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Knowledge vs trust
Sep. 2nd, 2007 06:44 amFrom time to time my friend ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
siderea does posts which one might gather under the general head of The Human Race For Those Who Haven't Quite Got The Hang Of It (which seems to be quite a few of us on this bus). I think that, were I as learned and talented in the field as she is, I could produce something similar on this subject. As it is, you'll have to be content with the usual incoherent ramblings.
In Diane Duane's Star Trek novel "My Enemy, My Ally," the McGuffin, as it were, is a new technique which will confer on the Romulans the psionic abilities of their cogenitors (is that a word?) the Vulcans, without benefit of the centuries of mental training by which the Vulcans gained these abilities. This, in a society as warlike as the Rihannsu (the Romulans' own name for themselves, Paramount notwithstanding), is rightly seen as disastrous, since honour and trust would thereby become things of the past. This got me thinking.
We prize knowledge highly...but we also place great importance on trust, which has as a necessary prerequisite *lack* of knowledge. It's meaningless for me to say "I trust you" if I *know* what you're going to do, or if I can find out without your knowing about it. For there to be trust, there must be a barrier between me and what I'm trusting you on, a cloud of unknowing. There has to be the chance that you will fail to merit my trust, or that you will succeed, and I have to allow that chance to remain, and still choose to trust.
So is trust the good and necessary thing we believe it is? If it were possible to *know*, wouldn't that be better? Logically, there's no question. To trust is to speculate in advance of the data, a cardinal error. Without certain knowledge, the mind must be kept open, not biased either way, and any hypothesis formed on the basis of prior experience is just that, a hypothesis of equal value to its opposite. But of course we aren't logical by nature, and never have been.
We feel better when we feel able to trust, when our knowledge of what someone has done in the past leads us to believe we can predict what they will do in the future...but if that were truly so, we would be machines, not humans possessed of free will, another quality we prize highly which necessarily includes the freedom to lie, to cheat and to betray.
There may be more on this later, when my brain is less porridgelike.
siderea does posts which one might gather under the general head of The Human Race For Those Who Haven't Quite Got The Hang Of It (which seems to be quite a few of us on this bus). I think that, were I as learned and talented in the field as she is, I could produce something similar on this subject. As it is, you'll have to be content with the usual incoherent ramblings.In Diane Duane's Star Trek novel "My Enemy, My Ally," the McGuffin, as it were, is a new technique which will confer on the Romulans the psionic abilities of their cogenitors (is that a word?) the Vulcans, without benefit of the centuries of mental training by which the Vulcans gained these abilities. This, in a society as warlike as the Rihannsu (the Romulans' own name for themselves, Paramount notwithstanding), is rightly seen as disastrous, since honour and trust would thereby become things of the past. This got me thinking.
We prize knowledge highly...but we also place great importance on trust, which has as a necessary prerequisite *lack* of knowledge. It's meaningless for me to say "I trust you" if I *know* what you're going to do, or if I can find out without your knowing about it. For there to be trust, there must be a barrier between me and what I'm trusting you on, a cloud of unknowing. There has to be the chance that you will fail to merit my trust, or that you will succeed, and I have to allow that chance to remain, and still choose to trust.
So is trust the good and necessary thing we believe it is? If it were possible to *know*, wouldn't that be better? Logically, there's no question. To trust is to speculate in advance of the data, a cardinal error. Without certain knowledge, the mind must be kept open, not biased either way, and any hypothesis formed on the basis of prior experience is just that, a hypothesis of equal value to its opposite. But of course we aren't logical by nature, and never have been.
We feel better when we feel able to trust, when our knowledge of what someone has done in the past leads us to believe we can predict what they will do in the future...but if that were truly so, we would be machines, not humans possessed of free will, another quality we prize highly which necessarily includes the freedom to lie, to cheat and to betray.
There may be more on this later, when my brain is less porridgelike.