Isn’t knowledge just an extension of cause and effect, physics? If knowledge means a state of affairs that is reflected in another locus, such as a consciousness, isn’t this really some kind of physics thing. Such as, a rock has “knowledge” that it sits upon solid ground, and therefore can’t fall through. And isn’t knowledge of a principle, like 2+2=4 just a fact reflected? Knowledge is just a word to describe physics, communicated and reflected, or repeated, in another substrate, such as a mind, but not necessarily a mind.
Knowledge begins with experience. And, yes, we experience physics, mathematics and grammar.
Ier, I think knowledge begins with a rigid framework of understanding and categorization that is innate in us due to the physical structure of our senses, and from there, experiences pass through and once they get through our system of understanding, the stuff that gets pooped out the other end is knowledge. It’s experience + a rational framework = knowledge.
A nice neat package as long as we ignore illusion, delusion, and plain 'ol irrationality as causal agency in arriving at “I know”.
We kinda have to do that either way. I prefer the neat package.
I also prefer the neat package - just as long as I don’t forget ignorance is bliss… or is that hell? Or both?
Who the hell is in control here? 
Tent, I don’t know who’s in control. It seems like no one.
But I don’t think that a rock can have knowledge.
It’s like, a must, that knowledge have a knower, and unless you’re gonna tell me I can’t prove rocks aren’t conscious and able to know, then I have to say that they’re not and just go with it. A perceiver of a rock may gain some informational content about the rock from his perception of it, but then to know it he’s gotta run it into his brain and at least compare it to something in order to identify or distinguish it from other things, or as I might say, to know a rock from his elbow. But what if nothing’s ever come through his perception? Like this is the first time. So he’s still gonna get some knowledge about the rock, just not that it’s a rock, and not that it’s not an elbow. He can know that it’s taller than it is wide, he can know that it’s color is darker in one place and lighter in others, he can know whatever he can know about it by analyzing it according to just some basic first principles that are arguably, innate in him. Without that innate framework, he wouldn’t have a way of concluding even the things that could be concluded about a rock minus any context, which are at least some things, and arguably the same things you’d have to know in order to make sense of of the rock in any given context at all.
OP, I think that physics, in as much as it quantifies and organizes phenomena in such a way as to accurately represent each object and each interaction between possible objects, that it is rich with information, but the knowledge part only comes when we know it. People get all fussy about how 2 people can conclude opposite things about the same object in front of them, and from there, in my opinion, it turns out that the only thing we can know is that there is disagreement. Especially when we get equivalent arguments and equivalent data. We know what’s possible by knowing what’s necessary first. It’s necessarily the case that when you and I both stare at an ice cream cone, we get the same waves of light and the same smells and all because they are physical and this can be demonstrated to be true. What’s possible however, is that I don’t like ice cream and you do, and so we end up debating what we can really know about ice cream cones, instead of accepting that we know all we can and that there is some uncertainty as to whether they are good or bad, and if so, how.
I feel like this is sort of the same thing that james and iambiguous are debating. I could be wrong. Who knows?
Or turn that around more properly;
Definitional logic + experience + interrogation => certainty.
A physics particle or construct is a physical “memory cell”.
An engram or synaptic construct is a physiological “memory cell”.
A logical or emotional construct is a mental “memory cell”.
That’s all very well for you inside your particular construct, but it has nothing to do with anyone else no matter how similar the construct. Memory evolves to include any new experience. There is no “past”, only a newly constructed present with memory as a vague shadow.
All knowledge is instrumental, Tentative. There is no other kind of knowledge. Once you fully realize that and accept it you’ll stop crying about it.
Let me clarify further. All “knowledge” does something. Knowledge is an aspect of action. Consider it to be something like potential energy. So if somebody says “I know God exists and I know he hates homosexuals and he thinks I ought to be a good servant of God and stop homosexuals from doing what they want to do” - that is knowledge. It leads to certain kinds of actions, and creates a certain kind of world. He really does know what he says he knows.
It may seem like I’m exaggerating the active aspect of knowledge, but I don’t think I am. I think realism is bad philosophy. There certainly is a world we share - Mr. Reasonable has pointed that out, for instance - but the world we share is not separate from the “we” that shares it. We have certain things in common. And when we come to see things in a certain way, like which phenomena to call “elements”, it’s not necessarily because that way of seeing things is “more true” than other ways of seeing things. What happens is you get into a certain kind of mindset and if you’re a small enough thinker, that’s the only way you can see.
Again (and again, and again), knowledge is not a problem. I think the problem you’re trying to point out is narrow-mindedness. Is it an illusion that I see and think of my wife in a certain limited way? Of course not. If I didn’t I’d be a rock. Rocks don’t see people in certain limited ways, and they have no personal desires. But I don’t think the ideal human (questionable idea in the first place, maybe) is like a rock. Is it a problem if I think my wife is limited to the particular limited ways that I see her? Yeah, I think that would be a problem. Though a bigger problem would be aggression - if I actively tried to force my wife to fit the limited way in which I see and think of her, or to force others to see her in the same way I do. That would be a pretty big problem. So, again, the homosexual hater knows homosexuals, and knows that they are sinners and should be restrained. The problem isn’t with his knowledge, it’s that homosexuals don’t like other people to act like arrogant fucking asshole pricks who try to make their activities illegal, etc.
And none of these can be corrected with further knowledge? Extended knowledge is self -corrective; otherwise, we are doomed to eternal ignorance.
Good point. All wisdom is based on ignorance in some way.
Anon,
And all knowledge is actionable. Perhaps I have failed to provide the right words, but…
You cannot stand outside your “knowledge” and look back in. In this sense, you don’t have knowledge, you ARE knowledge. Your knowing is self limiting because you are inside your own perspective. We are all “narrow-minded”. There is no choice in this unless you claim a god-like perspectival point that encompasses all perspectives at once. What is knowing is a particular focus on a tiny part of the field, and in that, is “narrow-mindedness” that is inescapable. Is this actionable? Yup. A good thing too. Your narrow-minded view of your wife is unique to you and hers of you. It matters little that you both can both agree that the rainbow is beautiful while holding hands, neither sees the other’s rainbow. But it goes further than that. Within your perspective, HOW you think of your wife is just as much a part of your knowing as WHAT you think of your wife.
It is this limiting how we think that makes our knowing suspect. In our numerous exchanges, I get the impression that you are proposing a sort of working catch-all definition of knowledge that works some of the time until there is a “surprise”. I’m good with that. We all have to find some way to make sense of the daily grind. But I see way too much knowing that isn’t. If that’s crying, I’ll own it. I can’t accept the arrogance of being a “knower”.
I think we’re not that far apart on this issue, ultimately. But there’s something else going on too - maybe it’s just one of those little philosophical fixations that makes normal people get impatient with us ILP types. I emphatically DO think narrow-mindedness is escapable. It is absolutely unnecessary. The problem isn’t with knowledge, which would be like some kind of original sin idea. Once you have a little knowledge, you’re not now at war with this “problem”. You don’t have to literally see things, at all times, from infinite points of view (impossible!) to overcome the “problem”.
Changeux believes that the so called “isolate qualia” i.e., we don’t see the same rainbow, can be challenged by communication in which synonymous reports of what is seen can be made.
See Changeux/Ricoeur–“What Makes Us Think”
Old joke–you are unique, just like everybody else.
Where have all the philosophers gone?
I’m in a Dennett mood and also recentish saw a Stephen Hawking special that had a riveting section re: John Conway’s model of physical reality, and how it effects everything, including consciousness. It got me meditating on how knowledge (knowledge is to know where the ledge is; know ledge) is physical, incomplete and causal, among other very un-knowledgy things, and that consciousness is just another kind of flower, no different from the bucking dust it broncos on. Have a looksy. It states what you already probably believe and know but it’s still affecting.
I’m also into Dennett. Thanks for the Conway video. I totally agree with it. The hundreds of billons of neuronal connections in the brain can achieve human consciousness and, with environmental input, can produce Mind. That Conway’s grid is open on all sides to infinity is impressive.
conway’s grid rocks, it’s been on my mind for weeks – affording me a new worldview somehow.
what strikes me as how patterns emerge, with seeming symmetry and shapes and movements, it’s really quite beautiful to me.
and even if a square dies, the fact that it was lit up at all is eventually baked into everything that comes afterwards. it can never be undone, and it’s existence is expressed in all that follows – only there’s the illusion that it’s gone.
I lost a family member, my sister’s brother, and i’ve been thinking about conway’s grid and this kid’s life, how the grid is a metaphor for brain cells, but also for everything. How our consciousness and actions flower during our lifetimes and effect other things and people in a cosmic determinism, and how it’s all intertwined and enmeshed in the fabric of forever. how our lives are like flowers blooming and etched into some frolic cosmic substrate that we can’t readily glimpse, but is eternal. Death be not proud.