The Race Between Knowledge And Wisdom

This thread invites you to consider the relationship between knowledge and wisdom. Here's a few thoughts to get the ball rolling....

Science develops knowledge which gives us more power, and wisdom is the judgment to use this power in a sane, constructive manner.

To begin considering the relationship between knowledge and wisdom, we might consider kids. We attempt to deny kids access to things like cars, alcohol, drugs, guns and sex etc based on the premise that these kids are not wise enough to successfully manage the power inherent in such things. We conclude, too much power for that level of wisdom.

I'll propose that knowledge in society grows exponentially. That is, the more we know, the easier it is to learn new things. It's kind of like a jig saw puzzle, where the more pieces of the puzzle that are in place, the easier and faster it is to complete the rest of the puzzle.

Wisdom in society appears to grow slowly. We can point to some substantial advances in social justice and related wisdom type issues, but usually we're lucky if wisdom grows at all from generation to generation, and there is a long pattern of the same lessons having to be learned over and over again. It's almost as if wisdom and judgment have to be rebuilt kinda from the ground up in each individual and generation.

If you generally buy the above, then we might propose that knowledge grows exponentially, while wisdom grows incrementally at best.

If this is true, then we can project that the relationship between knowledge/power and wisdom/judgement will become ever more out of balance over time. Both knowledge and wisdom will grow, but at very different rates. We might predict that future generations will have much more knowledge and thus power than we do, but only marginally more judgment and wisdom.

As just one example, today's humans are somewhat wiser than humans of 100 years ago, but now we have vastly more knowledge driven power, the ability to erase all of human civilization in less than an hour.

The bottom line question, will human beings be able to handle all the power science is giving us?

Ok, your turn, go!

 

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Have you considered that this is because what we find out is what DOESN'T work rather than what does? Perhaps wisdom is more an absolute, like morality, and what we keep trying to substitute is relative, like ethics. I submit if we ever develop a science of morality, wisdom will expand exponentially too.
Johansen's Laws of Morality:

1. Sapient beings have the right to voluntary action.
   . . . Corollary: it is wrong to involve someone in an action involuntarily.
2. You cannot do good by doing wrong.
   . . . Note: the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
3. Like all toxic substances, government is subject to hormesis.
   . . . Observation: never expect a small successful government program to work at full scale.

I guess the first law is derivative from the zeroth law that all things have the right to exhibit their nature.

 

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I think everyone having an attitude of not fighting against people but against harmful things like disease and lack of knowledge is key.

 

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I agree with all your observations.

As to becoming wiser, IMO we only seem grow in wisdom after experiencing a true disaster. We knew the destructive power of the a-bomb, yet we used it on innocent Japanese civilians several times. Only after we saw the horror of radiation poisoning and birth defects due to radiation damage to DNA, did we realize how easy we fall prey to the lures of Pandora's box. But these lessons may come as a total surprise to us from unexpected results and unintended consequences.

 

Yes this society have grown in knowledge , about wisdom definitively not in wisdom. Example War brings causality and pain. World war 11 ended in 1945, one generation passed 20 -25 years , we got yourself into Cuban missiles and Vietnam , one more generation 20 - 25 years we got our self partially into Iraq. Then come Jr Bush wanted to show our knowledge with stupidity and destroyed an ordered society into chaos, and started an other calamity in Afghanistan Oh wait I forgot Somalia , Granada. Why are meddling into other counties internal affair> Now this guy Obama is using new tactic ,flying drones into so called friendly country, and opening frontiers in Yemen. So we have the THE KNOWLEDGE, HOW ABOUT WISDOM

 

While some of what you say is true, as history will testify to, you fail to make the link between what happened and how and why it happened. But much more importantly than that, you fail to give your version of what that history would be like if it were to have occurred your way. In other words, things are the way they are now because of things happening the way they did. Tell me how it should have been? You know, give your solutions to those world problems that caused those high level decisions to be made the way they were, and tell me how history would have unfolded according to your way. On second thought, spare me.

 

Will we be able to handle the power? It will be a mixed bag. It depends on what you consider handling it well. Have humans ever handled power well consistently over time? I would have to admit, no.

 

You make some great points.

I think humans will use science as we use it today, to further our understanding of the universe we live in. We also use science to better our lives, to make our lives more comfortable, more entertaining, more economical, etc.

There also could be a negative side, as there is with most things. Bad people can use the power of science to do bad things. I don't know if humans can pass that obstacle or not. Only time will tell, and then it will be crystal clear what went wrong. Hard to say now.

 

So we remove the natural phenomena which controls population growth to some degree (even though we're at a planet bulging 7 billion already), and give each person greater and greater knowledge (power)). Where do you see that going ?

 

Which people? I've been fighting against the coal mines sine 1973, but it doesn't seem to do any good.

 

Professor Bartlett has an excellent lecture on the "exponential function" which in the end will dictate human development and population growth.

http://www.albartlett.org/presentations/arithmetic_population_energy_video1.html
http://www.albartlett.org/presentations/arithmetic_population_energy_video2.html

 

Thank you for the replies! How do you feel about the following?

If you accept the basic premise of the opening post, then it seems we are required to do some combination of the following.

1) Slow the development of science/knowledge/power.

2) Accelerate the development of wisdom/judgment/sanity.

3) Both.

What are your thoughts on this equation? Is this the right equation? Any chance of it happening?

Here's an experiment that might be interesting.

I like to watch the Charlie Rose show as it's perhaps the most intelligent show on television. He's a good interviewer, and he has a wide range of very smart and accomplished people on. Nobel prize winners, leading scientists, doctors, politicians, writers, thinkers, playwrights etc, the leaders of our society in almost every field. Highly recommended.

Watch the show if you wish. See if you can find a show where the topic of this thread is discussed in a focused manner.

Point being, the cultural assumption of our society, including it's most thoughtful educated minds appears to be....

1) More science is always better. Faster is better.

2) Wisdom is a personal matter for your church, shrink or self help book etc.

It looks to me as if we're going to push the pedal to the metal and drive right over some catastrophic cliff at full speed, like Thelma and Louise.

I'm up on the 14th floor, sitting out on the window ledge, with my feet dangling over the street below. Talk me down.

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As Prof. Bartlett states, this is the greatest challenge man faces.
What we consider to be good and prolongs life (i.e. healthcare) in the end is a bad thing, as the earth cannot support an unlimited number of people.
What we consider bad and shortens life (i.e. smoking) in the end is a good thing as it limits population growth and resource usage.

The dilemma is that either we choose to voluntarily limit population growth or nature will do it for us, probably in a very unpleasant way.
Then again, the prospect of a "Soylent Green" type assisted suicide seems counter intuitive.

 

You're making this fun!

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I beg you not to jump! You have so much to live for. I'd like to give you some reasons if you'll afford me the opportunity.

Science is there for us to improve our understanding of the universe. More understanding means we have more tools to fix problems with. More tools are better in the sense that the more you have the less likely the chance that you'll not have the right tool for the job. So in that sense, more tools are always better.

However, like everything in the universe, mass evolves to space. The tools require constant maintenance. Nothing stays the same for any amount of time. More time equals more change.

Being of the maintenance field I can tell you that not all people use tools properly. Believe it or not, some will use a screwdriver to pry things. Some will use a hammer to persuade the object a little more that it needs to do what it is told to do. Some will even try to use a screwdriver as a chisel.

So more tools (more science, more knowledge) is better if used properly, but if used improperly can spell disaster!

Wisdom is in the mind of the beholder, it is not in the hands of the church. All people have wisdom, some more than others. Wisdom is the application of knowledge. When one has knowledge and there is a problem to be solved, wisdom is how the knowledge is used in order to try to solve the problem. Just because one has knowledge does not mean that one can solve the problem. One needs WISDOM in order to apply that knowledge properly and solve the problem. All the knowledge in the world is useless with no wisdom.

 

i don't think we have any choice but to handle power from knowledge well because no knowledge basically results in failure and demise. I see a main reason we don't handle the power well is because people see other people as competitors, which they are, sadly enough, which is a way of looking at things that I refer to as a bad attitude. If we can realize that we do better cooperating and fighting against harmful things like earth-bound asteroids, we can do much better than on our own.

 

People fighting other people is a tragic way. There are ways that we can do things to not hurt people and it is good for everyone to find them out and try to do them. The coal miners have failed you and it causes you to have to try to defend yourself. Society must try to work harder to prevent these conflicts. We're smart enough to figure it out, i think.

 

Drive to reproduce is one of the harmful (natural) things. I sure don't want us to go back to the harsh times before knowledge. I recently read a story in Smithsonian magazine of very hard lives led by a hermit family in Siberia, cut off from everything for 40 years. They basically lived everyday hanging by a thread, figuratively speaking.

 

Knowledge is greatly better than the alternative. I'm with the scientists on that, but not on their idea about the spreading of wisdom. We need to develop good attitudes toward ourselves and others and religion isn't the answer because it's too open to a multitude of personal interpretations.

It turns out that morality is programmed into our mammalian DNA, and we should try to develop the good aspects of that and discourage the bad aspects. We ought to try to change from a culture of competing against other people and we shouldn't accept attitudes that promote competition against others as good anymore. One way to do that is to focus on competing against our own past selves to become better.

 

It is easier to make a wooden spear, than to know whether it is right or wrong to kill your fellow human being with it.

This idea that "too much population is a bad thing" is circular reasoning, because "too much" of anything already sets the precedence that it is a bad thing. Is 7 billion human beings on Earth too much? No and yes. Yes - because at the rate of how we are living, it is going to reach breaking point. No - because we don't "need" to live at that rate. Population has as much to do with wisdom as it has to do with knowledge. Let me ask you this, if the world discovered technology that could produce enough food in quantity to feed the entire world (knowledge), would it solve world hunger?

Well it has, the world has long been in the position to potentially solve world hunger, but the obvious imbalanced distribution of resources and overconsumption of countries leads to no application (wisdom) of this knowledge. Before you disagree that world hunger can be solved, ask yourself how much a human being actually needs to sustain themselves. The idea of 3 meals per day is completely cultural, the average meal is almost a feast compared to what some people in the world eat. We are overproducers, but we are also overconsumers in all our facets of lifestyle.

Imagine a piece of pie, the western world has horded the majority of the pie while the rest are given what's leftover, a smaller share of the pie PLUS how much we're willing to give to them as "charity". Would it be fair to then point at the other people and exclaim "Hey! why are those people having so many children. They don't even have enough to sustain themselves, let alone their children." For people that have the audacity to do this, they would like to believe that those people are wholly responsible for their own problems.

Although, while it is true that having several kids makes an already bad situation worse, and many mouths can make a small slice even smaller in a shorter amount of time, you can see who is really to blame. Now, while it is very strange to blame yourself for some starving child somewhere in Africa, we're not to blame as individuals, but as a society. While I have done nothing to worsen the situation, I have done nothing to repair it either, so to do nothing is to accept the status quo. For everyone in the world to eat and take enough for themselves to just survive, would you forego all the luxuries and amenities afforded to us? Personally, and I know this is wrong, but I'd say no - its a selfish moral choice. People are only out for themselves and their family, not the entire world. And instead of fixing the world, we already have enough family problems on our plate. But I'm not going to get it twisted, I know I have a larger piece of the pie, and I'm not sharing it with people that need it the most.

So when people say "there's too many human beings in the world", they never think of the issue in terms of themselves, as if they're up for the chopping block. No, they think of the mass millions of poor people below them that are a burden on the world, and continue to propagate the problems for themselves. So in terms of population debate, you can see how it has more to do with wisdom than knowledge. There is enough knowledge in the world, we just can't seem to stop killing each other or stop looking at others as deadweight.

 

Let's take Vietnam There were over 55000 of our man kilted and perhaps double the amount of injured , we have killed thousand of Vietnamese and so on . You tell me what have we accomplished ?

I have to go I will be back tonight .