Noam Chomsky - The More You Learn..

I think you've already kind of touched upon this but over the course of your illustrious career have world affairs being become increasingly familiar other Estill areas that seem alien to you about areas that can still shock and surprise take Twitter for example Oh totally area to me I'm not gonna get near it all right it's a kind of depressing question because the answer is virtually everything I mean even in the fields in which I've worked all my life say professionally the more you learn the less you've the more you realize the less you know I mean as you what happens is standard in the sciences but everywhere else too you know you you look you you learn more you think you're approaching some kind of a horizon but in fact the horizon is receding and the more you learn the more you see that horizon is very far away that's true and I could give you examples from my own field but it's true in the core Sciences now it takes a physics you know the star of the sciences and they got some problems like one problem is they can't find 90% of the mass energy in the universe it's it's postulated because otherwise nothing works but can't find it can't find any evidence that is there there's pretty serious problem I remember about 10 years ago this one was finally overcome about ten years ago the big the Hubble telescope which is out in space it was bringing in tons of information about outer space and there was a time when it turned out that the that had very powerful evidence that the universe was considerably younger than its oldest stars that's pretty serious problem the and anyway in any field you are that's what you find all the time when you turn to human affair you know our understanding is extremely thin almost everything is you're learning all the time from other people from you know your children your friends your enemies so depths of human possibilities and capacities that we can barely perceive when you look at different fields I mean sometimes one of them having a boring interview on the telephone and I'm trying to think about something else because the questions are too boring I start looking around the room where I work you know full of books piled up to the sky and so and I all different kinds of topics and then start calculating how many centuries would I have to live reading 24 hours a day every day of the week to make a dent in what I'd like to learn about things it's pretty depressing so the answer to the question I think is you know we have little bits of understanding glimpses a little bit of light here and there but a tremendous amount of darkness which is a challenge you know it being life to be pretty boring if we understood everything better if we don't understand anything and know that we don't that's the important part

Channel: Chomsky's Philosophy

Views: 92,409

Keywords: knowledge, chomsky

Id: KTDBWHnyojI

Length: 3min 29sec (209 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 07 2016