Sensation

Sensation
The pursuit of knowledge is the achademics goal. Yet all our knowledge falls into science and hearsay. History is a knowledge not dependent on science. Long term history maybe more science as fossils and artefacts can submit to scientific tests. The history of kings is written by people with vested interests, therefore though it can be considered knowledge it can never be called truth.
Science is based on assumed foundations. Time, space, matter; yet much of this Newtonian certainty appears to be crude and intuitive. Newton assumed later scientists would discover the secret of gravity. This has not transpired. Half baked theories of particles called gravitons have not been proved. We have no real certainty of the Big Bang, only its apparent echo. The human mind is not equipped to conceive of timescales involved. Infinite universe, limited universe, multiverse, none can be visualised, only conceived of mathematically.
Careers are built on old paradigms that look increasingly shaky. To abandon a life's work and the respect and status that comes along with such work meens major figures can never abandon the fundamental pillars. This would render their life's work wrong. Yet this is where we are.
Increasingly it seems our consiousness is all we can be certain of. Time is not as we perceive it, space, light, matter; nothing it seems is what we intuitively assumed. It took a good two centuries from earliest evolutionary theory to Wallace and Darwin before this paradigm shift took place. In many American schools creationism is still taught. From the flat earth to the pre Galileo universe of all stars and planets revolving around us we have got it wrong. The illusion of free will is crumbling. Quantum mechanics points to matter being unformed until a consious observer looks on. Several important scientists are coming round to thinking that thought and feeling emerges from matter to thinking matter emerges from consiousness.
Given this unstable reality we live within, is knowledge ever likely to be more than the latest story. A story to be over ruled by another. Then another.
We are animals. Are we not designed, if anything, to survive? What chance do we of figuring anything out?
Tacit knowledge. Craft skills. Sport skills. Dance skills. Musical skills. This knowledge is worth seeking. Knowing how never ends, knowing that is complete. These two types of knowing share little other than a language connection. You can know Oslo is in Norway but there the knowing ends. Knowing how to play a violin is never completed.
So to sensation. Is this not our better search? To quote Lord Byron,

"The great object in life is sensation - to feel that we exist, even though in pain. It is this 'craving void' which drives us to gaming - to battle - to travel - to intemperate, but keenly felt pursuits of any description, whose principal attraction is the agitation inseparable from their accomplishment."


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