Making decisions based on everything we don’t know.

I know it sounds odd. But after reading Swedish book ‘Där världen blir till’ (“Where the world becomes”) by author Elisabet Hermodsson this actually makes sense somehow.

Have you ever thought about knowledge as being something limiting? I suppose not and neither did I.

Francis Bacon said “Knowledge is power” and in our part of the world we take pride in having a lot of options to chose from; the more we know the more free and invincible we believe ourselves to be. As I write this I hear my grandmother in the back of my mind saying “Knowledge, knowledge, knowledge my dear. Keeping yourself well-informed is crucial in today’s world.”

It seems I don’t agree with granny anymore.

In her book and in a similar context, Hermodsson quotes an author by the name of Gerholm.

“Planet Neptune didn’t exist pre Copernican revolution because there was no room for invisible planets in the geocentric system.”

In other words, in medieval times and before Galileo Galilei came along to place the world on its head (or more specifically out of the spotlight), we believed Planet Earth was the centre of the universe and that all other planets, including the sun circled around us (Geocentric or Ptolemaic system). With that way of looking at the world came a way of looking at life and the acknowledgement of an according truth.

Once the Copernican view of the universe (Sun being in the centre) had been established, the reality and therefore the truth changed. Suddenly there was a Planet Neptune on the map, which had previously gone unnoticed.

Nevertheless, it’s always been there. Conclusion: Because we didn’t see it, it didn’t exist.

What fascinates me here is how we relate to knowledge and everything we believe to know about our world. We make decisions based on everything we know assuming we know everything there is to know. And how else would we proceed, right? Still, I think it’s worth a thought.

Science as our acclaimed provider of truth could come along with a theory tomorrow “proving” that everything we’ve believed to be true so far is actually not.

How does that influence our decision-making? Should we continue assuming that we know everything there is to know? What about that which exists but can’t be measured nor discovered? Finally, how does this affect future generations?

It seems as though the knowledge of today does indeed limit us in light of the knowledge of tomorrow.

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~ by choicesoflife on January 6, 2012.