Ignorance is bliss…. Or is it?

Personally I’m confused already…

I have always assumed that ignorance, was in-fact bliss. People who are ignorant, by definition, can’t be worried about the things they don’t understand. But they should. They should be fearful of what they don’t know, they should be scared of what is potentially around the next corner and most of all, they should be worried about the sheer scope of what they don’t know.

This is how it all started…

Probably not as confused as his name suggests...

I was wondering home one night with a few friends in the usual drunken Friday night style. As we walked we turned our conversation back to the usual mumblings about the economy, bank bail outs and how we, as a generation, are pretty much screwed when it comes to getting onto the property market. One of our friends started babbling about this, that and the other, as per usual an argument ensued and as I listened I realised that both of them didn’t know what the hell they were talking about. Not only that, but each one danced around the other one’s points in a confused ramble in an attempt to contradict the other persons argument, thereby scoring a decisive victory. However, as you all know, no argument ever really finishes, it just gets put on a shelf and reemerges at a later date. Clearly no-one is willing to give up their beliefs or opinions without a struggle, but how much of what people profess to know is actually knowledge and how much is just opinion? The debate between knowledge and opinion has raged on since the days of ancient Athens. Plato attempted to separate the two into different realms of existence, the intelligible realm of opinion/belief and the unintelligible and somewhat mystical eternal realm of true knowledge. Confucius said “real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s own ignorance” and as my friends argued I realised he was right.

What is this guy talking about? And what the hell is this blog for?…

The idea is simply to blog my way out of ignorance. They are reems and reems of things, notions and ideas that I simply do not understand. Rather than pretend to understand I have decided to take several subjects, research them and then publish my results using the power of the tinterweb! I’m not gonna profess to provide a complete in-depth account of everything. Instead I’m just going to try to dispel some of the darkness of my own ignorance. As well as blogging my way to enlightenment I’m going to post random articles about stuff (surely the greatest word in the English dictionary) that I enjoy, I am interested in and that I feel are important. Please remember that this is a work in progress and that I am not an academic. No, instead,  I’m just a simple web monkey trying to find out how it all works on this crazy place we call Earth.

“Ignorance is not bliss – it is oblivion” – Philip Wylie, US author.

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