I do not know everything
Not even close :-)
For one thing, I suspect that physical reality is infinite in extent and I'm finite so it's impossible for me to know everything. But even if the universe is just very large and expanding there is no way for me to know what is happening now at a place even a light year away. But let's restrict our conception of knowing. The configuration of pebbles on a beach is not knowable so let's not include stuff like that in the concept of knowledge.
Long ago I was pondering what it meant to understand something. The thought emerged of "stand under" - what do you stand under? Well - you stand under structures that you trust not to fall on you. The idea emerge of a "structure of understanding". This is the structure of interlocking ideas that we have that we use to understand what's going on around us. Not everything we encounter can fit within our personal structure of understanding. New additions have to be compatible with what is already there. Our structure of understanding is populated by things we know but it's a finite thing.
I've been reading and studying for a long time now. I know quite a bit. I'm proud of my personal library of 500 books. I don't even know everything that's in those books. I see pictures of professors with libraries many times bigger. Heh - I think of professors as being professional readers. I'm lucky to be mostly self-taught and that means I can follow my nose and look at the things that interest me. Before they can become professors, students have to master a lot of material that I'd avoid as nonsense. And then I look at the huge number of books in public libraries. There is a lot of knowledge out there that I don't know about at all.
That I don't know everything is not a problem. I have a sense that I can learn anything I want from the vast amount of knowledge I don't know about. Wikipedia is great in that regard - whenever I encounter something I'm interested in I can look it up. But I also did that most of my life at libraries.
I live immersed in a continuous stream of information. Most of that doesn't become knowledge for me. It leaves an impression but the detail is not there. I mean - I've been continuously reading about current events for a long time. What year did Iran/contra happen? I have to look it up. I depend on professors who write study that stuff and write it up. So a lot of what I know is what other people have told me And I know that what people tell me isn't always trustworthy - but where else will I get knowledge of things I can't experience? So I go with "the best I know" - My structure of understanding evaluates new information and the stuff that sticks is the best I know - and that can change
So my image of a structure of understanding is a bit misleading - it's an image of something built of rigid elements Rather, the structure is more like an ecosystem - many things interacting and mutually influencing each other.
In a biological ecosystem all the information is local People with structures of understanding can get information from all over the planet. And we see how people with similar structures of understanding tend to group together. The fact that there are so many mutually hostile groups is a consequence that nobody knows everything.
What do you think?
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.