On Sufficient Knowledge

Between losing focus and grasping an idea is this wandering state of observation. It is as if the mind is just taking in the shape and form of a concept and noting it, not trying to interpret it or grasp it. It’s kind of like when someone is teaching you to put together a machine for the first time when you don’t know what the machine is or what it does. Instead of grasping it right off the bat, you just watch the parts be put together until the final product takes shape and its operation becomes more evident.

This is the scientific stance on learning. No one should assume that because we see the machine and its shape, or even if we have been trained in its operation or even its engineering, that that leads to truly understanding how it works. To do this you would have to explain away some of the fundamentals that science hasn’t gotten down to yet, such as how time works, how things exist, and why there is not just perfect, all-defying nonexistence.

So, rather than say we truly know something, we instead arrive at a stance where we only define what we have sufficient understanding to do with that knowledge. For example, you may not know how the lawn mower sustains itself in space and time, but that does not matter, because the only knowledge you need about the lawn mower is the knowledge it takes to mow the lawn.

Though science inevitably strives to find absolute knowledge about how the universe works, to even perform an experiment, scientists need sufficient knowledge to run those experiments and come up with hypotheses. Thus, absolute knowledge and sufficient knowledge are very different things, and most people are only concerned with or speak of absolute knowledge.

Now, as people, whether we arrive at understanding through having a scientific stance or through the slow accumulation of simple “sufficient facts” learned through experience, we come to know very little about specific things. Unlike in science, for a fact to be sufficient, it does not matter where the idea comes from, as long as it does the job. You might think that you work for the king managing the kingdom’s finances, but if you are really just an accountant, the general result of you doing the bookkeeping is enough to make that knowledge sufficient for the task.

To think you are doing something and actually be doing something else may not be the common norm of how things happen; rather, most people’s understandings are built on reasonable and sufficient knowledge. However, it does not take much to see where it becomes problematic if even a few truly incorrect ideas about the world might prevent a person from making progress in fairly large parts of their lives.

While there is work being done in CBT to correct such core misconceptions and better a person, these efforts often work within much larger patterns of misconceptions that are less harmful but are still inhibiting in some way. The goal of philosophy, then, is to rid a person of these misconceptions—at least that is the goal of moral philosophy. Having good metaphysics, being competent in epistemology, and forming sound moral arrangements in life, though all human-centric, are the foundations of what philosophical work hopes to achieve.

And yet, it took me ten years to wander around and figure out what the end product of doing philosophy would look like. Somewhere during this process of trying to figure out how to apply philosophy to my goal of unlocking human potential, I stopped grasping and started putting together the puzzle. I only began doing that when I actually had enough pieces to see a glimpse of a picture starting to form.

And yet, as I form this notion of a philosophy that does what I intend it to do—after having that intent shifted multiple times by a deepened understanding of the human condition—I still have yet to motivate myself.