Meta-Knowledge!
The truth is rather like a lollipop. On the surface, it appears to be nothing more than a sweet suckly thing with which to nourish your senses. But underneath, it holds a great subtext of meaning, that only becomes obvious when you understand all sides of the situation.
Understanding comes in stages. You start out with the first stage, which is reasoning. You notice a concept, and first decide to take it into your mind to figure out where it belongs. This is often the stage where many people will drop it, assuming that whatever it is, it’s either too complicated for them to understand, or most likely meaningless anyway.
Reasoning is a fun stage. Before you actually have the knowledge of what you’re working with, you’re left trying to fit it into systems you already have available. Sometimes the inadequacies become obvious immediately, and you’re forced to modify the system or create an entirely new one to deal with the situation.
.oO(Well, if they were willing to give me a lollipop, they can’t be ALL bad)
Sometimes they’re more rigid, and you instead modify your view of the situation to fit your system. .oO(They gave me a lollipop! Clearly they are trying to lull me into a false sense of security so they can corrupt my precious bodily fluids!)
After reasoning, you get to experimentation, working within the system as it’s been interpreted to figure out whether you were right or not, and get a better working knowledge of what you’re dealing with. The effectiveness of this stage is directly related to just how willing you are to be wrong. In either of the lollipop cases, being too trusting of the initial supposition would be highly unlikely to reveal it’s opposite in time. Either the trusting one will unwittingly give themselves over to destruction, or the paranoid one will instantly whack their would-be assailant with a frying pan and/or run away terrified.
To be truly thorough, the first two steps will likely be repeated until there is a genuine understanding of the facet being examined. At this point we come to the third stage, Integration. Just about everything in life is intricately connected with dozens or hundreds of other things that all serve to verify truth. For instance, should the lollipop giver be sinister, one could likely find that they had several orders of lollipops, all intended to be used for the luring of unsuspecting victims. Or the kind lollipop giver will have many other relationships in their life where there would be found testimonies of their generosity and thoughtfulness(or just a general love of sweet things).
Integration can be a tricky one, because of how encompassing it is. Luckily, most things that are true will integrate fairly effortlessly into an environment that is well understood. It can then act as a sort of test, confirming the veracity of your discovery with what you’ve learned so far. Often, it will even give you new ways to verify what you already know with the discovery of this new knowledge.
When integration fails however, you’re forced into a conflict. Either the new information is wrong, your old information is wrong, or you have an incomplete understanding of the situation. The simplest solution is often that the new information is wrong. After all, it would require the least amount of excising to resolve the conflict. However, if you expect to have real knowledge, you cannot simply assume this. You must return to reasoning and experimentation, only now, you must apply it to the principles of integration.
The search for truth must therefore be infinitely recursive. Every new piece of knowledge must be integrated into the whole, which means the whole is at stake withe very new piece of knowledge gained. This can easily be frightening, and cause people to reject new knowledge rather than to continue assimilating new pieces. When you’re young, your accumulated knowledge is small, and the risk of being wrong about it all is low. As people grow older, they find themselves more and more attached to their accumulated experience, and the risk of new knowledge can cause them to fear the acquisition of anything that goes against what they have accumulated.
However, this fear can be moved past, and so long as one is willing to be wrong, to examine all options, and is willing to be wrong about everything they’ve learned so far, there is no reason why knowledge cannot progress indefinitely.
I hope.
