True Knowledge

The tricky part of a saying like "I only know that I know nothing" is that if it is true, the speaker does know something - so it's a self-contradictory statement. Kind of like, "This very statement is false." It's hard to tell whether that's true or not, because if it's one, it's also the other!

Anyway, more seriously ... knowledge, or absolute certainty, depends upon us having some unfailing means of assessing when something is true. Within our physical universe, we don't have that. Our eyes can be fooled; stage magicians and creators of optical illusions intentionally take advantage of this. The evidence of our ears is not reliable - the results of any game of Telephone show that. Our instruments may be more consistent in their functioning than eyes and ears, but we still read them either visually or aurally. And we really don't know for certain that all we perceive, including me writing this post and you reading it, is not a very vivid dream. Maybe we are gorillas, grapes, or gods dreaming that we are human.

A benchmark I happen to like comes from the Course in Miracles: "Only Love is real. Nothing unreal exists." If that's true, then maybe the closest we come to knowing anything real is when we love.

Something that might interest you on the subject of ignorance and knowledge-

Have you heard of the "Dunning-Kruger" effect? I think Manu alluded to it, earlier. Or maybe it was rex- I just got back from a long day of hard labor, it's not inattentiveness I'm just exhausted.

It's something to do with cognitive bias, basically a phenomenon where people with less information than everyone else think they are operating with the same information as everyone else.

Omhu Cuspor wrote: knowledge, or absolute certainty, depends upon us having some unfailing means of assessing when something is true.

If knowledge, or absolute certainty, must at all have to do with truth, sure. That is a common view as far as I can tell, but not a universal one.

Our instruments may be more consistent in their functioning than eyes and ears, but we still read them either visually or aurally. [sic]

Or we can save the data they record over high numbers of attempts at what ever process is being mapped onto paper or hard drives for later review and re-review by ourselves, our co-workers, fellow experts in other groups independent from our own, and to some extent even the public. One can question as you go on to the reality of reality itself, of course, but under the condition that there is any extent at all to which we can study what ever this thing is we may or may not be deluding ourselves into perceiving, there are ways to generate - arbitrarily, though never quite limitlessly - reliable statements about it.

Part of knowledge in general is an understanding that knowledge is relative.

I "used to know a lot" about computers because at that time I inhaled all computer related information. Now, relatively speaking, I still "know a lot about computers" but there's way more that I don't know now because computers have changed so much in the last 20 years.

knowledge is kind of like those linear equations in Algebra III where gone are the days of simply dealing with numbers... now you're dealing with symbols and infinity. Knowledge is infinite. And what we know doesn't include to knowledge of everything we don't know and everything we have yet to know.

Now if one is content in simply not knowing anything then it's fine if one doesn't seek knowledge. If one doesn't want to know then one is free to believe whatever they want. But belief has no regulations. You could be any degree of wrong about anything you don't know. Therefore, even if the destination is infinite I'd rather seek knowledge because at least I'm progressing towards knowing things that remove error from my belief/opinions/etc. I can be wrong, but I don't like being wrong or acting upon bad information or a lack thereof.

Therefore seeking knowledge, to me, is not about knowing everything or reaching a destination. It's simply a path of moving forwards. Socrates understood he didn't know anything relatively speaking, but that was kind of his floor or foundation for knowledge and wisdom. He still allowed himself to have students/followers which he would not have done if he believed he only had beliefs to share.