Appearances, Reality, and Applied Ignorance

Let's begin with what we don't know and can't know.

If only the people in charge would live by Petey's axiom! But the reason people typically want to be in charge is because they begin with what they think they know about the unknowable.

There is the known; the unknown; and the unknowable. But to know that something is unknowable is no small thing, for it is at the foundation of what Hayek calls the Great Society, by which he means the large-scale spontaneous order, or self-organizing system, that is a result of human actions but not human design.

Indeed, such a system could never be constructed by the human mind, since it is energized by a virtually infinite amount of knowledge and information dispersed throughout, and present in each individual. 

Now, I am a big fan of the human intellect, which can know everything knowable, which is to say, being. But the future doesn't exist. Of course, we can make accurate predictions in deterministic system, but the free society

constantly adapts itself, and functions through adapting itself, to millions of facts which in their entirety are not known to anybody.

Only in "small groups of primitive society can collaboration between the members rest largely on" facts and circumstances known more or less by everyone. Which is why central planning is such an atavistic temptation. Toss in the deliberate provocation of vices such as envy, and you've really got something!

But in a complex order, our little bit of knowledge is dwarfed by the knowledge dispersed throughout the system, and which allows us to benefit from the expertise of others. Thus,

a 'civilized' individual may be very ignorant, more ignorant than many a savage, and yet greatly benefit from the civilization in which he lives. 

In short, "We all benefit from knowledge which we do not possess." Ironically, a complex society allows people to know close to nothing, leaving the details to others. In fact, our post-reality civilization is so affluent that its elites can afford to know less than nothing and still pretend it's knowledge.

At the moment there are a couple of Russian guys in my kitchen repairing the freezer. Left to my own devices... let's just say I envy people who really know something about something, whatever it is, from cardiology to refrigerator repair. 

What if we didn't have money, and the only way I could reimburse them would be to exchange my knowledge for theirs? For truly truly, I have only useless knowledge to give, in that it's not for the sake of anything else.

The civilized soul is the one who is interested in unusable truths.

Even old Aristotle knew that

It is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits; it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician demonstrative proofs.

The cosmos is a complex system. Is there any way we can dumb it down and make it intelligible? Is it reducible to something we can wrap our minds around -- even with our invincible ignorance of all the ins out outs, for example, of the nature of dark matter, or of how quantum and relativity theories relate?

Those aren't things I'll ever figure out, but I do have any number of physicists working on it.  

So, what's a guy like me supposed to do? Well, I hereby reaffirm that 

In each moment, each person is capable of possessing the truths that matter.

Beginning with the truth of Being, which you might say is the Ultimate Quality. And indeed,

What ceases to be thought as qualitative in order to be thought as quantitative ceases to be thought as significant.

Which is to say, of ultimate significance. Just how do all these qualities get in here? Are they really reducible to quantity? Or perhaps it's the other way around -- that quantity is a vehicle for qualities, as appearances are the veil of reality.

Profundity is not in what is said, but in the level from which it is said.

If that's the case, let's try to say something from the highest and deepest level, and see where it leads, for

The universe is important if it is appearance, and insignificant if it is reality.

Therefore, "significance" lies in that gap between appearances and reality. Only man can say that "things are not what they appear to be," i.e., that things appear one way, but in reality are another way. Which in turn is rooted in a kind of applied ignorance, similar to what Hayek said above. 

In other words, we don't take things at face value, but inquire into deeper causes -- even the cause of being and of causation. We are perpetually curious, which is to say, open to being. But most people have neither the time nor inclination to sit around all day thinking about being. Which is where religion comes in, from genuine ones to the crude political religions of the left.

For whatever else a religion is, it is a symbolic framework for thinking about ultimate reality, or the absolute, or one's deepest concerns, and that's about it for now....