Believing and Understanding

Nothing is easier than believing we understand experiences we've never had.

A quote from Gwen Bristow found written on a wall in Covent Garden. It is also read from the Mind Hacks Blog.

Many of our beliefs are indeed, however, deviating from the fact. The understanding of facts is often twisted because of the belief that we understand what we really don't understand. This is why a semantic world is so complicated. When a world contains not only the facts but also the understanding (or interpretations) of the facts, this world becomes a semantic world.

A semantic world is both complex and exciting. On the negative side, the existence of various interpretations of same facts makes a semantic web super complex. Therefore, it is very difficult to construct such a world from scratch. On the positive side, however, a pragmatic semantic world must endure a great level of forgiveness, i.e., we do not need to enforce any great-scale agreements in such a world. In fact, the reach of greater scale agreements in a semantic world must be established by self-willingness. This type of self-willingness can also be addressed as social communication, a significant character of Web 2.0. Isn't it a natural evolution when Web 2.0 emerges before the Semantic Web?