Socrates Didn't Know Anything And Neither Do You

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With winter just on the horizon, there is a seasonal tendency to succumb to depression. Consequent to this I wanted to talk about something a little uplifting today. Namely, to draw your attention to all the mystery, wonder, and unexplored frontiers that still exists in the world.

The internet is some sense has shrunken the world. Whereas 100 years ago, if you wanted to experience a faraway land, your recourse was to stories from those who may have been there. These stories could come in written form or told in person. In either case, such sources were few and far in-between as the location became more exotic and obscure.

These stories also left a lot to the imagination. Descriptions would engage your mind into crafting the images of people, places, architecture, food, customs, and anything else the story teller shared.

Today, there surely is a youTube channel that will show you directly footage of this faraway land. Your imagination is left dormant as all is presented up for display. Not only are we shown things directly now, but we also have a vast library of footage to view. There are always hundreds of videos to choose from on any given subject on youTube. The world feels smaller.
This problem is further exacerbated by the nature of algorithms. The algorithm after all will narrow your exposure to the content that will keep you on the platform. Consequent to this it will continue to show you over and over the same things until you actively reach out to see something new.

However, one cannot reach out into the unknown via search. You must tell the machine what you want to see. This necessitates you being aware of the existence of the thing you are searching for. So once again, you are in a sense trapped in your own epistemological bubble unless the unknown is forced upon you by another actor.

Yet the world is much larger and more mysterious then can be passively experienced. However, we do not give ourselves permission to go explore it. We lock ourselves in epistemological cages. We train our brains to filter out entire realms of data because we have either a) previously categorized it as nonsense or b) consider it a waste of time.

To expand the world, we can draw from. To bring back the wonder and the awe, we need to role model around what seems an idiosyncrasy of Socrates.

In the dialogues, Socrates claims he knows nothing. This claim does not have any particular focus devoted to it though. It’s almost a throwaway comment Plato put in to make Socrates look clever. Yet, this belief that Socrates held, this belief that he really, truly, knows nothing is a foundational belief that steers his entire enterprise of seeking out those who claim to know and learning from them.

Socrates comes to discover that none of his interlocutors know anything about the subjects they claim knowledge of. And so too we need to heed this lesson and stop attributing to our beliefs truth where almost certainly none is found.

We need to suspend judgement. We need to stop wanting certain things to be true. It’s when we forget that we are on a lifelong quest for wisdom and begin to believe we actually know something does the world begin to shrink.

The world appears smallest to those who think they know everything. These sorts of people are the most insufferable and usually the most ignorant.

Indeed, we must suspend judgement at the absolute level and live according to working theories. Theories we build up in our minds on how we believe the world to be but do not attribute to these theories the status of truth. What these theories are is what we hold to be true right now given what we have encountered; but little more.

We are never to grow attached to any of these theories and their truth values. Our identity should never hinge on any of these working theories. We only live by them for the time being because you cannot actively live “I don’t know” as an answer to everything.

#mgtow #philosophy #socrates #plato #knowledge