IGNORANCE AND INNOCENCE

Questions of Will and Experience

Prologue

Have you ever thought about why a baby acts the way he does? And why when he does or say
something wrong, does everyone just laugh and say: ‘nevermind, he’s innocent, he doesn’t
know what he’s doing’. But there’s a big twist when we are talking about someone a little bit
older, if he does something that for us is wrong, makes a comment that has nothing to do
with the situation, or simply doesn’t know about something everyone does, why do we think
he’s an ignorant one? Is he supposed to be aware of his acts? Must people have certain
knowledges? And if it is true and they don’t have them, why do they remain in ‘ignorance’?
Why is the baby not able to grow out of its condition by himself?
So, there is a big interrogant among these facts: What is the difference between their
innocence and their ignorance?

But before judging other’s condition, a self-check:

Do you think YOU are ignorant?

If your answer is ‘No’, that is the main reason you should hear my talk.
And if your answer is ‘Yes’, congratulations, you are just some steps ahead of them who are
still believing they know everything, because that is the worst form of ignorance: the illusion
of knowledge.
The point here is: why are some people conscious about their ignorance? Why do less people
care for snapping out of it? Why do others refuse to? And how do I stop being ignorant? Is it
possible not to be ignorant at all?

These and many others questions will have an answer.

Alejandro Salazar.

IGNORANCE AND INNOCENCE

 Questions of Will and Experience

Well, have you ever thought why does a baby act like he acts? And why when he does or say
something wrong, does everyone just laugh and say: ‘nevermind, he’s innocent, he doesn’t
know what he’s doing’. But there’s a big twist when we are talking about someone a little bit
older, if he does something that for us is wrong, makes a comment that has nothing to do
with the situation, or simply doesn’t know about something everyone does, why do we think
he’s an ignorant one? Is he supposed to be aware of his acts? Must people have certain
knowledges? And if it is true and they don’t, why do they remain in ‘ignorance’? Why can the
baby not grow out of its condition by himself?

So, there is a big interrogant among these facts: What is the difference between
innocence and ignorance?

Based on various definitions, opinions, and after an intense process of philosophizing, I got
my answers to this question.

First, I found some definitions which try to explain what innocence and ignorance are in a
dictionary-like way, but I didn’t get satisfied, and I will tell you why in a moment. Let’s see:

Innocence: the state, quality, or fact of being innocent of a crime or offence. From latin
nocere (injure / harm) derives innocent (do no harm). (This is the most traditional
interpretation of innocence: the lack of sin, keeping apart from evil, and the kids are the
symbol of this state of mind and ‘soul’).

Ignorance: plain lack of knowledge or information. From latin ignorare (not knowing).

But these concepts didn’t satisfy me although they are barely correct, just because they don’t
consider some things that ‘being ignorant’ or ‘being innocent’ imply. And they are the causes,
the reasons of these conditions, that I resume in two aspects: experience and will.
So the deal is: Why is something not known?

THE DIFFERENCE
I’d say that ‘ignorance’ and ‘innocence’ are two different things; and that while innocence
could be similar, my first statement is that innocence is not a form of ignorance.

I feel both relate to personal/life experience (neither have gained them, but for different
reasons): the gathering, retention, comprehension, and the most important, application of
knowledge/wisdom/understanding - all gained through an experience of some kind. It could
be through relationships (home, friendship), or their environment.

Innocence, to me, is simply somebody who either has not had the time, or (for whatever the
reason, but, youth comes to mind) has not had the opportunity, or the need to gain
knowledge related to some facet of a life-experience contributing to their 'world-view.'

Conversely, ignorance would relate to somebody who did have the opportunity to gain true
knowledge through their experience(s) - but either chose not to, or did (does) not have the
capacity to absorb these experiences.

I mean: a four-year-old who doesn’t know that many people suffer around the world is
innocent (and this goes also for people with mental diseases), but a 40-year-old person (with
use of mental faculties) who doesn’t know it, is ignorant.

Anyway, this is not about physical age, but mental age.

So, what an innocent and an ignorant people are like?

An innocent person acts in function of his unawareness of the real world or any sort of
knowledge. Let’s take the classical example: a little kid. His world is limited to what he can
perceive and gets his attention by simple beauty: the sky, a bird singing, a toy lying in the
floor, etc. So, if we sit him in front of a TV and sintonize any news channel that shows for
example: ‘300 died in a terrorist attack in Syria’. What would he think about that? Of course,
nothing. If it is the first time he looks at a TV, he only will get close to it, will appreciate the
colors, will hear the sounds, maybe will taste and lick the screen, and then he will get bored,
maybe now he is trying to climb on a chair or bothering the cat (and here he is taking a risk,
but his lack of experience avoids him to be aware of that and although his parents have told
him, in a language he doesn’t understand very well yet, not to do it, he will not learn until he
experiences ‘the hit of life’). This is an innocent person, and his condition is something
natural.
Okay, what about a little older kid? He has already the ability of identifying what a TV is, has
a better usage of the language since he not only hears but listens to the information, and the
images are no longer just a mix of bright colors. So, can we consider him as an ignorant one?
No, because he is not understanding and comprehending what the hell is going on beyond
the screen. Nobody has explained him that if someone ‘dies’, it is not a good situation. The
point is that he has not had the chance to learn about violence in Syria. (And here it may
come up another situation: he watches a soldier using his rifle for killing others and listens
that that action is called ‘to kill’, he will imitate this behavior without doubt, not only because
that is cool for him, but since there’s a biological need to emulate others. So their parents
catch him shooting and stabbing his little brother, they will get shocked when he says:
Daddy, I’m killing Martin! Obviously, he doesn’t know what he is actually representing, he
isn’t aware that that is wrong, and he is acting with no intention to do harm). Also this
happens with other topics, like sexual stuff.
We are still in the innocent ones territory.

But at the point that kid understands the situation and comprehends that killing someone is
something you shouldn’t be doing, he opens the doors to ignorance on that topic. His
innocence on dead has gone forever, and he becomes ‘a first level ignorant’. So if he decides
to do again that representation of ‘killing Martin’, he is no longer acting under the rules of
innocence. Why ignorant? At the moment you get any knowledge, you automatically turn
into ignorant because there is a lot of things you don’t know from and for now. And
ignorance about what? Dead in general, why? where? who? how?, etc..
Since you see the fact, you are supposed to know the cause. And this happens with any sort of
fact about our reality.
But the kid is not able to be conscious of this, since he has not crossed ‘the line of Will’, and
he is not interested in finding out all of these answers because he is busy doing things that
being a kid implies to do. Perhaps he will act like Curious George and will ask simple
questions like: what is this? What is it for? Why can’t I eat it :v? How does it work? (although
they cannot understand the explanation). They ask questions, but it is not a genuine need to
snap out of ignorance, because they have not learned they can have that need.
Here I draw ‘The Line of Will’ (TLW)
Basically here the deal is to follow one of two ways: stay in ignorance, or stay in it but trying
to be less ignorant. There are two types of ignorants here: type-two ones who refuse to learn,
for different reasons, like laziness, cowardice or dogma, and also because it is so comfortable
to remain here: if I have a book that thinks for me, a pastor who acts as my conscience, a
teacher who gives me the answers, and so on--then I have no need to think for myself and
look for new things to learn and apply. I have no need to do it, if only I can pay; others will
take care of that disagreeable business for me. Type-three ones are cool people who try to
satisfy their need of knowledge.
And following one way or the other requires freedom and, of course, will.
In this order of ideas, we would become an ignorant but outside-the-box thinker. But how?

HOW TO SNAP OUT OF IGNORANCE?

Before proceeding to acknowledge ignorance, people must start to think by themselves,

obviously. In many people’s lives, their thinking guide is a whole lot of convictions not really
based on actual data. I have a word for that: Dogma Dogma is everywhere and comes in a
thousand different varieties—but the format is generally the same:
X is true because [authority] says so. The authority can be many things. (image)

Dogma is a printed rulebook. And people are not supposed to dig too deep under the surface
anyway—you’re just supposed to accept it, embrace it, and live by it. No evidence needed.

You may not like living by someone else’s dogma, but you’re left without much choice. When
your childhood attempts at understanding are met with “Because I said so,” and you absorb
the implicit message “Your own reasoning capability is shit, don’t even try, just follow these
rules so you don’t mess your life up,” you grow up with little confidence in your own
reasoning process. When you’re never forced to build your own reasoning pathways, you’re
able to skip the hard process of digging deep to discover your own values and the sometimes
painful experience of testing those values in the real world and learning you want to adjust
them—and so you grow up a total reasoning amateur.

Isn’t that sad? Stop living someone else’s life.

But that’s a hard thing to do because most of us have the same relationship with our own
minds that my grandmother has with her computer: It’s this thing someone put there, we use
it when we need to, it somehow magically works, and we hope it doesn’t break. It’s the way
we are with a lot of the things we own, where we’re just the dumb user, not the pro. The
mission is to stop depending of others and realize that our ‘computer’ is something we can
use, explore and eventually, fix.

If you understand this, you can make the first step.

So, consider this: you don’t know anything.

Some people are, more than victims of dogma, victims of their own certainty. That’s what
Stephen Hawking meant when he said, “The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it
is the illusion of knowledge.” So please be aware of this.
If you want to see this in action, just search for famous quotes of any prominent scientist and
you’ll see each one of them expressing the fact that they don’t know anything.

Here’s Isaac Newton: To myself I am only a child playing on the beach, while vast oceans of
truth lie undiscovered before me.

And Richard Feynman: I was born not knowing and have had only a little time to change
that here and there.

And Niels Bohr: Every sentence I utter must be understood not as an affirmation, but as a
question.

And Elon Musk: You should take the approach that you’re wrong. Your goal is to be less
wrong.

The reason these outrageously smart people are so humble about what they know is that as
scientists, they’re aware that unjustified certainty is the bane of understanding and the
death of effective reasoning. They firmly believe that reasoning of all kinds should take place
in a lab, not a church.

This first step is about humility. Humility is by definition a starting point—and it sends you
off on a journey from there. The arrogance of certainty is both a starting point and an ending
point—no journeys needed. That’s why it’s so important that we begin with “I don’t know
anything.” That’s when we know we’re in the lab.

Consider this too: No one else knows anything either.

Let me illustrate you a story. *shows WBW’s emperor’s new clothes comic*
Yes, it’s an old classic. The Emperor’s New Clothes. It was written in 1837 by Hans Christian
Andersen to demonstrate a piece of trademark human insanity: the “This doesn’t seem right
to me but everyone else says it’s right so it must be right and I’ll just pretend I also think it’s
right so no one realizes I’m stupid” phenomenon.

My favorite all-time quote might be Steve Jobs saying this:

When you grow up, you tend to get told the world is the way it is and your life is just to
live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice
family life, have fun, save a little money. That’s a very limited life. Life can be much
 broader once you discover one simple fact. And that is: Everything around you that you
call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you
can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn
that, you’ll never be the same again. (In slides)

This is Jobs’ way of saying: You might not know shit. But no one else knows shit. If the
emperor looks naked to you and everyone else is saying he has clothes, trust your eyes since
other people don’t know anything you don’t.”

It’s an easy message to understand, a harder one to believe, and an even harder one to act on.

This is a battle of two kinds of confidence—confidence in others vs. confidence in ourselves.

For most people, confidence in others usually comes out the winner. To swing the balance,
we need to figure out how to lose respect for the general public and the conventional
‘wisdom’.

So, recap:
The first step was about shattering a protective shell of arrogance to set a starting point of
humility. This second step is about confidence—the confidence to emerge from that humility
through a pathway built on first principles instead of by analogy. It’s a confidence that says,
“I may not know much, but no one else does either, so I might as well be the most
knowledgeable person on Earth.”

From here, everything is up to you. Your will.

CONCLUSIONS

Put in a nutshell: ignorance is the act of willfully ignoring any sort of knowledge, a conscious
decision to remain uneducated, and I put this clear: there is not an absolute ignorance, but
there’s an ignorance about determined topics. So ignorance is not ‘absence’ but ‘lack of’ or
‘imperfection’ regard to a suitable knowledge. Innocence is a natural state we are born with
that we are supposed to grow out of. This snap-out attitude is what Kant called: ‘the
illustration’.
Being innocent or ignorant is not a question of physical but mental age.
All of us are ignorant, but some people tries to be less than others.
And for doing this, first free your mind from others and from your own certainty.
Then, explore.

There are things we know, many others we know we don’t know, but there are so many,
many things we don’t know we don’t know, this is the universal form of ignorance. So, there’s
a limit for humankind and the universe will wonder us forever. Nevertheless someone will
think outside the box and make this *points*, bigger. (kurzgesagt graphic).

Fucking End
References

Wikipedia.
waitbutwhy.com - The cook and the chef, Elon Musk’s secret sauce. By Tim Urban.
Many other sites around the net.
My dictionary.