knowing,

For the purpose of this blog I am going to work under the premises that knowing something is part of the human condition and therefore I am only going use the human condition to describe what knowing is. In other words, I am going with the assumption that we are not in some kind of matrix, even though I cannot prove we are not because I cannot immediately perceive it. I am going off the assumption that what we can perceive is what is real, and not the chance that what we can perceive is some kind of illusion.

So here goes nothing, my attempt at understanding some of what we have been talking about in class. One of the things that came up today was the idea of knowing. Tony went on ahead and filled us in on three primary types of knowing, leaving me, and hopefully not just me, in the dust wondering what knowing is. I'm not even sure how to tackle this one. What is knowing something? can we ever know something in its entirety? I figure it's maybe something like this: you can know a person, or to be more precise, select aspects of a person, not the entire person; I seriously wonder if you can even know everything about yourself, but I digress. You can also know facts such as what chemicals a desk is made up of, under the same category, you can also know somethings status, such as where someone is. You can know how to do something from experience although this is somewhat questionable since no two situations will be exactly alike, I still feel that there is something to be said about memory, but I guess it's really more of a system of estimating probabilities than actually knowing something, again, since no two situations will be alike.

That brings me to my next idea, which is the shit storm of the whole thing. We cannot know the future. nothing is certain people, or maybe everything is certain but to bad because we can't predict what will happen. I wonder about this human notion of choice all the time. Do other animals have choice or are they driven by instinct only? does choice even exist? if not, then what is the human idea of choice? If we had no notion of choice, assuming that it actually does not exist, what would our reality look like? I guess the idea of choice is probably integral to the human condition (what condition is our condition in?). Maybe the only difference between instinct and choice is the notion of choice. That of course would suggest that choice does not actually exist and is only an illusion, one either created by the human brain or created by the man to make us feel like we are in control, which in many cases, despite free will, we are not. In regards to the past: the past is subjective, no two events are ever exactly alike and no two people will perceive any event in the same way. I think its important to realize that what you "know" about the past is not equivalent to what you know at this very moment. the past only exists and peoples heads and in books and movies, which are extensions of people's imaginations. having a general knowledge of the past serves as a means to work out probabilities in the future, but keep in mind that they are not going to give you certainties. People who ignore history are more likely to repeat it is the way the saying ought to go. Not that I am trying to say that you should not study history, my advice is to just be critical of what you are taught because it is all always subjective. (I am going to politely avoid time travel in this blog. I honestly hope it never exists.)

Again I digress, with a somewhat adequate description of "knowing" on the table as well as reassuring that the future and the past cannot be completely known, we come to what you know right know, which is not all that much. all we "know" in the truest definition of the word is what we can immediately perceive. what does this mean? It means that everyone in the world that you cannot perceive with any sense at this point in time could be dead from swine flu. That this has happened is extremely unlikely, but just by admitting that it is unlikely we have to cede that it could happen. Since it could happen, and since we are not aware of the world outside of our perception we cannot dismiss that it has not happened. One of the beauties of our age is that technology allows us to increase the range of our perceptions, for instance after reading my example, and hopefully accepting it as a possibility, albeit a remote one, some one could simply turn on the T.V. or phone a friend and find out that not everyone is dead.