Ignorance is bliss?
 

I was chatting to someone and I thought of...Is ignorance truly bliss? If you were ignorant how would you know any different to truly know of or seek something better?

if you spent the last 6 months in a cave you would have missed the stress of the war . . . that is true.

Another view of the same concept is the expression "stick your head in the sand" . . if you hide then maybe it will all just go away . . . but then that presumes you know whats going on . . you just dont want to face it.
Children are the perfect illustration that ignorance is bliss . . . . . . . . they are innocent and now nothing of the nasty world. I wish I had listened to my parents when they said it was the best days of my life . . . .. .

. . . . and interestingly the converse would be 'knowledge = hell' ?

Ignorance is not bliss...because then you don't have the knowledge or experience to control your environment,
at least to some extent.

Yes, there is an additional responsibility or burden that comes with this,
but this is the price of freedom.

Anything worth something, is worth effort.

Ignorance is only bliss in hindsight . . when its too late. Whilst you are ignorant you cant know the horrors that would otherwise fill your head . . so you cannot appreciate the bliss. So ignorance can never be bliss that can be enjoyed. If your knowledge of something stresses you and you find you are jealous of someone else who is living 'in ignorance' then you suffer more . . . so its like I said . . knowledge = hell (and the obvious opposite of that ie. 'ignorance is bliss' is a fallacy).

The true opposite would be 'you dont know what your missing!'. Where you might have been on a 5 star luxury holiday . . and you return to work to chat to someone who has never been on holiday in their life . . . you could imagine that their ignorance of the holiday experience is a negative thing . . . they 'dont know what their missing' . . . or ' you cant miss what you have never had'.

"Sadder still to watch it die . . than never to have known it".
N Peart

well a person who is blind from birth.. they are now an adult.. is it really better for them to have their sight? They were accustomed to life without sight.. and now they have to relearn and retool....

I agree with you Cynthetic. Sadder to have had sight and lost it . . than never to have known it.

Ignorance is bliss, but I would rather be miserable and know what the fuck was going on.

For an answer to this question (in one form) read 1984, and consider the proles. They are oppressed by the government to some point, but as long as the gov't doesnt touch the booze, porn or hookers, they don't care what happens. They don't know any differant, and they are uneduacated, so why would they risk their life as they know it?

I swear, it really does relate!

Ignorence is bliss only if you dont know how to deal with stress. Sure not knowing what is going on will pardon you of responsibility but truley knowing how to deal with your situation will be enlightenment and true bliss

I have to agree with rogue on this one. Ignorance is defintly NOT bliss. It sometimes seems like it to the educated ones. Only because if you are ignorant you don't have to work through right and wrong (and grey areas) of things. But I for one, someone who wants to know everything there is to know, would find ignorance to be hell. That is, if I had enough knowledge to know that knowledge exists. If not then I would just be another slobering idiot.

I think the only way ignorance could be bliss if we are talking the very young (talking complete innocence here) or the "mentally challenged" to be politically correct.
For any intelligent human you crave to learn....which brings us to the idea that the more you know, the more you realize you know nothing. But that is what drives us. Without that spark to learn more and expand the ol' grey matter....well without that then it's not worth it.
For myself I don't mind admitting I don't know about certain things...admitting your lack of knowledge and asking to be taught is one of the best ways to learn.

I have a journal entry about this, actually. Click if you might be interested.

http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/journal...&journalid=323

not complete ignorance but for the most part yes

Humanity is too curious for ignorance to be bliss. We'd still want to know. Hell, I would anyway.

That's the point of that saying... its like sex... if you NEVER knew about it, you wouldn't know what you were missing... when you found out about it (via many methods) you became less ignorant and now you know that you have to have it all the time to survive!

Ignorance is bliss until you know ignorance is bliss. Once you start the education process, you must not stop it.

Well, you know Matrix, right? Let's say that you are living quite happily inside the Matrix, not knowing the truth (being ignorant). Then you get unplugged and find out the truth (no more ignorance): You are going to spend time in a dirty hovercraft with nothing to eat but strange goo and nothing to wear than rags. Would you be still happy?

So yes, in a way, ignorance is bliss. But knowledge can be bliss, too.

Even though i agree w/ most of u people... u must also look at it from this point of view.....
if u were pulled over by a cop for going 45 in houston... when the speed limit is 35... but u didnt know that b/c u r from LA and the limit there is 45.... u will still get the ticket reguardless if u didnt know what the law was... (reguarldess if u were ignorant about the law or not) in that case ignorance can bring u no bliss.... only a day in court, day in "how to drive safely" and it will take away weight form your wallet....
jsut another view on this situation :)

Ignorance is indeed bliss.
Plug me into Nozick's Pleasure Machine baby and away we go :)

ok... lets look at it like this.... it has been stated, knowing too much causes too much stress, knowing too little makes life out of control... but what if you reach a perfect balance? is it possible do you think?

I think that is what most of us are trying to figure out.

To quote John Stuart Mill, "It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, is of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question. The other party of the comparision knows both sides."

And what if Socrates (or 4thTimeLucky) decided that they would quite like to be a satisfied fool?

Ok well let me give you a possible scenario and see which one you would choose. Tomorrow you are going to be in a terrible auto accident. There are two possible outcomes of this accedent. 1) You will receive terrible brain damage. You will forget most of you education, your life, and world experience. The brain damage is such that your IQ is permanetly reduced to below 25 and will never go above this. But, as a side effect of the accedent you brain now produces a chemical imbalance that makes it so that you feel happy all the time.

2) You recieve terrible brain damage. This time however, the accedent awakens part of your brain that most people are not able to use. You become able to retain almost everything you read, see, or hear. Your reading skills are triple that of a normal person. You quickly become an outstanding expert in the field of Philosophy examining many of the toughest question philosophical minds have ever encountered. But, you can never find an answer to anything, only more questions. This leaves you utterly disatisfied for the rest of your life.

Ok so which one do you choose? Complete ignorance with complete happiness? Great intellegence with utter disatisfaction? If this scenario doesnt work for you create your own, but I think that if you think about it deeply, most (but not all) people will choose knowledge and disatisfaction.

Well seeing as you have kindly taken away any social responsibility (if you had said I would be a brilliant chemist with the capacity to create life saving drugs then things would be different) then I would opt to be the happy retard.

Many people would opt to be a miserable genius. I would have once upon a time.
Then I did two things:
1) Read about the last years of a number of (miserable) geniuses lives. [Nietzsche being particularly notable for going mad when he saw a man being cruel to a donkey I think it was.]
2) Realising that we value knowledge because we associate it with happiness (learning makes us happy, being smart makes us happy and knowledge gives us money, power and 'stuff').

Decouple knowledge from happiness and I opt for the latter.

I would take the inteligence here, because even if it was not a satidfactory answer I found, I would still find something to make it worthwhile.

Isn't it about relative ignorance? I mean like you dont have to be a retard to be ignorant about something. It's only about the information, wich in itself is often not quite the truth.(if thruth exists that is.) Scientists discover that others have been wrong from the beginning, we can never "know".. We only think that we do. So I say we are all ignorant and blind regardless of the amount of bliss we are granted. Just be satitisfied with what you got.

To me, this is 50/50. There are a lot of things that people have told me that I wish that I didn't know. There are also many things that people tried to hold back from me, but I'm glad that I found out anyway.

Ignorance isn't bliss. But it's damn comfortable.

I tend to agree with what duckznutz was saying about the value of hindsight.

I think that the “Ignorance is bliss” statement works better in a past tense. Perhaps more along the lines of “Ignorance was bliss” as the “bliss” of ignorance can only fully be perceived and reflected upon after new learning’s.

Knowledge calls for action where’s ignorance calls for complacency. Maybe exertion is the missing antonym for “bliss”.

Ignorance is bliss when you have no soul.

Heh, it's funny how you "run into" people you know on the internet.

you once were an spf junky. correct?

Hmm some "special" people are happy all the time because they have no concept of self intrest no lying no cheating no stealing it dosnt make sence to them

Actually the entire quote is (IIRC): "Where ignorance is bliss, tiss folly to be wise". Somehow it got taken out of context and shortened to "ignorance is bliss", which isn't really true.

Getting a blow job is nice, but getting a hummer while watching two big-breasted beautiful lesbians eat each other out is truly bliss...

I'm just the type that would like to know whats going on, so I could fight it. I generally believe that ignorance is bliss, but still, given the choice, I would choose to know. Thats just me.

theres a certain mystique thats lost when you start knowing about things

ignorance is a bliss when your a shell

I find that Ignorance is Bliss, and War is Peace, and Love is Hate.

but then again I an convinced that someone is always watching me...

ignorance of the TFM would not be bliss