Josiah's Thoughts - Knowledge

Thoughts | Josiah Friesen

Sights | Victoria Hong

To those of you who enjoyed my September thoughts: welcome back. To those of you who never read my September thoughts: I urge you to do so. To those of you who read my September thoughts but didn’t enjoy them: first of all, I am hurt. Second of all, you probably didn’t bother to open this article, as you anticipated it would contain the same drivel as September’s piece. Well, you would be correct. This is the second iteration in a series of pieces outlining my thoughts on a number of topics, which have life or death implications. Could The Howl Mag afford my contractual fee for the production of another think piece? No. Do I do this for free because I’m an amateur university student and lucky to be given any platform at all? Yes. Much like last month’s piece, I will now latch onto a philosophical concept and dissect it. So without any more ado than I’ve already crammed into this introductory paragraph, let’s begin.

Knowledge. You’ve got some right? At the very least, you have the knowledge of knowing how to read. Unless of course this article is being read aloud to you, in which case you have the knowledge of understanding verbal language. Knowledge. Some like to compete to show who has more of it, others assess potential romantic suitors based upon how much of it they have, and yet still others think they have any amount of it at all, and write snarky, self-aware articles on the internet. Ah yes, self-deprecating meta humour. Regardless, knowledge is central to part of what makes us human: the ability to think critically. Thought creates ideas, and ideas become knowledge. But there’s a problem with knowledge. The word “knowledge” implies the existence of useful information in your mind in the form of facts, or in the form of skills, which outline the correct way of doing something. However, we must consider: how do we know what we know?

We are all too guilty of the habit of obtaining a new piece of knowledge, and once it passes some degree of scrutiny, accepting it as law. For some, that degree of scrutiny is as simple as reading something on a Wikipedia page. I have a confession. In 8th grade, I did something that was extremely morally condemnable. I edited a Wikipedia article with incorrect information. I hopped onto a page about the craze of the early 2000s: Heelys (It’s a shoe with a wheel(y) in the heel(y). What’s not to love?). I threw in several scientific buzz-words that I thought would escape the critical eye of other wikipedia editors. Hypothetically speaking, someone could have checked the article directly after I made the changes, and immediately before they were wiped from existence by an angry editor. That person would have accepted the words that I wrote as fact. They would be armed with misinformation. Plot twist: this article is taking a dull turn into the politics of the veracity of information, but in reality, I’m not boring. This article isn’t about the spread of false information in mass media or about how it’s your civic duty to stay informed and to scrutinize information that you find. It’s about how your existence is based upon things you can never truly know. In other words, doubt is ingrained into the fabric of our lives.

Consider Romeo -- a product of the mind of Shakespeare. One of the most famous literary works of all time is marked by a tragic ending, because Romeo couldn’t wait for 5 seconds to stop and think about his options when he discovered Juliet’s “corpse”. For those of you who are (unfortunately) unfamiliar with Shakespeare’s play: Romeo and Juliet, the central plot follows two lovers, Romeo and Juliet, who die because Juliet took a sleeping potion to avoid her problems, Romeo thought she was dead, and killed himself. Juliet woke up, saw him dead, and then killed herself as well. What could have been the first literary example of a power couple was not to be because Romeo thought he knew that Juliet was dead. This is a far cry from being misinformed about a form of footwear, but bear with me. These two examples serve to show that we can truly be misinformed about anything. Everything you think you know could be based on lies, illusions, or the spread of misinformation from others who also thought they knew the truth (bless their souls).

You may think that a solution for this problem is to systematically re-examine every piece of knowledge you thought you had, and produce proof of it. There are two reasons why this won’t work. Firstly, many of the things you think you know cannot be proven. I think I know that The Man From Earth (2007) is a fantastic piece of cinema, but this cannot be proven, as my opinion of it is subjective. Secondly, anything that seems like it could be proven would rely on a proof. This proof would be a series of logical ideas. Each of these ideas would rely on knowledge. This means that a proof of knowledge could also be false or based upon misinformation, rendering it useless. You cannot prove the truth of anything in your mind. The horror of reality dawns on you as you realize the idea that I’ve cornered you into: you cannot know anything.

If you read last week’s article, you may be expecting a calming conclusion to this article, where I tell you that it doesn’t matter that you can’t truly verify anything. You hope that I will tell you something that will ease the pain of existential dread that I have caused to squat upon your shoulders, like a giant grotesque parrot. I will do no such thing. That's it. The show’s over. The fat lady has sung. You can’t know anything, and you need to live with that. See you next month.