"What's knowledge? Who introduced the term knowledge into my life? Who teach me the knowledge?" are the kind of questions I have been trying to answer for quite sometime. After putting so much effort to quench my thirst or quest for knowledge about knowledge, I learned few things. One of those things is the first post of this blog i.e. about knowledge. So, here it goes.....
Knowledge of an incident is an amalgam of our beliefs, perception, cognition and conviction towards/of/about that particular incident. Looks like a very random definition, doesn't it? Let me take you through some examples. Example 1: A child who doesn't know anything about this world, starts learning about the same from ppl like family, his age group etc. So, in general, the beliefs related to ghosts, boochis, etc. are injected into child's mind by family and friends. The child who didn't hear anything about ghosts in childhood doesn't get scared,while walking in dark, because of ghosts. With the given beliefs, a person can perceive the knowledge through his convictions or cognition about the real life incidents he is coming across in a day to day life. So, here the knowledge is developed by that particular mind, based upon his discussions with friends, based on the stories he has read and so on. I am not trying to find out the correctness of the knowledge here, but to know what exactly it is and how it is being developed.
In the example, we can observe two things; one being the non-absoluteness of the knowledge and second being the biased and socially constructed nature of the knowledge. Non-absoluteness refers to the idea that says "no knowledge is perfect" or rather "no one has perfect knowledge about anything". What we generally do is read something and then we assume that we have gained enough knowledge and then start making decisions or start coming to conclusions about others (persons, events and ideas). However, the fact is that the knowledge we learned is not yet complete. I would like to discuss this perfectness in a different topic and want to concentrate here on biased and socially constructed nature of knowledge here.
In this 21st century, 90% of the people in the world are being influenced by media and movies and 99% of the youth get influenced by friends and family either in good or bad way. No one ever say that his parents are bad, even if the child is suffering because of the mistakes made by his parents. (Example 2: If a person, who has had a health problem in childhood, was not treated well nor shown to a doctor because of the ignorance of parents, would have to suffer in his youth and later. Though parents might get attentive after knowing his condition and after the damage is done, child never blames or finds mistakes in his parents. Similar theory can be applied to the love between child and parents). So, the idea here is that, the knowledge of the child is biased.
Now the question is how to make this knowledge more absolute and unbiased. How to attain the so called saturation in satisfaction in quenching the thirst? I have read lot of religious books since my childhood. Almost all these books end up talking about absolute knowledge and absolute satisfaction etc. They term it as the ultimate goal of human life, self realization(Gita), attaining the supreme(Iskcon), finding the answers for your un-answered questions or needs (Buddhism) and blah blah. My intuitional feeling is that, the concept of god has started rising from the thoughts of perfection or having perfect and unbiased knowledge and the element of devotion and worship was added to it later by some societies to ensure the smooth going. Though, the concept of God cannot be explained here in this topic, I just wanted introduce my intuitional thoughts here and so, I did. Now, coming to the perfect knowledge, all these religious books are true in the context of attaining the absoluteness of the knowledge and to make it more and more unbiased. So, what these religious texts stress upon is the socially constructed nature of the reality and the fact that there exists no perfect knowledge and no unbiased knowledge. What we have got to do is, to keep knowing more and more, to think broad, to accept all the ideologies equally and to improve upon them.
Sree..!!!
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