Fear Ignorance - Cultivating Epistemic Empowerment

Sometimes ignorance is the only way to win an argument, support your side or deal with the truth. For win, you cannot be open.

You cannot have constant opinion and at the same time be open to change. People respect the consistency too much to change mind.

Being open minded means changing and adapting. Being open minded is objectively better for survival. It is discouraged by society.

When we start defending view by making very poor excuses.

When we refuse to compare both sides of the topic with fair judgment.

When we deny obvious truth to uphold what we want to be true.

I am guessing that lying is the skill our ancestors needed to survive, so it was a skill that was passed on to us.

It is the most harmful thing after violence.

If you think that your side is right, you dont need to fear understanding.

If you think that your side might be wrong, you should understand why.

By writing everything down. Human brains forget. What you know now, you might forget in 10 years.

It makes you risk the ignorance by forgetting things.

The more you know, the more you study, the more you try to know, the better.

There are different tactics when it comes to debating. However, it all comes down to your case outweighting your opponent's case. By presenting all your arguments supported by reasons, you can build your case. By pointing out flaws in opponent's case, its negative consequences, you can make your opponent's case look worse than yours.

Compare quantity and quality of reasons. Quantity is a simple one. Just count reasons. Quality is about power of a reason. Not all reasons are equal. Some reasons outweight others. It depends on what individual prefers.

I might not be the right person to answer this, since people often misunderstand what I say. I am not good at making things simple.

What we can observe and feel. 

When we have the knowledge and the ability to weight that knowledge, and to produce more knowledge out of it.

Hard to say. Morality is about actions. Good or bad actions we do.

Every religion describes him differently in their way.

He is usually described as creator, the beginning.

I would prefer to stay on topic so I will only be answering some of your responses.

We cling to ignorance as a coping mechanism to avoid the emotional pain associated with mental realignment. This is because the brain rewards us with a positive feeling when we understand something correctly and creates negative emotional pain when we realize a mistake. This is also logical from a Darwinian perspective as the brain has evolved to further understand the world, which proves that understanding the past is beneficial to survival and existence. This indicates that ignorance should be avoided, but we have learned to avoid the penalty of error we chose ignorance and claim we never made an error. This undermines the purpose of the brain and devolves our actions to a state of mindlessness.

We cling to ignorance to avoid emotional pain, so how do we know when we are clinging to ignorance? It would be what we are most likely to avoid, which has the greatest pain. The greatest pain is the thing that we have the greatest emotional attachment to, or what has the greatest influence on our life. This is because it is all the worse when we are incorrect on something that is highly impacting our lives so our brain punishes us all the more severely. This means that what we get emotional about and what we have a great emotional attachment to is highly influential in our lives and we are more likely to cling to ignorance because of our desire to never recognize what we hold so valuable as incorrect.

The brain has a penalty function of emotional pain as a result of recognizing an incorrect understanding of the world so that way it drives us towards understanding. We have discovered that by remaining ignorant to our flaws we can avoid acknowledgement and hold off the penalty that is associated with error. It is from us choosing to avoid the punishment associated with error that we are punishing ourselves with a far greater consequence which is lack of understanding. The very thing that it was meant to protect us from we have chosen to cling to because we are unaware of the severity of the consequences of a lack of understanding, which this form is meant to highlight.

We should fear ignorance because understanding is what helps us navigate the world towards success. When you understand how to play chess you can move your pieces and semi predict the movements of your opponent. This implies that by understanding you can both predict and control the thing of what you understand to a degree. This indicates that to the degree that a person can predict and control the world is the degree that they understand it. I can predict that when I drop a ball it is going to fall and that when I throw a ball, I am able to move it from one place to another indicating my understanding of reality in a certain aspect.  The consequence of ignorance is remaining blind to understanding which our ability is to predict and control the world, leading us to a blindly unfolding existence. We are at the mercy of probability with no control in our own fate since we lack understanding. The reason why we should fear ignorance is because the world will come towards us nonetheless and we are blind to what will happen next and what we could do to make our future better. It is relatable to driving blind as you are still heading forwards in time and there are dangers out there that you may crash into and yet you choose to remain ignorant to it because you fear that acknowledging its existence. It is essentially sacrificing your future self through your present pleasure, and it is a very childish action. A person who clings to ignorance is choosing to benefit their present self by avoiding the present penalty of acknowledging their error and sacrificing their future self as they will continue to make the mistakes that they have always made rather than correcting their mentality to compensate with reality and make better choices in the future. Not only this but emotional pain is far less a consequence than making a wrong choice in reality as it is irreversible and something your future will be depending upon, whereas emotional pain can be overcome and put in the past not changing your future irreversibly like consequences of our actions. It is in this way that people who cling to ignorance not only sacrifice their future self for their present, but they sacrifice their future self to a much greater consequence that is irreversible in order to put off a much lesser penalty for their present self.

Many people fear understanding the world for what it is and they choose to cling to ignorance because they fear that by understanding the world correctly two things will happen. The first is they will have to realign their mentality and go through the process of emotional pain associated with error which is an unpleasant experience. The second is they believe that by understanding reality for what it is they will change their perspective of reality. The second statement is only partially true. Yes, it will change their perspective of reality as they will understand it for what it is, but if they recognize that the reality, they uncovered was with them all along then why they were fearful of it and content with where they were at. They were content with their past reality and yet fearful of uncovering what their past reality would be. Instead, they should recognize that the newly discovered understanding is essentially the past that they were content with just enlightened and more understood.

A primary example of how people may cling to ignorance over understanding is associated with value, specifically intrinsic human value. People are very aware that value is not inherent in the object but rather a perception of the view. This is known through many quotes and sayings understood as one man's trash is another man's treasure, or water is more valuable than gold in the desert. It demonstrates that value is not an intrinsic thing but a value that one entity places on another. It shows that one thing by itself cannot have value because value is one thing's appreciation for another. In this way, many cling to their past claiming that they cannot accept an existence with no intrinsic human value because that would be a life not worth living, but they essentially understood it backwards. Instead, they should have recognized that this new understanding of reality better explains why value is dependent on the individual, which demonstrates its better accuracy with reality, But they also shouldn't fear it, because if they were content with the reality they want new and the discovery is meant to explain that reality that they were content with then the explanation is associated with the reality they were content with, not the other way around. Essentially, if a person is content with their life as it is, and they understand it to be something else then they should be content with the new discovery as it is still the thing that they were content with before. This is why people should not fear understanding reality even if it may seem appalling at first, and why they should fear ignorance which so many cling to.

Many of the questions you have asked that I listed above I would love to explore, but I must go in the necessary order.

I must say I am ecstatic to finally express my thoughts as clearly and organized as I have, this has been a lengthy process of pondering and development, then finally last night it came together so much that I couldn't sleep. My refined plans are as follows:

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The brain’s job is to help us navigate towards a better future by understanding the past. We must have both a brain to understand and a past to interpret in order to navigate the future. The brain utilizes emotions to reinforce learning by rewarding us positively when we’re correct and negatively when we’re incorrect. The emotional attachment to our beliefs is proportional to their influence on our lives. The more emotion we feel towards a decision, the more likely we will cling to ignorance. Many choose ignorance to avoid this pain from mental realignment, which shelters them through blindness. A person who blinds themself to the world may feel secure in the short-term, but they sacrifice their future-self due to their lack of preparation caused by their ignorance. All decisions have consequences, so if we base our decisions on a misconception, we will often have negative consequences because reality won’t respond how we incorrectly modeled it to react. We should fear ignorance because it blinds us to what is coming, it is similar to driving blind, life will come regardless. Finally, we should not fear understanding because what we uncovered was already there. If we are content with misconceptions, and fearful of what we may uncover, then we should not fear what we uncover since it was there all along. Understanding the world for what it is does not change how the world is but shows us what the world is like when it is what you have discovered it to be.

I believe this to be an imperative concept to grasp in order to understand the world and that if you have a dispute to provide an example and allow me to explain so we can move forward. I cannot wait to move on to what I believe to be the next most important concept to grasp for the tools of reality.

I noticed that when I like some idea a lot, I defend it despite everything. However, it often makes me disregard obvious problems with the idea. 

Do you think that the source of all ignorance is attachment?

Because to me, it seems that only when a person is attached to some idea, person can diminish obvious counter evidence to prevent breaking the attachment.

I believe that some ignorance is due to a lack of experience or the inability to comprehend the world. However, I believe the root of all willing ignorance is a result of attachment. To provide even further insight, the amount of influence the decision has on one's future and past is the proportion that it is an emotional topic. I believe this to be caused by the brain prioritizing it, as it has a greater influence on your life, and therefore requires a greater value through emotional attachment.

I believe that if people are truly concerned about themself, they would recognize that the many mistakes they would make in a future based on a false pretext would be much worse than acknowledging one's immediate mistakes and correcting them so that way they do not have to continue living with them. Real world consequences remain with a person for the rest of their life, while emotional pain is short-lived and can be put in the past. This is why I view the emotional pain associated with mental realignment as a much lesser pain as paying the consequences for continually making mistakes based on misconceptions of the world and why is so much more important to understand reality correctly and to adjust one's views to do so.