What is it to know?

This proposal is a spin off from a thread about how we know that sidelined started in response to a statement by Hangdawg13. They seem to reach a mutual closing point. But I got to wondering not so much "how we know" but what is it that we know. What is knowledge?My first thought is that knowing is behaviour, it is knowing how to do something. Take gravity as an example. It's a word that we can use to reference language, science, or physical activity but all those things are learned memory. I think that the reality of gravity is something we will never know. I think we can know our own experience but that is either direct or recalled sensory information. The same could be said for an external physical object or for an internal state. I'm not sure at all how "knowing" God would fit in this.I am proposing this topic not as a debate but as an exploration. I would like to examine the various knowings including what does it mean to know a divinity. I welcome any help in improving my statement of this topic. I know my topic proposal aren't generally of interest but Hangdawg13 said he was interested in this discussion.lfen

Thanks, Dawg, and good clarification. Sheesh, is this ever a venerable and difficult topic in philosophy and now neuroscience. Kind of wish I had shoved my foot in mouth, well, put my hands in my pockets so I couldn't have typed this. And yet I think it is a really key issue.UG Krishnamurti offers a radical position that I find intriguing. That is we don't know what anything is, even ourselves. The knowledge we have is either the organims behaviour from genes and sensory motor learning or it's the symbolic knowledge that we have by virtue of our society. A chair is a chair because that is what we call it and we sit on it, burn it if it's wood etc all without ever knowing what it is. The world we know is a combination of our genetic adaptions and our participation in society.So I'll offer this to start. Knowledge is knowing how to do things even though that can get very complicated and sophisticated it remains operational and ignorant of what the essence of anything is.lfen

Ben,Both dualist and reductionist most certainly. And yes, what is being, and what is mind, indeed! Good questions.

I just checked online and my library has this book. If it's still in this weekend I'll check it out and give it a look see. I'm skeptical about that prediction, but you know I'm a skeptic so probably guessed. That is some sentence!The brain is a computational matrix. Are we living inside the brain?
The ego self seems to depend on the brain function and the brain coordinates the actions, the doings of the organism. The universe we experience and know seems to be something modeled in the brain. This is getting I think at Ben's point about asking what is mind.lfen

Schraf,Would you say then that fuzzy logic is a better model of the way organisms operate than two value logic? I think that may be the case.lfen

Ben,So are you favoring fuzzy logic over two value logic? That is how I'm understanding your post though you haven't said it quite explicitly.lfen

Ben,Sidelined opened a topic on "How do we know" somewhere towards the end of the thread I found myself wondering what is it we are asking how about it? To understand how we know, I felt I needed to know what it is we know. I don't really have a position here I'm trying to defend or even a direction that I want anyone to follow. I'm just curious as to what it is we know. The context will be this forum and possibly a focus on Hangdawg's fundamentalist Christian approach to knowing about religion and my eastern approach to non dual experience. I'm very interested in what you have to say. You don't need my approval. I probably tolerate more topic meander than an admin would.Your non dualist approach interests me but I'm not yet getting where you are coming from and going with it. Neither knower nor known? Is there then just the doing of knowing, like riding a bike, singing, solving a math problem?lfen

Ben,Taking an obvious example. One we deal with in ordinary life. A linguistic example. Someone ask you, "what is your name". If you reply with "Ben" does that demonstrate you "know" your name? Is that knowledge? A late stage alzheimer patient might look confused and be unable to answer the question.A much harder question would be to a believer here along the lines of, what is it you know when you speak of being filled with the Holy Spirit? Or what is it you know when you say you know you will go to heaven, or be judged by God, or experience the rapture?lfen

Ben,I've got to head off to bed. I thank you for bearing with me as I don't have anything like your depth in this subject. I googled PDP and realized I don't really know anything about that.I am sensing the possibilities that we are approaching the same understanding from different directions. But we may have some work to get our terms equated.Identity seems important. Thinking of the immune system preserving the intergrity of cellular on up processes. Yet an organism is still a colony. I read somewhere that the human cells of the body may be outnumbered by the other organisms living in/on us, bacteria, fungus, etc.Persistence in time. Change and identity. You can't step in the same river twice. If that is true you can't step in the same river once. yet we can speak of a river. There is persistence of memory for a spell.I writing this in the context of this forum which is largely a Christain atheist dicotomy. As someone with strong Buddhist and Advaitist leanings I'm generally regarded as decieved by demons by the fundamentalist which makes me about the same as an atheist. So when Hangdawg tells me he believes that there is a spiritual war going on I think in terms of fiction and he thinks in terms of fact.But what do either of us "know". I'm tired and my mind is wandering now. Faith as a belief in a creed, a set of propositions some of which make no sense to me like the Father and Son being of the same substance??? But then faith as an acceptance of being even though we know nothing but only do.Well, I'm incoherent and can't keep my eyes open. good night,lfen

Ben,Thanks for the referral to Chalmers paper. I'm having my wake up cup of coffee. So I'll respond more in detail later. Yes, I'd very much like to read the problems you see with the top-down approach. Thinking about religion and not scientific models I wonder if "logical" is necessary? Consistency and explanatory power, but the power can be psychological rather than functional. That is prayer, curses, magical spells might not functionally do much except alter how one or more people feel but that is a powerful factor in human behaviour. The model wouldn't have to be logical to satisfy some peoples feeling of consistency. Many Christians on this list seem to feel that the notion of the "trinity" is logical, others feel it isn't and have some other nonlogical but text based explanatory model that satisfies their sense of what is consistent in the Bible. Consistency seems to be a direction that the brain strives to move in, which seems to be a factor in paranoia as well as science, i.e. the seeing of pictures in clouds or inkblots, organizing random patterns into something that can be assigned a meaning.The primitives here might be in the brain. I'm thinking of optical illusions or problems where the processing of sensory input in some circumstances produces paradox.There is conscious knowledge but can we also talk of non consciousness knowledge? Do migratory animals know in some sense? Does a cell know in some sense? Does the immune system for example represent knowing?lfen

Hangdawg,Let me give you an example from my experience. It's the inverse of the above coming from my elderly parent. Perhaps you've a grandparent or someone that you've experienced this with. I've come into a room and found my mother sleeping in her easy chair having dozed off in the afternoon. I awaken her for some reason and mention she was sleeping and, and this is not that unusual for older adults not just my mother, she denies she was asleep. "I was just resting my eyes." Should I embarass her by asking her why she was snoring?I've actually started to recall a dream from long ago that I felt menaced by something trying to suck me in and I recall very vaguely I think appealing to God and then waking up. These discussions are just nudging this from the back storage areas, and dreams are hard for me to recall. I woke up. I don't attribute this to independent entities. I had a scary nightmare, perhaps it was a shadow side of myself that I experienced.Setting aside those folks we know to be chronic liars. No human being is totally reliable. We have quirks, misjudgements. I'd be inclined to believe you had a nap. Was my mother lying when she said she wasn't sleeping? I don't think so. I think she dozed and didn't recall sleeping but had recalled closing her eyes. Memory is maleable. It changes dynamically not just fading like a color photo.I think reliablity or lack thereof can be construed on a continuum. It's not "told the truth" or "lied". You know about fish stories and how big the one that got away was? The fisherman was struggling and excited and the fish just keeps getting bigger because they are recalling it in their enthusiasm. They aren't lying but there is a process of distorting going on. Particularly when dealing with out of the ordinary and heightened emotional experiences there are distortions.You know about the crime enactment and eye witness testimony? You might want to try this with a group sometime. I've typically read about it as taking place during a law school lecturer. Some one burst into the room and says something, pulls out a gun and someone runs, they fire the gun etc. Then the professor announces it was staged and collects the eyewitness testimony of the class. Nothing supernatural at all. Do you think the testimony will all agree?Some people are more suggestible than others. They have done experiments on this. So I'm reluctant to take ancedotal data very seriously in these matters, there are just so many factors that will distort it and can't be accounted for.Did you take a nap? Or did you call your girl friend that you've not told us about?Heading back on topic: I actually wasn't looking at knowledge true or false but rather if we know something what is it. In other words it's not whether you lied or told the truth about napping, but let's say I believe you. Let say I saw you napping even. What is that knowing? Not even how do I know, but what is it to know someone is napping? And can I really know what napping is even for myself? the scientific discription of the brain function is different from my experience but do either of them really tell us WHAT napping is? Or anything is for that matter?So what is it we do know about napping. It's not the whole truth. So is all we know about napping a set of doings, actions, such as even calling it "napping", being able to predict a loud noise will wake the napper, knowing to shake the napper awake before we ask where the car keys are, etc.lfen

Hangdawg,I think my use of the word knowledge is misleading. I was not thinking about knowledge as in the book of knowledge that is to say the population of England, or the longitude of London. I was looking at what is stored in the brain, what do we know. Cognitive dissonance is an intriguing concept. I suspect there are tensions. But I'm first wanting to find out what it is that is the unit for the tensions. If I tell you I am 5 ft tall when I'm really 6 ft tall. One of those statements is false and one true. But what is it we know about 5ft and 6ft tall?lfen

And some of Poe's dreams were nightmares.
Shakespeare got at that too with his "we are the stuff that dreams are made on".This was also the teaching of the Buddha: edited to correct a typo.This message has been edited by lfen, 12-11-2004 03:50 PM

Ben,Let's talk about the Richard Axel paper and how "molecular logic of perception" might constitute knowledge.I'm way more philosophical than scientific and so my first response is here is something indicating that an organism is knowledge. That is the functioning of the organism including sensory discrimination and motor actions based on that is knowledge as the ability to function in the environment. This is the area I am exploring now. All we know is how to function. We know our functioning not reality.How does that sound to you?lfen

Ben,I've moved my response to this thread as it doesn't really fit where it was. I'm trying to move this discussion over here so it won't get aborted by an Admin.I see your point but ask you to consider what that means for conscious behaviour vs. unconscious. At what point is the context social, observable by others in normal everyday interactions? This just gets more complicated. And sometimes we aren't conscious of those responses. Now we are into the whole psychology area of repression, projection etc. i.e. a lot of our knowing may be wrong, and we may have contradictory knowledge.I'm getting tired and all this is looking like spagehti. Time to take a break from the computer.lfenedited typosThis message has been edited by lfen, 12-12-2004 09:42 PM