Why socrates said the above statement? Socrates was one of the pioneers of the philosophy. If philosophy is at some place in todays society his teachings had played a huge role. Yet it seem wisest of them all claims he knew nothing? Why did he utter this controvertial statement? What did he wanted to tell us? Let's take a thought journey to find out some possible meanings to his claim.
Only true wisdom is knowing that you know nothing
There are several ways to understand this statement. In fact I have written some articles on the same subject. Empty dragon scroll of kung fu panda is a good example. Subjective reality and the story of five blind men is another. Here we will revist some concepts of information sphere to understand what wisdom ultimately leads to nothing and why?
Knowing about the pencil.
Let's start with something we already know. A pencil. The pencil I am writing is in my hand. I think I know about the pencil. It's made out of wood and a mineral core. I can google and know exactly how it is made. I know properties of the wood and mineral. I also know it's function. But do I teally know what it is? Let's be mindful about it and try to see. I can feel what it feels like when it is in my hand, when I focus on it. When I keep it on the table I do not know what it feels like. Similarly when I close my eyes I do not know it is there or not. If I close my eyes and reach for it someone can change it to a diffeerent one I would feel and think it is the same, not knowing what happened. It may be a crafted pencil from plastic, and I will be blind to this truth. It seems I can identify pencil when I compare what I feel in my hand against previous knowlege of how it feels. This previous knowledge is our information sphere that we carry all the time. If someone is to lose this information sphere they will be dementic, or be like a child. In other words, it is the "personality theory" of self. It suggests self is entirely formed by this information sphere. In this information sphere we have abstration for everything. It is just like in object oriented programming. In OOP evrything is an object with its properties and fuctions. Once you programe an object you can instanciate similar objects and use them in the program. As an example a real world pencil would be represented in OOP as an object with properties like line color, thickness and hardness. It has fuctions like making pixels colorful when the mouse is moved. This exactly represents what we do, when we look at the word "pencil". We can just communicate about it as we have our mental representaion on what it means. Language, and numbers play a huge role in making our mental world.
Knowing about time.
Lets look at another example. Look at a clock, one with a dial. When we look at the clock we see time, in some cases even without numbers! However, when a child look at the clock he doesn't know the time. The clock will be just a gadget with marks or numbers, and moving arms, if he is a little older child, and would be just an object with parts for a toddler. As the concept of "time" and association of this with the "Clock" is something we have learned after a struggle. These are abstract concepts very difficult to teach. Really speaking human mind's ability is remarkable in this sense. However, once learned the new version of the "Clock" we can never see what we used to see in the first place. As what we see, and associate it with is no longer in our control. We cannot magically erase the association of time with the clock and look at it in a child's Eye. We can imagine but not really. In reality, each one of us have different models of the same object. A clock seen by thousand people is not one clock but a thousand clocks. This can be explained as the subjective reality, which means there is no truth outside concious awareness.
Mind the Mind, the Magician
The mind seems to be the magician, behind all of these subjective realities. And abstraction is his tool of deception, which unfortunately decieves itself, into believing a reality which was made by itself in the first place. This is the likely explanation to the socrates statement, only true wisdom is knowing that you know nothing. You can read more about these simple truths, in the essay by David Foster Wallace, in his famous speech "This is water".
There can be other meanings to the above statement by Socrates. Which in my openion less likely explanations. Such as, Socrates, had no definite answers, beyond subjective projections about Origins of birth, and life after death. What is self? etc. Of course we all have our believes to above questions, but non can be proven beyond reasonable doubt. Only wise people would come to realisation that there are more and more, unseen truths about the world, than what we ever know. Only and idiot would claim that they know everything, hence ignorance is a bliss. Claiming knowing nothing, seems extreme for someone wise like Socrates, yet it must be true. Maybe he just knew nothing, beyond his mind.
What do you understand by Socrates?
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