principle. "Design" would represent the order of the universe, to the extent that we have so far understood it and project that we might increase our understanding, its coming-into-being (or its eternal existence, if you will), and even its "chaos" - a word we often use to mean that which we do not yet understand. The principle of intelligence is understood as being greater than the sum of the individual intelligences of each and every human being - and other living creatures. This is again confirmed by our successful applications of the results of our creative mental activity on the natural world, of which we are, of course, a part.

In this sense the term "intelligent design" could be acceptable to members of just about any religion which does not preach the destruction of science, as well as by agnostics and aetheists - apart from hardcore absurdist existentialists. However, it seems that the term is the property of Christian creationists who use it as a quasi-scientific smokescreen for literal interpretation of the creation story in the book of Genesis. As they have a de facto copyright to the term, I guess I will probably have to leave it to them and chalk it up to another victory for the use of words to suggest the opposite of what they seem to mean.

Noosphere

The following was lifted from Irina Trubetskova's article at www-ssg.sr.unh.edu/preceptorial/Summaries_2004/Vernadsky_Pap_ITru.html
and is provided only as background on the term, not to set the tone of the blog.

Vernadsky defined the future evolutionary state of the biosphere as the Noosphere, the sphere of reason. The term "Noosphere" was first coined by the French mathematician and philosopher, Edouard Le Roy (1927). "Le Roy, building on Vernadsky's ideas and on discussions with Teilhard de Chardin [they both attended Vernadsky's lectures on biogeochemistry at the Sorbonne in 1922-1923], came up with the term "noosphere", which he introduced in his lectures at the College de France in 1927 (Le Roy, 1927)... Vernadsky saw the concept as a natural extension of his own ideas predating Le Roy's choice of the term" (Smil, 2002, p. 13). Le Roy understood the noosphere as a shell of the Earth or a "thinking stratum", including various components, such as industry, language, and other forms of rational human activity (Arbatov and Bolshakov, 1987). Le Roy's concept was developed by De Chardin, who considered the noosphere as something external to the biosphere - a progression from biological to psychological and spiritual evolution. Teilhard based his conception based on philosophical writings, and was completely ignorant of Vernadsky's biogeochemical approach. Vernadsky developed his concept of the noosphere out of his theory of the biosphere, combining his biogeochemical works with his own work in philosophy of science (Grinevald, 1998, p. 24-25):

Form

stream-of-consciousness, captured thoughts, fragments, observations, reflections, suggestions, arguments, essays

For some reason the time given of my posting is off by three hours. Perhaps a starting subject: the fallibility of infallible technology.

Welcome

March 17, 2007. Toronto.
This is a test run. Comments on politics, art, music, philosophy, science, life.
When time permits. Time always permits, except going back.
When responsibilities and inclinations permit. That should work.
I'll get more specific soon, I hope.