Wisdom implies ignorance

One of the things that constitutes knowledge is the understanding of ignorance. We humans know not only what we do know, but we know what we do not know.* Metaknowledge. Is this a cognitive ability that is limited to our species? I don’t know. This ability drives curiosity. We want to know what we don’t know, but to do that, we have to be able to represent what we don’t know, to represent the space that needs to be explored. That is, of course, the essence of science, to represent parts of what we do not know and to have a plan for probing into it. Perhaps what distinguishes a good scientist from a bad scientist, an ego-driven one from a non-ego-driven one, is humility, knowing the extent of what one does not understand, vs. arrogance at “look how much I know.”

What of intuitive knowledge, non-explicitly-represented knowledge, that whispers to us in dreams and visions? That which we know, but we do not know that we know. That which we can remember, or become conscious of. I think that this is a kind of knowledge that indigenous cultures are experts at. They make good use of dreams and symbols and visions, not worrying about whether something makes literal, explicit sense, but only whether it is useful. Their understanding of biology, ecology and pharmacology is wonderfully sophisticated even if it is not scientific.

There are different kinds of ignorance, personal ignorance, species ignorance, cultural ignorance. Is something unknown to you because you don’t personally know it? In that case, you might know who does know. Knowing who to ask is a valuable thing. It makes it do-able to learn something unknown. But if something is unknown to you because humans don’t know it yet, then it’s much harder to learn it. That’s where science comes in. We’re an amazing species in that we reached out into outer space. We landed on another world and looked back at our own, and came to understand our world and our place in the universe in a new way. It really was for all humankind that those steps were taken. Now we’re sending out pieces of technology to know things further out in the solar system. This knowledge from beyond the planet, these are things that humans haven’t known before.

Or have they? Native Americans say they always knew what it was like to stand on the moon and look back on the earth. Their medicine men and women had traveled to the moon, not with their physical bodies, but with their spirit bodies, and so they already knew that view of the earth, a sphere floating in black space. A skeptical scientist can dismiss this as nonsense, but maybe in that ancient, indigenous way of knowing, there is more than just biological knowledge, or ecological knowledge. Maybe there is cosmic knowledge.

And that brings us to cultural ignorance. There are things that our culture, modern American industrial culture, does not know. Instead of assuming nobody knows, assuming that if science doesn’t know it, then humans don’t know it, why not just ask other cultures? We don’t because when we ask them “how” they know, we don’t like the answer. “We know because the spirits tell us” or “We know because the plants tell us.” We assume we know what this means, and dismiss it as superstition. But suppose it’s just a way of talking about intuitive knowledge? Suppose we did not assume we understand what their “methods” are, but just asked about the knowledge itself. (While respecting their intellectual property rights of course.) It doesn’t mean we can’t go back and check it with science. That’s what Vine Deloria was saying, “Just ask the question. Ask the people who know.” Ancient, ancient cultures may know things that we do not. At least they might point science in some interesting directions.