Ignorance = Bliss?
This is a bit embarrassing in some ways because I feel like an adult thinking about a childish topic, but I thought I'd cast a shape and solidify some otherwise fleeting thoughts.
When people say that "Ignorance is bliss", I assume that they have a particular context in mind. I wonder, then, what are the qualities that make lend truth to that idiom? Surely, there are times when we wish we did not know what we knew. Knowledge in this context somehow implies a burden and sometimes we just don't want that. But the paradox is that we can't willfully seek ignorance either - it needs to be this big "ooopsies" without which it does not have the exculpating "plausible deniability" that we so seek.
Knowledge gives us the power to decide, and what is life but a drama of decisions? The tension-point to any good story is the psychological drama that comes from not knowing what action to take. Just ask Sophocles, Shakespeare, or any of our contemporaries from Hollywood. We are constantly asking things like who do we marry, which job do we take etc. Life is a chained sequence of decisions at least insofar as we are conscious and existentially aware.
The point of focusing on life as a drama of decisions is that sure, knowledge is power, but specifically it is the power to decide life's questions, both big and small. And... with great power... comes that Spiderman-esque quality that reminds us of the heavy burden of responsibility that every superhero has.
Having knowledge gives us the freedom to decide, but it cannot liberate us. As Viktor Frankl once pointed out, freedom is a double-edged sword, and there's almost a kind of a quantum entanglement between Freedom and Responsibility, which is why he once advocated for a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast to complement and balance the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast.
Reflecting back on Adam and Eve in the Bible, the Fruit of Knowledge (of good and evil) makes it clear that this tension-point between the freedom from knowing and the responsibility over our ignorance is indeed ancient knowledge. After eating the fruit, they became aware of their nakedness - or in other words they became vulnerable and accountable for their actions and their decisions.
So perhaps, ignorance is a burden-free life, but it doesn't follow that it is also a blissful one, because there are some burdens we need to bear, if not to lead satisfying meaningful lives, then to at least survive at the basal levels of Maslow's pyramid - indeed the Dodo bird may have lived a blissful life, but it is also an extinct one.
And what will happen to society once we relinquish control of that decision-making and instead delegate it to intelligence algorithms. What will happen once Google Maps, search engines, or dating applications are able to perform better than humans? Currently, we are at an inflection point in history, where our human intuition might suggest that we turn right at an intersection but Google Maps advises us to instead turn left -- If we follow our intuition, we end up getting stuck in traffic and so the next time we learn to just listen to Google instead. If we continue to learn in this way, we will end up giving a lot of our executive decisions to machines because they can do these things much more adroitly.
What happens when we realize our own ignorance, begin to doubt ourselves, and stop trying to know?
What happens when we give algorithms the same trust when it comes to deciding who to date based on match-statistics in lieu of following our human intuition? If life is a drama of decision-making what will happen or what will be left of our lives? Will we still live interesting and meaningful lives if the drama is taken away from us?