Knowing doesn't mean so much

Maybe it doesn't, since what can we really know with assurance? I always say I want to know things, and be assured that they are the truth. Which is almost possible with facts or scientific proofs, but with people, it's practically a pipe dream.

How many times have I wanted to know what people were thinking and what they saw. I need some magic glasses.

This nodeshell rescue was brought to you by boredom.

Knowing facts is always helpful.

With the exception of the higher mathematics and physics I read on Everything, I can know virtually all of what I read, practically as soon as I read it. It can go just as easily.

And not all of it do I want to know.

But the understanding of what people say, what they feel, what they think--this is more of what I want. Sometimes faster, sometimes slower.

It is the hermeneutics of Everything I am after.

I'm seriously getting sick of knowing things. In fact, I fear that I'm starting to resent knowledge altogether. I feel like I'm kidding myself every time I open a textbook.

It seems like the more I study, the more I know, the more magic is taken out of everything that I have yet to discover.

I don't know where these facts will get me, really, besides a few knowledgeable comments in a conversation years away that will make me feel somehow superior. I'll tilt my head back a bit, squint my eyes, and talk for a minute about why cheetahs are a declining species, or how many concubines a certain Chinese emperor kept. Everyone will nod politely, and move on to something else, caring more about the way my fingers drummed on the table than what I've actually said.

I wonder what it would be like to forget everything that I have learned. To let go of what I hold so tightly, open my mind completely, and free myself from every opinion but my own. Education cannot help but mould us. It opens our minds, but closes them at the same time. Sometimes I find it hard to sort through my thoughts, to figure out which are really my owm and which have come from a man who's been dead for two hundred years. To wade through the knowing that doesn't mean so much and get to the kind of knowing that comes from experience.

The desire to get a firm grip on these facts starts to fade when I realize that they will never give me a firm grip on myself. This will take a different kind of knowing. And we're kidding ourselves if we think that a university degree will somehow make us a better person. Perhaps the process of acquiring this degree will give us something more, but the knowledge itself, to me, is hollow.

I like feeling things, I like experiencing things, but knowing, well, knowing doesn't mean so much.

Knowing more facts continues to take the innocence out of all of us. Why do we wonder? Because we do not know. Why do we imagine? Because we do not know. With so much knowledge we continue to lose our imaginations, to imagine a Utopia, a place you can just let yourself go in. Then you think about society, the harsh realities of this cruel world. Why are children so carefree? Because they do not know what lies ahead, no worries. Just like in Charles Dicken's Hard Times, Dickens criticises how the grownups are filling the children's minds with nothing but facts. How they're losing their innocence and naiveity because of it. Never having an imagination, everything must have a definition. The whole world must be based on fact and knowledge. If knowledge is so good, think about what this world would look like if we took away everyone's imagination.

Call me weird, but the more I learn, the more fascinating everything becomes. The more answers I get, the more questions they create. Where the hell did Mitochondria come from? What's hidden in pi? Why haven't we heard from extraterrestrial lifeforms yet? Why was there a big bang (if there was one?) What's going to happen when we start making nanites (ones that do complex stuff, not simple switches, I mean)? Cloning? Where are these microbes we're getting in space rocks coming from? What will happen if we (as a species) wipe ourselves out? What is going to be the single most important event for our species in the next one hundred years? Facts aren't the antithesis of imagination, they're the building blocks we use to create our mental worlds. If someone gets discouraged from finding a fantasy is false, then I could understand facts killing imagination in that person. But the more I learn, the more I wonder.