Feeding My Ignorance

This blog is predicated on the foundation that I don't know everything. That - I am sure everyone who knows me will agree - is a not unreasonable starting point Sometimes it surprises me just how much is included in the not known bucket - then I think - what about all the rest that I haven't yet realised I don't know - and that makes me slightly more comfortable with having such a big list of things I don't know - it is dwarved by the (likely) list of things I don't know that I don't know!!!

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I may well have covered some of this ground in a previous post - but it is worth repeating, especially as this has been triggered by yet another bit of serendipity.

In my own lifetime there are plenty of advances in what you might call universal knowledge - things that no one knew back when I was small are now, in many cases, commonplace and certainly not in any way surprising to anyone. The corollary is that there has been an equally large increase in what you might call universal forgetfulness - things that young people these days have no memory of. There has, been an equally signigicant increase in personal forgetfulness - of course - but fortunately this has been somewhat balanced by the addition of new knowledge.

Just off the top of my head - five things that are "no longer with us" (except in niche markets) - Spotty Dog; Betamax; Creamola Foam; threepenny bit; and Allan Glen's School (my alma mater) - although there are possibilities that the latter will be resurrected soon in a different form - and five things that were not imagined back then - Twitter; Mobile phones; Harry Potter; Ant and Dec; and the Human Genome. Both of these lists could be much, much longer however the purpose of making a list is not to be comprehensive but rather to show how easy it is to find some examples to put in each list.

All of the examples are "things", but there has been an immense increase in "knowledge" itself - not just in scope, but also in spread - the world wide web has made information available more widely, more quickly and more comprehensively enabling anyone to "know" about just about anything they want to know about. How many times each day will the phrase "I didn't know that before" be spoken or thought? For some - the vast majority - this is simply catching up with things that someone else knew already - for others - the creatives and inventors - this is an addition to the sum of all knowledge and quite unique.

The reason for going into the past like that is to project into the future - or more correctly - to fail to predict the future and to point out how difficult that is. There was a trivial example of what I mean - a recent tv programme featured someone who had been removed from "the real world" for a number of years - the reasons for that are unimportant but her reaction to seeing a smartphone illustrated the difficulty of conceiving of something that is outwith your experience.

There are many things that I do not understand - there are many things that are "inexplicable" for anyone. Things which "seem to work" but which cannot be explained using our current level of understanding. This is subtly different from advances in technology which enable us to travel faster, or to communicate instantaneously over long distances, or whatever. These are "unpredictable" in the sense that we don't know what "improvements" will be made as a result of advances in technology. That is fine and good - but what about the even wilder advances that might be made because of advances in knowledge (which could, perhaps be seen as a precursor to the advances in technology).

A well-known example of this is the Human Genome Project which has advanced knowledge considerably and resulted in opportunities for advances in technology to deal with some of the ailments that have been out of reach of what we have at present. Yes, there is a certain amount of circularity - the success of the project was built on previous advances in technology that allowed and facilitated the advance in knowledge.

Unfortunately - and this has been true throughout history - when it comes to advancing knowldge it is extremely difficult to separate the genius fro the crank. That is because in both cases it is likely that we cannot truly understand what they are saying.

I don't for one minute claim any expertise in the quantum world - I have read a little and know of some of the findings that have come out of that subject area. One of those is the notion of entanglement - and that is what triggered this post. I have no intention of exploring this particular notion - but it is worth quoting from the wiki page.

Quantum entanglement is a physical phenomenon that occurs when pairs or groups of particles are generated or interact in ways such that the quantum state of each particle cannot be described independently — instead, a quantum state must be described for the system as a whole.

The reason that this is 'connected' to this blog (and thereby in some small way a self serving example) is that the notion of entanglement is not a million miles away from the "red thread" idea that I have expounded several times which pulls pairs or groups of people together and links them in a way that is unaffected by distance.

This - of course - appeals to my "systems" self as it gives some sort of weight to the idea that the things that make up a "system" are connected in ways that we do not necessarily expect or predict or even desire. People are connected similarly. Our best friends from our youth remain 'attached' however loosely. Our work colleagues keep in touch even after they move on to a new job. It may be that, in years to come, these connections can be 'understood' - at present we see them, but certainly do not really 'understand' how they come to be. Why did some of the folks we went to school with become our "gang" and others did not. The reasons are complex of course and some can be explained - but at the root there is a bit of a mystery.

I mentioned Allan Glen's School above - I started there - many years ago - in Class 1B with around thirty others. Around half a dozen were the boys that I "hung out with" - plus a few from other classes and other years due to a mutual interest in music, for instance. Why did Ronnie, Kenny, Robert, John, Trevor, Gordon, Stuart and a few others become my mates and not the remainder of the class? I can explain it a bit, partly because of spending time together, but the truth is that there were so many interacting factors that it is impossible to be definitive.

The same could be said about my work colleagues through the years. Yes - a big factor is whether we worked closely together, either on similar projects or just in the same bit of the office - another is whether we ran together - but even in the set of people I ran with and the set of people I worked on the same project with there are big differences in how "close" we became as people and friends. (this harls back a bit to my very early post about 'grades' of connection to people.

There may well be something that we, at present, do not even know about never mind actually understand that 'causes' these connections to be made - perhaps they are (as the red thread myth suggests) sort of pre-programmed - inevitable consequences of fate - perhaps they are more dependent on the many choices we make through life. Either way, could there be a "force" that governs that sort of thing? After all, its not that long ago that gravity was "not known about" even though everyone could see the effects.

Clearly I don't know what this might be - however I am sure that there will be surprises in store in the future for anyone who thinks that they "know it all"!!