Who Knows?

We ARE because we KNOW. We will be a stone – jad – if we didn’t know or much lesser in terms of intelligence. In the Indian tradition, we have the Pramaana Shashtra – the theory of knowledge - epistemology. Without going into that, we today have size of knowledge, certainly the availability of it, has increased many fold. There are still giant flaws in KNOWING and PROBLEMS with it. This piece is contemplation on knowing.

Two key types of knowing, amongst others, is Direct Perception called Pratyaksha and INFERENCE - Anumaana. Lot of times the inputs – what we see affects what we perceive and vice versa. Take media, they will make you feel that what you are seeing is all there is. Often it is content out of context that gets extrapolated. Like plague in Surat. BBC TRIED to make the world feel that India got plague when one person was detected with plague.

Our biases, conditioning, experiences, judgments colour our perception. If you like a girl, and she smiles at you, one feels she is probably attracted to you. Or when someone is honest, people feel they aren’t polite. When polite, people may think they are fake! The list is endless and cause problems. These are Errors of knowing. Someone has said: Perception is reality, but not the truth. Thoreau wrote: “It