A delicious dream and epistemology

This morning i had a dream so delicious i could have sunk my teeth into it; such was the pleasure i felt this morning on waking up. All i have left from it now is an image of a round, wooden table seen from above, and of small trees that grew on it, artificial and ornamented, but beautiful nonetheless. I can't relate this to anything, so the pleasure felt is all the more rich and mysterious.

On a different topic, i have just come back from the Epistemology plenary. I'm not involved in teaching this course anymore, but i wanted to hear the first presentation to the new class.

Rodolfo, a student from Guatemala, asked if we can know anything from sure, and so Alan, seeing this as a possible door through which nihilism might slip in, tried to plug the opening by saying that there are certain people who are willing to die for what they believe they know. The implication was that these people must indeed know something.

But such an answer is too simple in many ways, and rather than close anything, it points in many differents directions, leaving the asker unsatisfied... Which, now that i think of it, is a great thing to do, particularly when teaching a class.

But Rodolfo was not attempting to say that in his opinion nothing can be known. On the contrary, i believe it's Alan who's been perched on that abyss at one time or another, and that's why he took the question to imply Rodolfo might be in that danger. Mislead as he may be, it is touching to see a teacher rush to the rescue, pedagogical sword unsheathed and all. Of course, there's some paternalistic patronizing going on, too, but such things are hard to avoid.

In any case, i know Rudy, and i know his question was actually coming out of his deeply rooted religious beliefs, which felt challenged by the relativity suggested by some of the presenter's ideas (which was Assam, not Alan).

Personally, i don't know if absolute knowledge is attainable by beings such as we. Still, we should never give up, and always LOOK for it, even though our own language is so imperfect that, the more we learn, the more difficult it becomes to use it to clearly express this road to knowledge with precision.

Most of what we know we don't, and in fact it really lies on the road to knowledge.
In order to have the will and the tools to travel this road, we convince ourselves of the absoluteness of what we possess, and call it knowledge. This has to be: there is knowledge. But this knowledge can be expanded, always, and in that expansion
process, previous knowledge can be contradicted, sometimes with great difficulty and pain, particularly if a lot of identity has been invested into the known. Thus, if we want to be consistent, we must say there is no knowledge, only the road to knowledge. And hence our paradox.

It isn't really a paradox, though. It's hard to live with doubt, but that we must have, particularly if we want to keep our curiosity, and be like children.