Thursday, May 27, 2004

What do i know?

I am writing this in a highly confused state of mind. I hope to make sense of what i am saying...
..so here goes ......

Can one quantify knowledge?
I know something. But how much of it I know, that i don't know.;) What I mean is that if there is
a certain concept i know, I may not be aware of everything associated with it, say I know some bits and pieces of physics,not everything. If I were to know everything about things, I can be called perfect (to some extent). BUT, nobody is perfect(more on this later).

While that is on one side, there is another side to what i am saying. There are things I dont know. Say, I dont know to drive a truck. And I know that I don't know to drive a truck. Fine till here.

What about the things we don't know that we don't know? I don't make sense is it? Well, till the day I was told about the existance(or extinction) of the dinosaurs, I did not know them. I did not know . That is we are living in this world oblivious to a the existance large number of things.Since we do not know about it, we actually dont know that we dont know about it.
Right?

In this case, given the fact that i don't know what i know and also that i don' know what i don't
know, is there something i DO know?????

PS: I am not the only one facing this problem. See Sanjeeth

Inspired by what a professor of mine told once : "I don't know what I don't know"

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

That reminds me of a Joke !
There was a guy in a park he was waving his hands left to right repeatedly.
A Passer by asked: "Sir what are you doing ? Some kind of excercise?"

He replied :"I'm shoving elephants off !!"
"But there ain't no elephants here Mister ??"
"See it works ;-) !!"

-- Praveer.

sanjeeth said...

I wonder what our quest should be -to know what we dont know?