Omniscience! (OK, you've scrolled all the way back to the first post now)

Hello, beautiful and/or handsome reader, and welcome to my new blog, Project Omniscience.


Ever since I was a kid, I've always wanted to know everything. To be the smartest man in the world. To always win at Trivial Pursuit. To be, in a word, omniscient, just like God, but less judgmental and with better hair. Sure enough, many years of hard work later, I know an awful lot of stuff, but for everything I learn, it only makes me more aware of the stuff I don't know.


Confucius once said: "To know that one knows what one knows, and to know that one doesn't know what one doesn't know, there lies true wisdom". I say: fuck Confucius, true wisdom is knowing fucken everything and not having any areas of ignorance left. And with our old friend wikipedia, and you, beautiful and/or handsome reader, I'm gonna become motherfucking omniscient.


There are 3.6 million articles on the English-language wikipedia, which is to a good approximation the sum total of human knowledge. If I become an expert on a new subject every day, 365 days a year, and 366 days on leap years, then I can get through the whole thing in 9,800 years. This might seem like a fairly long time, so I guess that some days I can do two. And of course this will only work if no new articles get added, but hey, what are the chances of that?


So, this is my humble goal. I'm gonna read the entirety of Wikipedia, one article at a time, become an expert on each subject, and then communicate my fascinating new knowledge to you, generically-good-looking reader, so that you too can benefit from the interesting bits of it. My main tool for this will be wikipedia's "Random Article" button, but I reserve the right to skip (or rather postpone for nine thousand years) any articles that are stubs, or that are about generic towns in Iowa, or that are otherwise kinda boring. I also reserve the right to throw in the occasional subject just because it's interesting.


And on that note, the first subject I've chosen is omniscience itself, since I strictly speaking should know what I'm in for before I start. Wikipedia notes that this is considered an attribute of God in both Christianity and Islam (in which one of the many names of Allah is Al'Aleem, or all-knowing, a name which I have modestly chosen as my nom de plume for this blog.)


It goes on to distinguish between inherent omniscience, the ability to know everything, and total omniscience, the characteristic of actually knowing everything. Apparently some theologians have suggested that God's omniscience is merely inherent rather than total, so he can know anything at any point he chooses, but that he doesn't absolutely have to, a distinction presumably made by folks somewhat embarrassed by the idea that God is watching them on the toilet.


Another fun controversy is whether omniscience is compatible with free will. Are you still free if God already knows exactly what you're going to decide? The obvious answer is no, as apparent from the extent to which people are apparently willing to go to argue the other way. A third big problem arising from omniscience is whether an omniscient being can create things which it doesn't already know. I shall spare you, reader-who-is-probably-at-least-better-than-average-looking, the details of all these arguments since they get rather silly. Theologians are folks who, upon realising that their premises are entirely logically inconsistent, just decide that this means they need to assert them faster and more loudly.


So there you have it, dear reader; you and I have together become experts on the subject of omniscience. I hope you'll continue to join me as we join hands and skip together through the knee-deep seas of human knowledge. And if you don't like that, then here's a video of a tiger riding a horse: