Nassim Taleb Taught Me About ‘Conscious Ignorance’ and Why It’s the Key to Understanding Infinite Possibility

“Conscious ignorance, if you can practice it, expands your world; it can make things infinite.”

-Nassim Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes

Reading a lot of books doesn’t actually make you smarter. Really, all it does is make you more painfully aware of all that you don’t yet know.

By the time I read 100 books, I thought I was pretty damn smart. But when I passed the 500th book, and then the 1,000th book and beyond, I just felt as though I knew less than I ever did when I started!

That’s conscious ignorance.

It really does make things infinite! For one thing, contemplating the 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars that could exist in the known universe definitely does come close to expanding your perspective to infinity.

There’s still so much we don’t know about our own sun, much less the septillion-something other suns out there.

Even on an earthly level, I’ve come to realize that I don’t know how anything works! Have you ever thought about this?

I mean, if society ended tomorrow, could you reinvent anything that you enjoy and that makes your life easier today? Like microwaves, cell phones — an internal combustion engine?

I could never recreate society; I would need the internet!

Even after 100 lifetimes or more, we could never reach the end of these fundamental questions of who we are, where we came from, where we’re going, why anything is happening, or what we’re supposed to be doing as it’s happening.

Everything is a gigantic, cosmic mystery, and we’re all just figuring it out as we go along, together.

To be conscious of everything that we’re ignorant about makes some people feel small — but it makes me feel big. I’m in this universe, exploring its unfathomable depths, and really just…enjoying myself, trying to cross the chasm of my conscious ignorance and discover exciting truths.

Of course, I felt that way before I read The Bed of Procrustes, by Nassim Taleb, but he gave me words for what I was feeling. I have words now, but I also have so many places left to go.

Tell me if the following sounds exhilarating to you…

I remember reading Carl Sagan’s book, Cosmos, way back when (I think I was 22 or 23), and he was reminding me of the seemingly-obvious fact that every single planet that we can observe through our telescopes is a real, actual place.

Other planets, even ones that are billions of lightyears away, are places that we can go to!!!

Places that we can go to, as in, actually step outside of a freakin’ spaceship and WALK ON THAT PLANET.

Think about that for like, a minute!

So incredible.

But even closer to Earth, cultivating this conscious ignorance even makes the ordinary extraordinary: It’s waking up in a house full of people who love you; it’s feeling your muscles stretch and contract and build power at the gym; it’s reading that one perfect sentence in a book that takes your breath away; it’s putting on a sweater on a cool winter day; it’s life.

Grasping infinite possibility won’t solve our real, urgent problems in the here and now, and it won’t change the fact that life can be exceptionally difficult, but it does make life infinitely more worthwhile.

All the best,

Matt Karamazov

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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