False and Fixed Knowledge

The combination of false knowledge and fixed knowledge can be especially troublesome. If a society's founding documents produce false knowledge, and these can not be easily changed, the whole society may be set off in a wrong direction. Information in the Bible produces fixed knowledge that can not be changed or it would no longer be The Bible. Many wars have been fought and are still being fought over people's belief in some fixed knowledge that may or may not be true. Even today a significant portion of the world's population, believe that every word in the Quran is absolutely true, and that book's supposedly 'true knowledge' should rule everyone's lives. Humans have fought over what is true and what is false for eons of time. In later chapters of this book you will read how more sophisticated ways of finding the truth will lead us beyond this information age that is mostly ruled by fixed and false knowledge.

You should notice that knowledge gained by reading books is by its very nature fixed knowledge because the words on pages of books are fixed with respect to time and space. This MT data may be interpreted differently from time to time but what is written on the pages never changes. Nowadays we have just begun use of the Internet as a main source of information. In this media, knowledge no longer needs to be fixed with respect to time. Web pages can change from day to day on the Internet. It is not good to have too much faith in the longevity of Internet information.

Looking back ages ago before humans invented writing there was little or no information available to produce fixed knowledge and knowledge was communicated only by storytelling which can be dynamic much like the Internet. Ever since humans first developed writing they have worshiped fixed knowledge because it relieves a person from the responsibility of thinking themselves. The old saying It is Written has held up the standard for worshiping the rule of information and the resulting fixed knowledge. Now as we move beyond the information age, knowledge will become dynamic again and the rule and worship of fixed knowledge should diminish. People will be more interested in what is happening now instead of what happened in the past.