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Author | Topic: What is it to know? | |||||||||||||||||||||||
lfen Member (Idle past 4678 days) Posts: 2189 From: Oregon Joined: |
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
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AdminDawg Inactive Member |
Thread moved here from the Proposed New Topics forum.
I just wanted to clarify that this topic is more about what knowledge is rather than how we obtain it. This message has been edited by AdminDawg, 12-09-2004 03:04 PM
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lfen Member (Idle past 4678 days) Posts: 2189 From: Oregon Joined: |
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
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Hangdawg13 Member (Idle past 751 days) Posts: 1189 From: Texas Joined: |
My first thought about knowledge is that knowledge is information that we believe to be true. I know you dislike concepts filled with dualities like true and false, but this is the way that I see things.
Since our abilities to understand are limited, obviously there will be things that we can only partly or approximately understand. I kind of see what you are saying about knowledge by experience, but you might want to explain that some more. If we want to know about something that we have no direct experience with, like say gravity or quantum mechanics, then we tend to use our imgaination to analyze and synthesize other information to create an artificial or approximate understanding of the concept we are trying to grasp.
I'm not sure at all how "knowing" God would fit in this. Well, with God, I have information about Him that I believe to be true, therefore I accept it as knowledge. My understanding of Him is far from perfect and since I have no direct sensual experience with Him, I must rely on anthropomorphisms and approximations based on the information I believe to be true in order to create a picture of Him in my mind.
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Hangdawg13 Member (Idle past 751 days) Posts: 1189 From: Texas Joined: |
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. It really is... I just finished "The Age of Spiritual Machines" by Kurzweil... If his predictions are correct computers will surpass humans in flexibility and intellect in 20 years.
That is we don't know what anything is, even ourselves. Yep, when you get down to it, we are mostly empty space with a slightly higher probability of energy than the rest of space. And we don't know where energy or space or probability comes from. And we don't even know if these things are true... If the universe as it appears to be actually exists in some form, then the probability is exteremly great that we are already living inside a computer matrix because once computational capacity rounds the nose of the curve and increases beyond all bounds, time increases to infinite... So... as Poe said, "Is all that we see or seem but a dream within a dream?"
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. I can see how that definition can be stretched to cover pretty much every kind of knowledge. It is another way to approximate what we do not fully understand...
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Loudmouth Inactive Member |
quote: Even if I do not know how gravity or quantum mechanics work, I KNOW that if I hold up a pencil and let go, it will fall to the floor. This is knowledge born out of experience, even if I lack some of the facts behind the phenomena. Many cultures had explanations as to why things fall (ie gravity) and some of those explanations were rooted in the supernatural or were culturally biased one way or the other. For instance, people from those cultures might claim that "things fall because Zeus orders it, I just know it". This is different from explanations that try and form conclusions from incomplete data sets, such as is done in science. However, no scientist would ever claim that they "know" how gravity works. Although these explanations may later have to be thrown out, they are still justified at the time being that they were consistent with the data at hand.
quote: I see nothing wrong with that explanation. I just see it as a different realm of knowledge from explanations describing physical reality or knowledge of the natural world.
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nator Member (Idle past 2170 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
quote: I think I would change your use of the word "true" with the word "reliable". Since what we know can be relied upon to a greater or lesser extent depending upon each bit of knowledge, then this allows for infinite shades of gray. The universe is not a dualistic place. There are infinite shades of gray. I would say that knowledge has to be able to reliably stand up to testing. If it doesn't, such as belief in the supernatural, then it must be considered myth and mystery, not knowledge.
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Ben! Member (Idle past 1399 days) Posts: 1161 From: Hayward, CA Joined: |
lfen,
I think one crucial matter in asking "what is knowledge?" is to define "what is mind?" or "what is being?" I think the dualist's understanding of knowledge will be fundamentally different from the reductionist's understanding of knowledge. For this thread, do you prefer to talk about one over the other? Or just to hear the thoughts from both dualists and reductionists? I'm formulating a post in my head in the meantime... Being -> What is it to know -> What is knowledge... got it... Ben
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lfen Member (Idle past 4678 days) Posts: 2189 From: Oregon Joined: |
Or just to hear the thoughts from both dualists and reductionists? Ben, Both dualist and reductionist most certainly. And yes, what is being, and what is mind, indeed! Good questions.
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lfen Member (Idle past 4678 days) Posts: 2189 From: Oregon Joined: |
I just finished "The Age of Spiritual Machines" by Kurzweil... If his predictions are correct computers will surpass humans in flexibility and intellect in 20 years. 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.
If the universe as it appears to be actually exists in some form, then the probability is exteremly great that we are already living inside a computer matrix because once computational capacity rounds the nose of the curve and increases beyond all bounds, time increases to infinite... 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
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lfen Member (Idle past 4678 days) Posts: 2189 From: Oregon Joined: |
The universe is not a dualistic place. There are infinite shades of gray. 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
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Ben! Member (Idle past 1399 days) Posts: 1161 From: Hayward, CA Joined: |
The universe is not a dualistic place. There are infinite shades of gray. In talking about 'knowledge' in a very very limited scope--that of neural implementation of memory--this is certainly the path that has been taken. Neural network / PDP models have (IMHO) certainly shown their power over other types of 'dualistic' models of knowledge. One of the powers of the PDP models is the 'greyness' of THIS 'version' of knowledge. Ben
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lfen Member (Idle past 4678 days) Posts: 2189 From: Oregon Joined: |
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
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Ben! Member (Idle past 1399 days) Posts: 1161 From: Hayward, CA Joined: |
lfen,
I'm not really familiar with fuzzy logic. I took a look at a webpage (the first one Google returns on 'fuzzy logic')... I'm not sure I'd say I favor fuzzy logic over two-value logic. I'd have to know a lot more about fuzzy logic first. From my 2 minute understanding of fuzzy logic, it still seems that they are operating on high-level information. I would favor PDP models that operate on MUCH lower levels (chemical and physical) of information than the ones that fuzzy logic and two-valued logic work. So to summarize... I think two-valued logic has very poor explanatory power. Fuzzy logic... I'm not sure about. I'll just detail a view on one reductionist's view (mine!) on 'knowledge' in a bit (working on typing it up), and hopefully that will answer your quesitons better. Ben
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Ben! Member (Idle past 1399 days) Posts: 1161 From: Hayward, CA Joined: |
lfen,
At this point, I've written a bit about 'what is knowledge' on my local machine. At this point, I'm getting stuck on what facet of 'knowledge' you're interested in investigating. "Knowledge" is just a word--humans use it as a symbol to refer to some set of 'things'. Can you describe for me what part of 'knowledge' you're interested in investigating? My answer, to this point, is simply that "knowledge doesn't exist," that it's a term coined based on a dualist / mind-body separated reality. I deny that reality; in my reality there is nothing that the term 'knowledge' can refer to. Yet, at the same time, there are things that are related to facets of this classical knowledge (such as long-term storage, affect / causation, etc). Can you try to expound a little more on what YOUR direction of 'knowledge' is intented to be? A word is, in many ways, meaningless. Only a common 'cultural literacy' can 'give' a word a meaning, and I don't think we have that here. So.... throw me a bone Regardless, I'm continuing to expound on the 'classical notion' of knowledge on my local machine, as well as what parts of my current model seem somewhat related to this classical notion. Thanks!Ben
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