Abundantly Alive in Christ

For information to “make sense” or have meaning, it needs a “knower”. Knowledge always presupposes a “knower”. A person for whom that piece of information has meaning. If the world did not have human beings, a mathematical statement like 1+1=2 might still be true, but only in a dry mechanical sense. It would hold no possible meaning. So we can answer the question: “if a tree falls but no one was around to witness it, did it actually fall?” The answer, in my humble opinion, is no. (I’m assuming several things, of course, such as the fact that no one could have had access to the information that the tree fell in ANY given scenario. NOT that trees don’t actually fall when no one was around to hear it.)

My point being that knowledge is useless if not acted upon. There are of course varying degrees of action. Sitting around doing nothing is, in some sense, an action (or lack thereof; in choosing to be slave to inertia). On the other end of the spectrum, to die for something/someone is the greatest and most ultimate action there is, since obviously nothing can be done post-death. But of course, people can die for good reasons as well as bad ones. Dying from lung cancer due to smoking a pack a day is still dying, but for the wrong cause. So it begs the question that if we all have to die one day, we might as well die for the right cause. And if there are right and good causes, then we might as well die for the BEST cause.

But what is the best cause and how can we know? That is a good question to ask, and good questions are worth asking because we have powerful rational faculties that would put AI to shame if we actually tried to use them.

Knowledge is perfected when one concentrates his life on knowing the truth. To be committed to learning what is true and good, rather than staying satisfied with knowing just what one studied in school. But how can we know what is worth learning? By… learning. That sounds like tautology but what I mean is that we learn by imitating others. Which is pretty obvious and common sense, so I don’t really have to persuade anyone that the most basic form of knowing/learning is from other people. Think about the books that we read: they were written by other people (obviously). All knowledge is built upon the knowledge of others. However, since human minds are finite, we necessarily possess some degree of inaccurate information, false knowledge, or perhaps just lack of complete information on any given matter.

Here, I will use the concept of “intelligence” and IQ as a marker of how well one can know as much possible true information as they can, but only because it seems necessary to be reductionist in a blog post on a frankly massive subject. Epistemology is not so straightforward a matter. And also that psychology, in my view, is and always will be a dismal science since it always tries to reduce the human soul to merely digestible (but not necessarily true) bits of information.