Ignorance Considered Un-Blissful

I don't like the old aphorism, "Ignorance is bliss." It's often repeated, in one sense or another, but I don't think it's ever true in any literal sense. Please allow me to elaborate.

Does knowing less make you happier? Some people would say 'yes', and some people would say 'no', and I think that intelligent individuals on both sides could probably give some kind of reasonable argument to defend their position. In particular, I think it is quite reasonable to say that knowing more does indeed provide more opportunities for complication in one's life. Knowledge brings responsibility and worry, both of which can become burdensome to even the most responsible or courageous among us. In fact, it seems likely that the saying that "ignorance is bliss" originated in the observation that knowing more gives more to worry about.

The motivating observation that knowledge brings worry seems reasonable, so let's explore it. Let's presume that a worry-free state is a blissful state, and let us also suppose that you know nothing -- nothing at all! If you know nothing, it seems to follow that you would have nothing to worry about, and having nothing to worry about, it seems to reasonably follow that you would be situated in a blissful state. (If you know nothing at all and you still haven't attained bliss, then ignorance-as-bliss would appear to be thoroughly invalidated right off the bat.) The chain of deductions seems sound enough, but what exactly could it mean to "know nothing"? Personally, I think it seems absurd to postulate a well-defined mental state where you somehow "know nothing" (without, of course, getting into a tortured semantics of what constitutes "knowledge"). All the same, let's suppose there is such a state, and let's suppose that, somehow or another, you were able to attain it. Then what? Does it seem plausible you could stay there?

There's a respected tradition in modern science of analogizing the dynamics of energy (heat in particular) to the flows of information, dating back to the work of pioneers such as Shannon (and the equally essential contributors to this tradition, such as Lebesgue and Boltzman and many others who are much less often credited in popular science literature). It is a gross understatement that a perfect thermal insulator (i.e. a surface that conducts no heat whatsoever) would be very difficult to construct. Try it at home if you don't believe me! (Or, see the nice summary of some relevant proofs in Enrico Fermi's "Thermodynamics", (1956).) In an analogous sense, it would be extremely difficult to construct a perfect informational insulator. Try this one at home too! One way to phrase our "perfect ignorance" or "know-nothing" problem, then, is in terms of constructing a perfect insulator. Whole sub-disciplines of engineering are devoted to developing better thermal insulators, and whole areas of research in mathematics are focused upon understanding the differential equations describing the conduction of heat. Keeping things that are hot from heating up things that are not so hot turns out to be amazingly useful, and much harder than it may seem at first. If the analogy between knowledge and heat seems strange, consider this: extremely active areas of theoretical computer security are just as occupied with the problem of keeping information from crossing boundaries it isn't supposed to cross. A classic formulation of this challenge is known as the "Confinement Problem" and, stated succinctly, it is the problem of ensuring that a particular computer system never "leaks" information that it needs to keep secret. (See Lampson, "A note on the confinement problem" in Communications of the ACM, October 1973.) In essence, both the thermal insulator problem and the Confinement Problem are occupied with making sure that what's in one place -- whether heat or information -- doesn't somehow find its way into another place where it isn't wanted. More succinctly, you cannot keep information confined to just one particular place. As a consequence, it would seem that you cannot keep all information out of your mind forever, even if you wanted to.

Now a problem arises. If you can't keep information out of your mind, you're going to start knowing things, whether you want to or not. There are various ways you might try to resist the informational torrent of your own experience but, apart from self-immolation, it would require a concerted effort through every moment of the day to sustain your attempts to block all sensory input, not to mention to instantly snuff out any stray thoughts from inside your own mind. Something important has happened here: without realizing it, you've developed a worry. Moreover, it is a worry that is inextricably rooted in your own desire to be free from worry. Paradoxically, knowing that ignorance is bliss gives you just enough knowledge to form a worry and work yourself into a decidedly un-blissful state. Total ignorance is fundamentally unstable and impermanent. This is no more strange than a hot cup of coffee eventually getting cold.

(Compare the "worry about worry" in the preceding paragraph to divergent oscillatory behavior in feedback systems with too high a latency. Norbert Wiener gives some poetic descriptions of these in "Cybernetics: Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine" (1948). Compare also to a classic parable from the literature of Zen Buddhism, namely the story of the girl who believed her head had somehow been removed without her knowledge; a retelling can be found in "The Three Pillars of Zen", Kapleau (1989).)

There is some extremely wild territory we could wander into at this point, but let's remain focused on the matter at hand. What I've essentially argued is that, even if ignorance is blissful, it's hardly something you can count on. A consequence of this is either that you're going to have your blissful ignorance suddenly and very unpleasantly interrupted at some point unforeseeable by you ("the rude awakening") or you're going to worry yourself sick in anticipation ("it's the waiting that's the worst"). Ignorance is not bliss at all; quite the contrary. Ignorance is danger. Ignorance is fear.

What is especially interesting about this line of argument is that it is perfectly scalable. We need not assume any sort of idealized and extremely implausible know-nothing state; what we have said above we can say about ignorance of anything arbitrarily specific or arbitrarily general. But if ignorance isn't bliss, then what is? And if ignorance is dangerous and frightening, then how do we explain all the worry and difficulty that comes with knowledge? More importantly, how do we resolve all that worry and difficulty? I think an obvious answer would be, "Do something!"

But what exactly should we do?

That's a very important question.