Noses, Earth & Knowledge

It amazes me that our brains can cancel out our noses from our vision. Is that something we learn? Do babies act the way they do because they can't stop staring at their noses? Or is that why baby noses are so small in the first place? Isn't it also peculiar that noses, allegedly, continue to grow throughout our entire lives? It's as if the nose is aware that our brains have negated it from our view, and take that as a challenge to get so large that we are forced to regard it. "Hey, look at me, asshole! Remember me? That's right. Your nose. Peekaboo, mother fucker. I'm back and I'm bigger than ever. Achoo, you piece of shit."

It makes you wonder if there are other things your brain negates, without our conscious knowledge. Is there something so completely obvious dangling in front of our sentience every moment of every day that our brains just cancel it out? Is there some unrealized aspect of reality that nobody is even aware of because of how omnipresent it is? Maybe everyone in the world walks around with an unsightly parasite feeding off of the top of our spinal cord and nobody notices or cares because the parasites are otherwise motionless and benign.

It also gives you a newfound appreciation for the likes of Isaac Newton who, somehow, saw a natural and daily phenomenon like an apple falling and saw it for what it truly was: a force of nature. You might forgive everyone else's lack of vision-- they couldn't even see the nose on the front of their faces; how could they have discerned something as foundational as gravity just by seeing their 10,000th apple fall from a tree? 

Education was the process by which people re-learned how to see their noses. It was also the training that allowed others to understand what Newton saw. It even forged new ground in the testing of ideas that built on that reality-- of gravity-- so that we could eventually understand that the world was round and existed in a solar system whereby other wandering stars circled a central point in space: our sun. You couldn't just be told it was so-- it necessitated someone of understanding to demonstrate to you how it was so. 

But eventually, the telephone game factor comes into play. You pass along the same information from ear to ear until someone misinterprets some small detail, which becomes erroneously incorporated into the original message. A slow corruption of ideas begins-- until, a generation emerges that knows that it is so, but not how it was so. As such, subsequent people aren't taught how it was so-- only that it is so.

This works, for a time-- because after all, people can't even see the nose in front of their faces. If you tell them that it is so, the majority of them will accept this. However, eventually, someone will come along who perceives something is missing. Some crucial detail that others have missed; they understand that some say that it is so, but how can they truly know that it is so? The lessons about how the secret knowledge is learned weren't conveyed, along with all the other weight of thought and care and wonder that is included in the wonderful question of "how," so this bright individual learns to cynically question true knowledge only because it isn't clear to him how it is so that a thing is the way that it is. Their intellect is then turned against the system as they seek the truth of the matter, perhaps even believing that they have been lied to. And why wouldn't they at least suspect they were being deceived? After all, when they voiced their concerns that the knowledge they were given was inadequate-- the people charged with teaching that knowledge felt defensive not because they knew it was true, but because they, too, perceived that something essential to the knowledge was lost; something that they don't know and had never learned.

People love to ridicule the so-called "flat earthers," or anyone else who "denies the science." While I do not believe that the Earth is flat, I do sympathize with those that do. They live in a modern world that exists as a result of monumental scientific achievements that have come before us that we haven't been able to properly convey to new learners in full. Not only this-- but in a world that lacks any true opportunities for adventure or discovery, the world we exist in today is "boring," for lack of a better description; at least by the standards of the kind of adventurers it took to get us to where we are today. So these "flat earthers," among others, have to take it upon themselves to re-prove the things that have already been proven; to re-discover the things that have already been discovered. This is what leads to moments such as these:

The comments section on this video is full of people who could not be more ready and willing to jump in and offer their own personalized 'slam dunk' on the individual depicted in the video who undertook a science experiment to test his hypothesis. I wonder how many of them have attempted their experiment to prove that the Earth is round.

They don't bother because they take it on faith. Nothing wrong with that, as long as you are clear and honest with yourself about what you are doing. With a few possible exceptions, most of the people who believe that the Earth is round do so because they have been told that the Earth is such by others who claim to know. Enough people, seemingly credible, have done so to make them confident to say that they also believe that the Earth is round. But very few actually know in the way that someone knows that it's cold outside, or that water is wet, or that if you drop an apple it will fall to the ground, or that you have a nose on the front of your face. If asked to prove that the Earth is round, many of these individuals may struggle to describe precisely how it is that they know this. Not just know that others know it-- but to know it, and to have proved it, for themselves.

I don't claim to know this for myself, or that I have proved it myself-- but I am also not so deluded as to believe that a large portion of my own personal knowledge about the world has been outsourced to other minds. Whether deserved or not, I must extend a level of trust in other thinkers to gather a consensus of truth about reality into my conscious self just to function efficiently in the world.

And if I'm honest, the fact that the Earth is round has very little to do with how I conduct myself in my day-to-day life.

What impacts me far more is electricity. But I know absolutely nothing functionally helpful about how it is generated, distributed, and used to power the things I interact with every single day. I know that there have been many scientists who have devoted their lives to figuring it out. I know something about Benjamin Franklin and a key and a kite and a lightning storm. More importantly, I know that when I turn on a light switch on my wall, a bulb turns on in my ceiling. More important than that, I know that if I don't submit my online digital payment to my utility company, my power gets shut off and I'm left in the dark, literally and metaphorically. These are things I know. How my electronic payment is tendered through the internet, powered by electricity, to deliver funds from my checking account to the account of my electricity provider is such a mystery that if I had to explain to someone everything that goes into making such a miracle happen, all I would be able to relay is the steps that I take to make it happen.

Step 1. Turn on my computer.

Step 2. Open up my web browser.

Step 3. Take out my wallet.

Etc., etc., etc....

The reality is that very few of us know much of anything. A great deal of trust is needed to have any kind of proper bearing in the world; trust in the institutions that tell us that this is thus, even if we don't know the reason for this thusness. We are told that a thing is so, but the details on how it is so are generally vague, at best-- and require levels of invitational access to hear, from experts we don't know, the secret knowledge of what makes reality real.

And then I think of the nose on my face. The majority of my life is spent unaware that I even have one. I barely even think of others' noses when I'm staring them right in the face. The only time I'm aware of it is when I'm sick, or if there's something especially pesky in the air that is irritating it in an allergenic or odorous sense. I wonder what else is happening that I am utterly ignorant of, and I wonder about how much I "know" that isn't really knowledge at all, but an accumulation of trusted guesses that I have in what other people claim to know.

I had a dream once, and in that dream, I emerged with a lingering quote that stuck with me:

"Those who know nothing know much about things that those who know something know nothing about."

I don't know if there's anything to that or not, but someone once told me that knowing is half the battle. So if I ever figure it out, I can look forward to knowing that I still have one half of the battle left ahead of me to get through.