All knowledge is non-trivial

It is not just material possessions that we tend to take for granted, but also our knowledge and all the people who came before us in History to present to us their hard-earned lessons. For instance, the basic idea that we can test our hypotheses against Reality itself to see whether they hold or not sounds so ludicrously obvious when it is stated as such, but even in our modern times, most people do not walk around and apply it to their own life. Most people take the ideas that sound good enough to them, which is fair because after all you only have so much time and you gotta survive in our complex environments, especially if they confirm their pre-conceived ideas and biases, and if they make their (social) life easier.
And before that, even cutting-edge thinkers did not consider the importance of verifying their ideas through empirical evidence. They could believe for instance that the material world was too "imperfect" and thus that it could not reveal any deep truths about the Universe, something which our mind was better suited because it allowed us to use logic and reason in "purer" mathematical statements. ¹
The idea that our mind does not give us the raw truth, but instead projects reality, upon which we build models of it to make sense of all of that, that idea is not at all obvious! Most people, past or present, do not relate to the Universe in such a way, and I am not saying it is an absolute Truth, but I find it to be a very good explanation as to why even our best attempts to understand Nature and the social world tend to be so laughably limited.

This piece isn't about my rather Kantian views however, it is more so about the way we take knowledge for granted, and tend to view our ancestors as stupid, a view which invites intellectual delusion and also makes us less empathetic towards others.
Here is a list of ideas which can feel obvious but which aren't, as can be seen by how many people, again past or present do not recognize them as true, or how much pain and suffering they have caused by being ignored. Some of these are laced with my own opinions of course:

• Having sex and ejaculating inside a woman leads to pregnancy, which leads to the birth of a baby
• Happiness is not the same thing as pleasure
• Cigarettes are unhealthy
• The existence of "opinions" is not obvious, what if people are just wrong? The existence of "truth" is not obvious, what if someone just holds their opinion above the others?
• Sunlight is crucial for our health, mood and energy levels
• You can direct your attention towards certain things. You can listen to your thoughts without being a slave to them
• Human beings have to exercise otherwise their health starts to seriously deteriorate, our body thrives on meeting resistance
• The idea of ideas and the mind are not trivial. They shouldn't be taken for granted, even if they are useful
• Same thing for causality. Is it an inherent aspect of the Universe, or something which our mind uses to make sense of the world?
• The air you breathe can be polluted, it's not all the same
• If you do not like your friends, you can stop hanging out with them
• No one has a blank mind, everyone is influenced by their culture and upbringing, for better or worse
• Acquisition can be material but also intellectual
• If you eat too much, you feel pain in your body and have digestive issues
• You are the final arbiter in deciding whether you are okay with your life or not
• TV and the internet have a deep influence on your mind, for better or worse (in my opinon for the worse)
• The idea that text can be rendered in different fonts but still mean the same thing is non-obvious. People learning to read Japanese, Chinese or Korean know very well how different the symbols can look in different fonts
• In complex societies, we have basically no idea how our things are made, our food is produced, and where our information comes from and how it's distorted
• Some people are friendly, some people are not
• Emotions are not thoughts, the body is not the mind, even if they interact with one another. Even if they are all "one", they are useful to distinguish because some people are very intelligent but incredibly dissociated and emotionally unaware
• You only have so much time, everyone dies
• I am here and you are there
• And the example that started this whole piece in my mind: my father sometimes "chokes" on a tiny amount of food, not enough to cause a real choke, but enough that he starts coughing fairly loudly. My mother and I recommend him to simply drink water to clear his throat, but he doesn't listen, and this keeps happening to him. Someone intelligent enough to be an engineer does not pay attention to the pain in his body, even in a situation where addressing it is very very simple

I could go on and on with examples of course. I tried to mix up the "seriousness" and the domains, but of course many of them revolve around my particular interests. I didn't focus much on Science in those examples because I am not that well read in scientific domains honestly, so I will frame them more as questions and explorations instead, again to highlight the non-trivial nature of knowledge.

• What is light? Does it behave like sound which requires a medium to travel? In that case, what would be the medium? If not, then what in the world is light?
• How do our eyes see? Highly non-obvious question, even if you just answer at the level of physics, i.e. optics
• The idea that regular things falling on Earth, such as a pen, can be described with the same law as the movement of the planets around the Sun is highly non-obvious. This is why Newton is such a genius ²
• What is heat? Is it a fluid? In that case how do we "generate" it from a fire let's say?
• The idea of micro-organisms, ones so small you cannot see with your naked eye is highly non-obvious
• The idea that using an instrument, such as a telescope or a microscope, is valid Science is highly non-obvious! Galileo is said to have been persecuted by the Church because he supported Copernican heliocentrism, but not only was that model less reliable with its predictions because geocentrism was developed very thoroughly in comparison, ³ and it also involved the usage of an instrument which only Galileo used ⁴
• The idea that humans are animals is non-obvious. The idea that we have a similar biology and anatomy to other animals, mammals, is non-obvious
• What exactly causes molds to appear on bread let's say, or for things to decay, is non-obvious
• The idea that light, color, magnets, radio waves and electricity are all facets of the same phenomenon is highly non-obvious
• The idea that matter and energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed, is highly non-obvious

As always, there is a lot more, but I think you get the idea. All knowledge is non-trivial, ignorance is the default state of existence, the one we are born from and the one we will die in.
I have been meaning to write at length about the narratives of our times and how they blind us from the inevitable limits of the developments of our civilization, but whatever I have to say and whatever you think of our society, I think it's fair to say that we live in a time of deeply entrenched narratives.
If there is one thing I am glad for when it comes to my education in mathematics, it is the attitude towards examining assumptions and never taking something for granted, especially if it is important. At the end of the day, we have to survive in an incredibly complex environment, which is why we do not have the time to rederive or understand certain things which we believe to be true, but still, there is a lot you can uncover through being honest with yourself, and simply asking, again and again: Why?

Footnotes

¹ My knowledge of ancient history is very very rough around the edges, so it's possible that no one in history really held that view, but it is not too far-fetched to imagine armchair thinkers who had many good reasons, according to themselves of course, as to why empirical evidence wouldn't be useful to uncover truth.

² High school students are taught gravity in such a casual manner that they comfortably take it as "normal" physics, but imagine describing a force, the thing which people usually conceptualize as one object pushing another, as being able to act across any distances, instantaneously, between any two bodies with mass. You would be seen as crazy, like someone talking about an occult phenomenon in the context of inert matter pushing other inert matter.

³ Other problems with but heliocentrism at that time: 1) Why could we not detect the rotation of the Earth on the surface? For instance, why would dropping an object from far above still lead to it falling vertically? 2) The model predicts that planets could become very far apart from one another, since their period of revolution around the Sun were not in sync. How come then that the planets we observe in the sky do not meaningfully shrink in terms of perceived size?

⁴ I haven't read the book but these ideas concerning Galileo come from Against Method by Paul Feyerabend.

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2025-08-30