The Known, The Unknown and The Unknowable+翻译.docVIP

The Known, The Unknown and The Unknowable We are all taught what is known, but we rarely learn about what is not known, and we almost never learn about the unknowable. That bias can lead to misconceptions about the world around us. The known is pressed on us from the first. In school we start each course at the beginning of a long book full of things that are known but that we do not yet know. We understand that beyond that book lies another book and that beyond that course lies another course. The frontier of knowledge, where it finally borders on the unknown, seems far away and irrelevant, separated from us by an apparently endless expanse of the known. We do not see that we may be proceeding down a narrow path of knowledge and that if we look slightly left or right we will be staring directly at the unknown. Even when we are right on the edge of the unknown, we may not be aware of it. Those of us who learned the history of the Persian Wars in school did not know that the events so vividly described are all based on the writings of the one source who survived—Herodotus. If you want to know almost anything that happened in the Greece of that time and it was not recorded by Herodotus, it is unknown and in all probability can never be known. But we did not think of his accounts as fragments of knowledge on the edge of the unknown; it was just more stuff from the huge pile of facts we had to learn about the history of Greece. Because of such lessons, we grow up thinking more is known than actually is. If we had a better description of the limits of present knowledge, that description could be a part of what we are taught. Such insight would give us a better perspective on what is known and what is currently unknown. In time, many things now unknown will become known. We will learn more about what lies below the surface of the earth, and we may learn how neurons interact to let us perceive and think. The accumulating pile of data can be misleading, however. Bey