Thread: If you could know everything, would you?

If you could know everything there is to know in a snap, would you? You can make this a philosophical debate about what knowledge as a concept is, or then not.

Let's also just ignore that we're humans and we couldn't irl contain those amounts of data.

I would like to put forward the idea that given the amount of information available on the internet, provided we know how to find whatever information we want, is there any point in having any of it in our heads?

Originally Posted by KJW

I would like to put forward the idea that given the amount of information available on the internet, provided we know how to find whatever information we want, is there any point in having any of it in our heads?

Is there a risk of losing the ability to interpret?(all trees and no wood)

Originally Posted by geordief

Originally Posted by KJW

I would like to put forward the idea that given the amount of information available on the internet, provided we know how to find whatever information we want, is there any point in having any of it in our heads?

Is there a risk of losing the ability to interpret?(all trees and no wood)

I was thinking along the lines of not feeling that we "own" the information unless it is in our heads, even if it is available to us externally. On the other hand, we don't want to spend too much effort memorising things that we will hardly ever use and is available to us externally.

In the future, we may have chips in our heads that enable us to connect our minds to the world wide web. In this case, can be regard ourselves as possessing all available knowledge?

To answer the OP, my answer would be a definite no. If there was nothing unknown to investigate life would be very dull...

Originally Posted by KJW

I would like to put forward the idea that given the amount of information available on the internet, provided we know how to find whatever information we want, is there any point in having any of it in our heads?

Atm you think of something you don't know and look up the answer in the internet, but you still can't analyze it fully without knowing all the factors. You would know but not understand.

Originally Posted by PhDemon

To answer the OP, my answer would be a definite no. If there was nothing unknown to investigate life would be very dull...

But imagine the possibilities since you would be the wisest man alive! You could tell so many things to everyone else. Science wouldn't be about trying to understand, it would be about understanding. You could figure out if and how it is possible to travel to other galaxies, build safe and working AI, transfer human consciousness into machine and probably even cure cancer. It would maybe be a doll life for you since it's like counting 1+1 your whole life over and over again, but the help you would give makes it worth it.

That's all well and good but any day I haven't learned something new is a wasted day. If I knew everything I would get bored...

I dunno.

Originally Posted by PhDemon

That's all well and good but any day I haven't learned something new is a wasted day. If I knew everything I would get bored...

Any day you haven't learned anything is a wasted day at the moment, since the goal is to learn more. If you knew everything there's no such problem, you'd just have to change your perspective to knowledge.

Nah, I'll stick with what I've got

Just look at Trump. Do you think that giving him as much information as he could handle (from birth) would have made him a better person? (perhaps not a serious point)

Would individuals' acquisition of "knowledge" differ completely even though they had access to the same store?

Conflict would still arise and conflict (a god thing in small doses no doubt) is as important a priority as "consuming data".

At the risk of being redundant, let's just say that knowing everything means you know a lot of stuff. That would include the future, things I can't sense, and the truth about all things religious, just to name a few. Perhaps in some ironic twist, the person who knows everything might be the same person who says, "I can't know everything". What happens to the Uncertainty Principle when someone knows it all, or a quantum particle, like where is it at any time even if it's in more than one position? Knowing everything puts a limit on what can be known and when I think of that I wonder how can that happen if the universe is infinite or boundless?

The person who knows everything probably has an answer for every question. If I thought that person was the ultimate in intelligence then I just might accept every one of his/her answers as gospel simply because I wouldn't know any different. If I don't think that omniscient person is all that they're cracked up to be or if omniscience is an impossibility then I'm going to continue searching for answers, but that's just me. For me, the best answer an omniscient person can give me is, " Keep looking".

I imagine knowing everything entails knowing the future too. I have a problem with that. If you know something bad is going to happen in the future and you take steps to change that future and succeed do you not erase the reason for creating the better future in the first place?