The Allure Of Mystery

Curiosity itself is not dangerous, only how people act on it, but when many people say curiosity is dangerous, they seem to mean that it can make impulsive decisions or threatening situations seem appealing.  So subjectively appealing is curiosity supposed to make something that people could be led to death, dismemberment, or some other major negative outcome.  As secondary and limited of a philosophical issue as scientific practicality is, oftentimes, the situational benefits or dangers of curiosity are mentioned with regard to technological evolutions or discoveries in nature that could end lives if mishandled.

The most foundational and thus the most important matters of curiosity, though, have to do with things that cannot be known with human limitations.  The basic truth of logical axioms and that one exists as a consciousness are the only self-evident truths, with the latter depending on the former both metaphysically and epistemologically; they are not mysterious in the sense that they cannot be known by humans.  Many, many other things are neither self-evident nor are they knowable otherwise because they do not follow by logical necessity from these few self-evident truths.  Curiosity will never override epistemological limitations and allow someone to view future events, to know if an object they are perceiving through the senses actually exists, or if their memories of only two moments ago are accurate.

What curiosity can do is subjectively reinforce the desire to discover what can be known (even if this is only logical possibilities, which are determined by consistency with axioms, and evidential probabilities) about things like morality or an afterlife or just care about weighty but unverifiable possibilities.  Now, even something like God's existence is neither an unknowable issue nor one particularly difficult to discover, since an uncaused cause has to exist by necessity if any contingent thing exists (even if I am the uncaused cause, all things that are not eternal need had to have a cause, and this causal chain could not be infinite going backwards or else the present would never arrive).  Curiosity spurs some people to think about God's existence or hypothetical nature even if they never realized all of this, but one of the deepest powers of curiosity has more to do with what people would knowingly sacrifice for its sake.

For example, whether or not there is an afterlife, while by default not as important as the inherent, independent truth of axioms, is a very significant matter.  Approaching the topic from emotionalism and assumptions does not mean someone will not experience great curiosity over this mystery.  Whether an afterlife exists and what it consists of are indeed of extreme philosophical depth and weight.  Still, if there was a universalist (so no one can avoid it), eternally experienced (so no one dies in hell, contrary to what the Bible teaches in verses like Matthew 10:28), perhaps even non-theological hell for us after death (so the uncaused cause is not orchestrating it), would you really want to know about it in advance?  Nothing about this is logically impossible, though it is not likely.  It just could have been true even if it is not because it does not contradict the only necessary truths of logic.

It would ultimately depend on the individual as to whether someone would want to know such a presently unknowable thing--either about the afterlife or any other incredibly significant subject.  Many people do not know that possibility is dictated by consistency with necessary truths and not by whatever assumptions they have as irrationalists, by their standard experiences, or by what other people tell them is true.  For this reason, their emotional reaction to mystery might blind them to otherwise easily apparent truths or possibilities, or to dismiss certain truths because it makes them uncomfortable that their deep feelings of curiosity could give way to existential terror.  Another more constant danger is that curiosity persuades people to overlook, deny, or neglect things more important than whatever they personally appreciate.

Mystery makes some subjects seem exciting to specific individuals even apart from the objective nature of the topic--hence why curiosity motivates some people to squander their attention on relatively unimportant or lesser things like, say, the process of bioluminescence as they neglect the intrinsic nature of logical axioms or whether the uncaused cause does or does not have a moral nature.  A person feeling intrigued, no matter what a given issue would deserve, is subjective, and many leap after mysteries that strike them as engrossing to the detriment of their worldviews and lives.  It is also true that many non-rationalists are more susceptible to being destroyed or disappointed by curiosity because they do not recognize genuine possibilities with or without promoting because in either case, they do not look to reason.  The allure of mystery only influences beliefs, despite this, to the extent a person allows it to, to no extent at all or to any other degree.