Knowledge

I know a lot. Relatively. I like to refer to myself as the King of Trivial Information. I mean, sure, there are other people that know more than me--I can't really argue that, but I know tons of random fact that nobody really cares about.

Of course, ignoring the importance of the knowledge I have attained, what have I really learned of my own accord, and what has simply been shoved in my brain? I have taken a lot it at face value as pure truth without really questioning its validity just because it sounded reasonable and came from a place of authority. There are some things that I have been taught over and over again that I can verify. 2+2=4. Yup, got that one. Red and Blue make Purple. Grass is green. Dogs Bark. Plant leaves are made up of Cells. If you leave milk of for too long it will go bad. Fire will burn wood. There is such a thing as a Giraffe.

But what about the fact that Paper will Spontaneously combust at 451 degrees Fahrenheit? Even the fact that the world is round. We breath Oxygen. There are ~7 Billion people on earth. The speed of light is 186,000 Miles per second. The earth is 90 million miles away from the sun. Water boils at 212 Fahrenheit. Cats eat mice. J.R.R. Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings. If you boil water, it will be sterile. I have white blood cells that combat my system's invaders. Rattlesnakes and sharks,  Zebras and Buffalo and countless other animals all exist, but I have never actually seen any of them--I still know they are real.These are all things that I know to be true, but not because I have experienced them--only because I have been told so by various trustworthy sources. Many people do know many of those facts, but how many of those people actually know them because they have gone and found them out for themselves? An extremely small percentage.

Who is to say that someone in the place of a trustworthy source couldn't simply make up random information and insert it into the system and laugh as people took it for truth without actually testing it's validity.

I guess the real question is--what do I really know because I KNOW it is true, and what do I know because other people have told me it is truth. I had a much harder time writing the first list than the second. I guess all my intelligence comes from other people's work. It all comes from generations of people figuring out stuff and telling everyone else so that the simple layperson didn't have to spend time figuring out mundane facts that may or may not actually be applicable to their every day lives. I guess I don't actually know that much. I'm just an information thief.