Ignorance as Wisdom

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Ignorance is usually juxtaposed with knowledge. Thus, to increase one's knowledge is to decrease one's ignorance. Now though, what about ignorance's relationship with wisdom? Can a decrease in ignorance actually decrease wisdom in turn?

Awareness is quite similar to knowledge. I would almost subcategorize awareness as a type of knowledge, suggesting that awareness is a shallow, immediate form of knowledge; but something well known can pass in and out of awareness. However, I would like to address awareness as a cursory knowledge of something that may lead to further study. In this sense, I will discuss awareness in relation to ignorance and knowledge.

Now I need to define perfect knowledge. Perfect knowledge is a state of knowledge in the absence of ignorance; that is, it is a complete knowledge of everything and every possibility. Perfect knowledge would require the knowledge of the state of every particle and its past and future states as well. It would also require knowledge of the conclusions of every deductive sequence to know about higher order truths. An agent of perfect knowledge could answer a question about what you had for lunch or where one star is in relation to another.

Now slip away from this absolute of knowledge and approach finite knowledge bound by infinite ignorance (all of us). Increase knowledge by selecting a particular portion of the knowledge from the absolute and add it to your set of knowledge. Does this knowledge increase or decrease wisdom?

Oedipus the King provides a perfect example of this. Oedipus is the king of Thebes who wants to know who killed the previous king. The truth is that he himself had done the deed, not knowing who it was he had killed. Unknowingly, he had also married his mother to become the new king. When he finds out he was the guilty party, he blinds himself and leaves town, leaving his uncle/brother-in-law as king. His gain of knowledge seems to have led to folly.

I think that ignorance and awareness are opposites.
Awareness seems more the potential for knowledge, than a type of knowledge. You are onto something though, because it seems that as ones store of knowledge increases, those types of knowledge which he is potentially capable of percieving decrease. i.e. you can't teach an old dog new tricks.
Wisdom and knowledge are not necessarily the same thing.
Many would argue that wisdom sees the folly of knowledge.


But what do I know.

...

Words have a great deal of baggage with them. The barrier of a common language is often quite obvious.
I would never have daid that ignorance was juxtaposed with knowledge, it's more of an opposite. Innocence I would juxtapose with ignorance and the difference still causes me no end of confusion. Since I'm almost faithless in the eyes of many, there is also a problem with what exactly knowledge is: the more materialistic testable stuff, or, the "revealed" knowledge of the Bible, Koran, Talmud, etc. I tend to go along with C L Dodgson on the way words can mean anything I want them to mean, which is why in a technical context I'd always want a strict definition of the way a word is going to be used.

An interesting discussion thread, no doubt. What is the relationship between knowledge and wisdom?

Although everyone in the world seeks, in addition to true happiness, certain knowledge and perfect wisdom, and these things are mostly impossible, and may in fact negate one another. Though knowledge--especially from experience, fuels wisdom, wisdom is the true understanding of how and when knowledge will be of use. And some knowledge, impossible knowledge, perhaps, is useless. It is wise to realise the futility of attaining absolute knowledge.

Confusion.
Thagomizer is that a restatement of Occam's razor or a suggestion that there is an ethereal method of knowing you don't need complete knowledge of everything. The idea of a state of mind or a method that gives you hindsight before an event doesn't make sense to me. I'd say wisdom is knowing that you have to carry all sorts of junk in the form of knowledge around and getting as much of it as you think useful, any shortcut would be appreciated. though.