Protective Ignorance and the Relation of Our Knowing to Reality

This paper argues that what we call, with a single name, "protective ignorance" is in fact two fundamentally different states that resemble each other only in their outward result. Does a person's knowledge of a proposition play a role in bringing about the very reality that proposition concerns? Or does that reality hold independently of our knowing or not knowing, already in place beforehand? On the basis of this question, the paper distinguishes two states. The first is "constitutive knowing", in which a person's knowledge helps to construct the very experience or reality it concerns. The second is "protective not-knowing", in which a person, faced with an independent reality, chooses to remain unaware in order to escape the suffering that knowing would bring. The paper shows that each of these two states has been documented independently, across several separate research traditions that have never been read together under one framework. Within protective not-knowing itself, a further question remains open: what is the relation between pre-voluntary neural mechanisms and conscious choice? This question deserves further study.