Philosophy: how to expand the boundaries of knowledge?

All knowledge items are divided into two categories: what is given in the sensation itself (table, chair) and what can be learned only through reflection. Wearable things can not be touched, use senses or any technical devices. It becomes very difficult to understand metaphysics. Love, morality, virtue, etc.

You can not hold and touch, you need a special body to disclose these concepts. Even worse with the ability to understand new knowledge different from what is already in my head. When a person learns the objects of the external world, everything is simple.

This is a wrench, they unscrew the nut to the left, and turn it to the right. There is no contradiction with the existing knowledge. Yesterday I published a post about a political distributed network. One of the commentators told me a lot that I do not know what I'm writing. In his opinion, even 10 people are not able to agree among themselves, so the "Fuhrer" is needed to command these incompetent people.

This person, and I have before, sits the notion of social life as a kind of centralized mechanism, according to which directives are lowered from above, the non-fulfillment of which is punished by a massacre. And the reason is quite trivial - the general mistrust of people makes them incompetent, and the only cure is to create a total vertical without private initiative.

If a person already has ideas about a certain subject, how can one change it, and, most importantly, expand knowledge by moving to a more complex system of understanding?

The first in the matter of knowledge was distinguished by Plato of Athens. He has a dialogue "Menon", in which Socrates, asking questions to an illiterate youth, led him to an understanding of Pythagoras' theorem.

According to Plato of Athens, the soul of a person directly perceives ideas, but does not remember about them. The task of man - when he comes across the objects of the sensory world, starting from them, to pass to the knowledge of ideas through the mechanism of recollection.

So the knowledge of centralized, decentralized and distributed political networks is already contained in the minds of people. Simply prolongs life, the environment of general distrust and fear pushes people towards totalitarianism and paternalism. But if you think about it a little, you can arrange life in a completely different way.

The next generator of ideas in this area was Nikolai Kuzansky, a thinker of the 15th century. He was one of the first to talk about religious tolerance and allowed the existence of different views. Poklonskoe and Orthodox traditionalists who set fire to cars and cinemas probably did not hear about him.

But most importantly - Nikolai Kuzansky put everyone at a dead end with his statement about academic ignorance: I only know that I do not know anything. This he took from Socrates and developed further. He drew a circle and said: the set of points of space around the circle is the area of ​​knowledge, beyond the circle is the unthinkable. The circle itself is a group of points of contact with the unknown.

I learned something new, the circle increased, and the group of points of contact with the unknown increased. The more I know, the more contact with the unknown. That is why people who are limited in knowledge, having fewer points with the unknown, believe that they know a lot and are ready to give advice on any topic.

Idiots do not doubt the truth of judgments, they do not know that the world is very complicated, and consciousness places limitations on the very possibility of expanding knowledge. If your cup is full, poured water flows past, and the mechanism of pre-release of the head from the old knowledge is very difficult and complicated, both in the psychological sense and in the methodological.

The mechanism of expanding knowledge is very interesting, and in a bright literary form, described Marcel Proust. A person reflects on an intelligible object with the help of memories, he creates a continent from them, layers heaping his ideas about the subject.

They essentially are a layering of various misunderstandings, and the emerging continent is nothing else than the man-made hell out of lies and deception.Sensual perception, carrying this burden, makes a shift, tension causes a lightning strike, and truth emerges.

Dante has a wonderful symbol in this regard. He sits on the back of Gorion - a monster of lies and deception, using it as a machine, rising from hell to the truth, having been internally changed. Mikhail Bulgakov continued the roll call with Dante. Satan is sitting in the theater and asks: "Have the townspeople changed internally?" Truth takes away the whole previous life from a person.

That person who has gone on a slippery path of knowledge ceases to exist, and is born in the unbearable torments of the other, although the outer shell remains the same. Truth selects the world, that small circle is already known, and man by his effort acquires a larger circle, another world, more complex.

Marcel gave the whole world a mechanism for expanding knowledge. In order to learn new things, it is necessary to create a new temple of knowledge (knowingly false) by means of creativity, so that the idea passes the test, then a window of opportunity for discovering the unknown before appears only then.

It is creativity that creates the organ, machine or rocket (the Proustic novel is that), which carries the person along the curve of the trajectory from the point of limited knowledge to the point of expansion, where the person becomes another. The basic condition for new knowledge is internal change.

Being in the midst of fear and distrust towards people, it is impossible to pass from the totalitarian model of the organization of society to a civil society of independent, free people, equal before the law.

To understand the mechanism of a political distributed network, you need to block your fear and distrust of people, you need to change internally, then you can move from an understanding of the hierarchical centralized management system to the distributed one.

All photos from Google.