So whats in a name?

Its weird that I didn't start out to write a blog, just find out what one was about. They asked what I wanted to name my blog so I said "what the fuck, I'll give it a shot." Then they asked for a name and I thought of all handles like soccerprincess or jesusfreak that people use to succinctly describe the entirety of their being. So what's important to me? Well its not soccer or jesus.

It's not a god or gods, a school, a club, a job, girlfriend, a car, or even the collective good will of all humanity.

The way I see it, the only thing worth anything is the collected body of humana knowledge. This may at first sound unimpressive or uninspired but it makes sense to me. It works for me because knowledge is the most valuable object that the human mind can seek, attain, or pass on to others. Knowledge has enabled humans to transcend much of the brutality and harshness of nature that drove our distant ancestor’s day to day life. It has also allowed us to repeatedly overcome the brutality we have inflicted on ourselves throughout human history. Knowledge is not a physical entity but it has allowed us to shape and then transform the physical world we live in.

Knowledge is defined as a true and justified belief. When put so simply, knowledge may appear quite unremarkable, until one stops to consider how many beliefs we hold that are true but not justified or that are completely justified but false, almost true, or indeterminate. Examples are almost too numerous to count which demonstrate the inadequacy of the mind in determining justification for a choice or action (See The Drunkard’s Walk by Leonard Mlodinow).

Knowledge is almost never something we gain easily. At best we can acquire it from loving teachers and diligent study. It requires interaction with the world because “nothing is true but reality makes it so.” It requires us to make an assertion about the orientation of objective reality and then test it. This assertion will almost always be wrong and require us to reject it and try again. Only after much searching and learning and testing and thinking are we sometimes lucky enough to find a tiny nugget of thought that satisfies the criteria for knowledge.

This process is daunting, but also much more difficult than it appears, because the second indispensable criterion for knowledge is that the truth creates a belief that is justified. One can note that the truth of the seasons and cycle of the moon was known long before people ever knew about gravity, the tilt of the earth’s axis, or the solar system. It becomes almost impossible because very rarely is a belief created by truth. Mostly, we come to a belief and then work backwards to try and rearrange the facts.

Thus our knowledge is a collected body of truth accumulated and validated, at no small price, by those who came before us. Think about all the false assertions about the world that must have failed the acid test of reality before we arrived at what we have today.

Jared Diamond tells the story of the almond in his book Guns, Germs, and Steel. The wild plant produces an almond that is high in cyanide and thus extremely poisonous to humans and any other animal unfortunate enough or stupid enough to eat them. In order for us to get the nut we eat today, must have taken not only a very timely genetic mutation of the plant, but also many generations of people determined enough to keep trying until they found a plant that didn’t taste like death or cause them to vomit. A beautiful metaphore.

Knowledge is my love. This is what I spend my energy on.