Boundary between my knowledge and my ignorance?

[coberst]

Boundary between my knowledge and my ignorance?

How can I know what I do not know? How can I trace that boundary between knowledge and ignorance?

In the dialogue “Apology” Plato writes about Socrates while in the dungeon just before drinking the hemlock that the citizens of Athens condemned him to be executed.

In the dungeon shortly before drinking from the hemlock cup Socrates spoke to his followers. He spoke about the accusations against him at the trial. He said that the sworn indictment against him was “Socrates is guilty of needless curiosity and meddling interference, inquiring into things beneath Earth and in the Sky…” Socrates further adds that he is accused of teaching the people of Athens, to which Socrates vehemently denies that he is a teacher. He points out that in matters of wisdom he has only a small piece of that territory; the wisdom that he does have is the wisdom not to think he knows what he does not know. Socrates conjectures that he has the wisdom to recognize the boundary of his present knowledge and to search for that knowledge that he does not have. “So it seems at any rate I am wiser in this one small respect: I do not think I know what I do not.”

For Socrates a necessary component of wisdom is to comprehend what one is ignorant of.

Am I wise? Do I know what I am ignorant of? I certainly know that I am ignorant of astronomy and psychology. There are many things about which it is obvious to me that I am ignorant of. Are there things about which I am not even aware of my ignorance? Are there matters about which I think I am knowledgeable of but which I am, in fact, ignorant of?

When I ask myself these questions I become conscious of a great number of things about which I am ignorant. Does this mean I am like Socrates in this matter? I do not think so. Socrates is speaking about two types of ignorance about which most people are unconscious of.

I think that Socrates is speaking of our ‘burden of illusion’. People are unconscious of the superficiality of much that they think they know and they are unconscious of a vast domain of knowledge that is hidden from the non critical thinker.

The uncritical mind has no means for discovering these illusions. CT (Critical Thinking) is the keystone for discovering these illusions. The Catch-22 here is how can one develop a critical mind when they are deluded into thinking they have a critical mind?

When our educational system has not taught our citizens how to think critically how can our citizens ever pull themselves out of this deep hole of illusion?

[Praxis101]

$%^$@#%^$$ ate my original post.

If I were a Psychology professor, teaching an intro class of some sort, this is a major topic that I'd be compelled to cover.

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When our educational system has not taught our citizens how to think critically how can our citizens ever pull themselves out of this deep hole of illusion?

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Great question. I personally feel that this is of the utmost importance. Education should cover this ground very early and reinforce it frequently. The ability to critically think is vastly more important (IMO) than that ability to memorize and analyze facts - for the simple reason that it aids in eliminating bias within those facts. Education is virtually meaningless if the student cannot accurately analyze/synthesize material in a meaningful way.


When I was growing up and first exploring Psychology, I'd spend some time alone exploring simple exercises. Pick a subject, begin thinking about that subject. Analyze thought:
- Why did I think that first?
- Where could that thought have come from? i.e. what experience(s) is it based in?
- In what way did the thought manifest? (e.g. language, picture)
- What's my temperment like? What influences might be affecting my temperment and how might they be influencing the course of thought?
- Are there any feelings associated with this thought? Are the feelings driving the thought or vice versa?

Nietzsche theorizes that consciousness inherently carries one major flaw: pride. Pride in itself. One quote is: "Everything that enters consciousness is done so in error" (or something very akin.) The Bible probably covers this idea as well.
- This, IMO, is the first step towards critical thought.


I would (and still do) catch myself in absurdity frequently. "wtf did that come from. where am i going with this?"

I like trying to clear my mind. Figure out how it likes to work. There's a lot of value in this subject for every/any individual, IMO.

[Magic_Man]

EDIT: Upon rereading, this is not a flowing, cohesive thought. But alas, at least it contains some important things that I think about.


The best way to start being conscious of ignorance is to simply ask yourself why you think the things that you do. Try to imagine how you would convince an unbiased third party. A friend and I are constantly debating because she says things that I know for a fact she hasn't thought through, and when she gets mad at my questions, she usually winds up saying "Well obviously I haven't thought about it as much as you". No [censored]!

Although it is a silly example, I'll bring up the idea of O.J.. I don't know the percentages, but a huge majority of people are absolutely convinced that "OJ did it." And yet, I doubt even a tiny percentage of those people could repeat the evidence to you or give you any convincing reason why you ought to think that he is guilty. They're just repeating what the media and those around them have brainwashed into them.

Of course it would be quite tiring to ALWAYS stop and debate about whatever you were about to say. But particularly in issues of a scientific nature, or evaluating very clear evidence, it's pretty easy to ask where you got the idea from, whether that is a reliable source, and whether what you think is consistent with what is most likely to be true.

Other things that people say without thinking:
"You can eat a pound of chocolate and gain 3 pounds."
"Baldness comes from your mother's side of the family. Check your maternal grandfather to see if you will be bald."
"Hot water freezes faster than cold."
"In old houses, the windows are thicker at the bottom because glass is actually a liquid, so it flows downwards slowly over time."
"Acupuncture works."
"Homeopathy works."


Not all of those statements are categorically false, but they're certainly not categorically true. Trying to figure out why you think something will help you to learn how to think about future things.



"It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so." ~Mark Twain

~Magic_Man

[coberst]

Praxis

I have a question about which I would like your opinion.

A psychotic aversion to self-learning?

There is strong evidence that our educational system has graduated students with a neurosis directed at self-learning; there seems to be a strong aversion to serious scholarship that is without an educational institution’s imprimatur.

What is neurosis?

Becker says “isn’t the development of the ego the key to the general problem of neurosis?” The ego grows by putting anxiety under its control; thoughts and feelings are dangerous for the existence of the organism, ergo the ego “vaccinates itself” with small doses of anxiety as a defense mechanism against anxiety.

The ego controls our levels of anxiety by a restriction of our allowed experiences. The ego develops by “skewing perceptions and by limiting action”. The ego grows by “a dispossession of the child’s own inner world”. The ego’s technique mechanism is one of the best, it is self-deception. The child’s humanization is accomplished by giving over her aegis to the parent. Are the child’s educational efforts at humanization also accomplished by giving over its intellectual aegis to the teacher?

Our motives are buried deep in the unconscious and are veiled by our ignorance of our self. “One’s motives reside in his skewed perceptions, in the way he dispossess himself of genuine self-reliance”; Freud discovered “conscience as limited vision and as dishonest control over one-self…Neurosis is merely a process of interference with simple animal movements, of the blocking of the forward momentum of action.”

Neurosis blocks our most “eager and engrossing acts, acts of an excited infant [and of an excited adult] in a world of wonders”. The result being that we all tend to earn a sense of support passively, by “renouncing action and the satisfaction of making [our] own closure on action.”

Quotes and ideas about neurosis (not about self-learning) are from “The Birth and Death of Meaning”—Ernest Becker

[coberst]

Magic man

I think you are on the mark. The problem is that few people have ever learned to use this critical self-conscious behavior. Our schools have taught us what we need to know to get a job but have failed to teach us how to think so we could know better how to live.