Humans know about what surrounds them by virtue of their sensory perception. It is impossible otherwise to know about the world outside our head. It is necessary but is it sufficient? No. To develop our full intellect we need to develop our cognitive skills and, crucially, learn a language. Luckily, humans are a social species and language together with the physical adaptations necessary to speak, hear and understand develops in childhood seemingly without much effort, just by being immersed in the family group.
Humans, if we start with early modern humans, have been around for approximately 300,000 years but humans only begin to distinguish themselves when social living in extended family groups develops into behavioural modernity This is perhaps still somewhat controversial but, beginning around 50,000 years ago, the archaeological evidence seems to show a spread of development of skills in hunting and fishing tools but also the beginning of art, body decoration, burial of the dead.
The dawn of civilization begins with the development of agriculture. Given a fertile valley, suitable crops, a bit of foresight and investment in storage and defence, humans were able to settle into larger and larger communities. But larger groups need to agree, organise, resolve disputes, have common goals. Dispute settling and record keeping become necessary and writing is a useful tool to supplement memory. Cultural evolution in the last 10,000 years has left biological evolution in the dust.
Today, our collective memory, the stored information that individual humans have discovered, invented, developed, is now recorded and digital form and readily accessible to others. The internet is a vicarious way of knowing that would seem limitless.
But I’m talking of physical development, physical discoveries, physical inventions. Humans don’t just experience and share their knowledge of reality. Humans have imagination. Human civilizations seem to need non-physical explanations, a religious raison d’être. Ara Norenzayan’s book Big Gods proposes an explanation for why a religious organisation, a priesthood, is a given for a civilization to thrive.
So what is the value of religious knowledge? I ask as a deaf man unable to hear the beauty of the music. Are there other ways of knowing, other than experimenting, learning, being told, imitating.
Can internal reflection, meditation, revelation provide us with other or additional information and broaden our knowledge?
Just say you don’t want to wear the pink dress… Why bother with the camouflage?
I dislike that expression “ways of knowing”. Too often it is used to peddle woo.
I also dislike epistemology — the philosopher’s account of knowledge. They try to present knowledge in terms of true beliefs. But knowledge is distinct from belief (in my opinion).
Knowledge is mostly knowing how. If I call on a plumber, I don’t want him to give an eloquent speech about pipes. I want him to fix the pipes. And sure, there can be value in being able to give eloquent speeches, but much of that is the knowing how to present such speeches. The content of the speech is information, not knowledge. The speaker may happen to have knowledge that backs that information. Or maybe the speaker is just faking it (as too often happens with religion).
From my point of view, no it is not a way of knowing. It is a way of obtaining information (sometimes good information, sometimes bad information), but that isn’t the same as knowing.
It cannot provide additional information. But perhaps it can provide knowledge. By thinking about the information you already have, you can possibly rearrange the ways that you do things, and this can improve your “knowing how”.
It seems to me that knowledge is mostly (but not entirely) knowledge of traditions and social conventions. Knowledge of science is mostly, but not entirely, knowledge of the conventions and traditions of the scientific community. These traditions are not static. We are pragmatists. From experience, we learn what works and what doesn’t. Our traditions and conventions change over time, in accordance with that pragmatism.
What separates us from stone age people, is that we have absorbed many traditions and conventions which allow us to cope more effectively with our world. And that’s the ratchet effect of pragmatism at work.
Religions have provided a somewhat organized way of perpetuating traditions and conventions. And, in that sense, they have been a source of knowledge. They have been a kind of memory of societies. But they have been superseded by books and other methods (including the internet) which do an even better job of providing a memory for a social group.
The Christians liked the invention of the Gutenberg press, for it allowed them to print Bibles. What they did not forsee is that it would also make religion obsolete.
None of this is particularly relevant to what is happening in New Zealand. The social traditions and conventions that we pick up are important, and the New Zealanders want to be inclusive of Maori traditions. I think that’s hard to do. People tend to get their traditions and conventions from the dominant culture — and that’s pragmatism choosing the most effective of the traditions and conventions. I doubt that teaching Maori traditions in science class will be very effective. Teaching them in kindergarten might work better.
This is probably more prosaic than what you are looking for, but I find math and programming to be something like this. Just by thinking about abstract concepts that I cannot always directly reduce to symbols, it is possible to gain new knowledge about the physical world. I know it is knowledge because my algorithm runs better or even achieves something previously impossible.
This knowledge acquisition started with sense data, but the abstract concepts and manipulation within my mind did not involve sense data or even imagined sense data like words or images. Neither did I need to run experiments to arrive at my conclusion, although I will run experiments after the fact sometimes to confirm my thought process. So, this is a means of acquiring knowledge about the physical world that is largely outside the realm of empirical science.
Alan, you say all this knowing, that as a materialist, this thing you call “you” is just an illusion, right?
I mean there is no “you” is there? There is no more you, than the water that runs through parts of Africa in an area we call the Nile is really the Nile, right? Its just water that comes and goes.
Its all just molecules coming and going and you have been fooled into thinking that there is a you somewhere.
Some “you’s” are in concentration camps and you are on record as supporting that on the basis of a suspicion alone.
Is that because to you they are not real people, just molecules not worthy of person-hood?
Or is there a different reason you don’t care about justice?
Why is it that as a materialist (I guess, whatever you mean by that) I am against oppression and as (presumably, you never really say) as a theist you are for it, as per the quotation above?
If I believe this “thing” that I am is an illusion then why do I care when people like you put people like me (the other) in camps? Isn’t that the wrong way round?
Or are you doing it because of your religion?
Ain’t we waiting on something from you along those lines…..?
I agree.
When I got interested in quantum mechanics a few years back, I began to think in different dimensions. Soon after that, a concept crossed my mind that some experimental evidence in quantum mechanics doesn’t not fit into the accepted standard of Einstein’s theory of relativity; i.e. the limit of the speed of light. Since I knew little about it, I ignored that issue until I came across a few world renowned physicists, like Anton Zeilinger, who had called for a new theory or space and time:
…It remains to be seen what the consequences are for our notions of space and time, or space-time for that matter. Space-time itself cannot be above or beyond such considerations. I suggest we need a new deep analysis of space-time, a conceptual analysis maybe analogous to the one done by the Viennese physicist-philosopher Ernst Mach who kicked Newton’s absolute space and absolute time form their throne. The hope is that in the end we will have new physics analogous to Einstein’s new physics in the two theories of relativity.”
https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26790)
From the op:
Do you mean “like a deaf man”, or are you actually deaf? Am I right in presuming it’s the former?
Neil Rickert,
You should have written the OP. 🙂
So information becomes knowledge when we learn it. Or is there a difference?
CharlieM,
I am in fact deaf in one ear but the birdsong makes up for it. Yes, like works better.
I’m quite sure there is a physical me in a physical universe.
Information, in the Shannon sense, is just a sequence of symbols. Knowledge is what allows us to connect that to reality (or to make the information meaningful).
As my mother used to say, “I’m deaf in one ear and can’t hear with the other!”
My kids went to the same school as Evelyn Glennie. She is profoundly deaf but she can still appreciate music and has made a very successful career out of it. I think that in the way she receives sound her whole body performs the task of the ear. We experience sound through the malleus touching the eardrum, she experiences it because her body is in touch with the surfaces around her. Both ways use touch to feel the vibrations. The malleus and the foot are both built on the same theme. The whole reflected in the parts. 🙂
And with reference to gaining knowledge, “there is more than one way to skin a cat” 🙂
I know you are sure, that is why materialism doesn’t make any sense.
Is your hair you? Are your skin cells you? Is your finger you? Are the blood cells that you thought are you but no longer exist you?
OMagain: Ain’t we waiting on something from you along those lines…..?
I did use ideas tangentially inspired by Winston’s dependency graph of life to assist people working on rapidly comparing next generation sequencing data (NGS).
The problem with NGS data is that when genetic samples are sequenced, first we get a bunch of very small reads, each of which is only hundreds of nucleotides long. These then have to be pieced together into a complete genome, which is a very time consuming process.
A short cut is instead of assembling the genome and then trying to align it with other genomes is to cut the reads into even smaller segments on the order of tens of nucleotides long, and take a subsample of these segments. It turns out to be really fast to compare these subsamples, and accurate enough to say whether the massive unassembled datasets contain genetic material of interest.
How is this related to Winston’s graph idea? The big takeaway I got was that alignment based comparison isn’t necessarily the best or only meaningful way to compare genetic sequences. Alignment based comparison is only the be all end all if genomes are related by evolution, and a very particular kind of evolution where most changes are individual nucleotide mutations. This was the original motivation behind algorithms like BLAST.
On the other hand, if entire segments can be rearranged and swapped, such as is known to happen with micro organisms, then we need a completely different method of comparing genomes, of which this alignment free approach I worked with is one. Such an approach is used in the entirely different field of malware analysis, to great success, and since it is similar in that we are comparing strings of symbols, it turns out to be very cross applicable.
Here is a set of approaches I looked at. You can see there are both bioinformatic and computer forensic algorithms in the list, two completely different realms physically speaking, but very similar at the informatics level.
https://github.com/EdwardRaff/pyLZJD
https://github.com/EdwardRaff/pyBWMD
https://github.com/marbl/Mash
https://ccb.jhu.edu/software/kraken/
Would you call what computers do knowledge? Or does knowledge necessarily only exist in the realm of a thinking brain?
No. What computers do is computing or information processing. They don’t actually know anything.
Neil Rickert,
I agree with you, computing is not thinking or knowing anything.
It does seem to be a problem for those materialists who claim that computing is computing, and one day what computers do will be the same as what humans do-thus they will have consciousness.
I find it surprising that they can be so naive.
Well, I also agree that the internet can be regarded as a development of a traditional library that is much faster and more convenient than borrowing a book.
Computers already manage and process information. It is not inconceivable that computer functionality will continue to improve. Optimists may consider this improvement trend has no upper limit. I think there is a limit in that no sentient being can construct something more complex than itself. We humans evolved our intelligence biologically and until computers are being developed via variation and environmental selection, phoodoo needn’t worry.
EricMH,
You’re unaware that you’re contradicting yourself.
Taking small nucleotide samples to figure out if something relates to other genomes relies on the very same principles as longer alignments. BLAST works on the basis of first finding very small segments in common between sequences of interest (queries) and those in the database, to then try and align only the ones that seem related given the segments. It doesn’t matter if you were “inspired” by some bullshit dependency graph, the principle is the very same: expecting that similarity tells you something about “genetic material of interest,” because overall similarity can be estimated from small segment samples.
You might stop at the small segment similarities and call it a day. Scientists, after deciding which ones they care about, will try and produce the full alignment to look for features beyond “this is of interest.” Like the BLAST algorithms itself: it will only attempt alignments if the sequences have enough segments in common to have a good probability of producing good alignments. Scientists relying on quick approximations, like segments in common, will only go further for the ones they care about.
Also, BLAST produces local alignments, so it can find swaps and such. That’s why it can give us more than one alignment for a pairwise comparison. I’d say you knew this, yet you seem to imagine that all alignment algorithms try and produce global alignments, as if scientists never knew that genes and genomes rearrange and recombine.
As your links show, there’s plenty of software today that does the small segment comparison to estimate overall similarity without alignments to save time. They work very well, and they work because of the underlying, overall similarity. No way around. Whether you think that the similarity is explained by common ancestry or by whatever you imagine a dependency graph to represent doesn’t change anything.
You’re discovering sliced bread, but you imagine that you’re doing something else, because you did not start by thinking that you were slicing bread.
Are there other ways of knowing? Of course there are. To believe that modern consciousness emerged fully formed from nowhere is like believing that rotting meat produced the flies known to emerge out of it. The ancient picture consciousness was not formed out of ignorance but of a different way of perceiving.
In ancient learning the lyrical had preference over the literal, today the lyrical is not considered of any importance for learning.
In “Christianity as Mystical Fact” Rudolf Steiner gives some interpretations of traditional myths and legends from various ancient cultures. In this chapter he interprets such myths as the labours of Hercules, the labyrinth of the Minotaur, and Osiris.
When pictures like these were received by the minds of the people they evoked a multitude of emotions and in this way they gained knowledge. It is no coincidence that Knossos and gnostic are both derived from the same root. Gnostic means one who knows while an agnostic is one who does not know. Ignorance, lack of knowledge is from the same root obviously.
Rational, analytical knowledge has developed slowly and is the dominant way of knowing in modern times. But in gaining such a focused, logical knowledge of the material world, we have lost the more encompassing emotional knowledge of ancient times.
I believe that we can evolve in consciousness to regain this ancient way of knowing while still retaining our rational way of knowing. But now the choice is up to each of us as individuals to take that path. If we are unwilling to sacrifice at least some of our personal material comforts for the benefit of the future of the earth, life and humanity then this further evolution of consciousness may not come about.
As far as my experience goes, “other ways of knowing” always means that someone is about to talk bullshit, but that they expect you to respect it for whatever reason: the bullshit is religious, the bullshit is “traditional,” etc. This is true even when used in good faith.
I don’t think that’s true. The ancient Greek words are spelled definitely and there’s no reason to believe that they are etymologically related.
I think it’s extremely important to distinguish culture from civilization.
We can take culture to mean a shared repository of all the information needed to endure continuity across generations. All human social groups depend upon culture: how to acquire food (what’s edible and what’s poisonous, how to build traps, nets, spears, bows and arrows, how to detoxify plants and animals to extract nutrients); how to make tools, shelter, fire, and clothing; how to avoid conflict, resolve conflict; how to identify a prospective mate; child-rearing practices, etc.
Human beings were doing all that by 300,000 thousand years ago, and the roots of culture go much back than that, based on what can be inferred from the archeological and paleontological records.
I think it’s a serious mistake to conflate agriculture with civilization. The partial domestication of plants and animals goes back to about 12,000 years ago. But it’s not for another 5,000 years that we start seeing evidence of states, characterized by political domination (control of violence and control of information).
What were people doing in all that time? Why was there such a time-lag between domestication of tubers, goats, sheep, legumes, orchards, and some grains and the rise of political elites, soldiers, writing, dynasties, empires, and priesthoods?
There’s a very quick cereals to states narrative — as if one thing just automatically leads to the other — that isn’t sustained by a careful examination of the archeological record.
In case you want to know where I’m getting this from, here are some books I’ve read recently:
Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States by James Scott
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow
The Pleistocene Social Contract: Culture and Cooperation in Human Evolution by Kim Sterelny
A Different Kind of Animal: How Culture Transformed Our Species by Richard Boyd
I am in fact deaf in one ear but the birdsong makes up for it. Yes, like works better.
I’m not deaf but I do have severe tinnitus. On the bright side, the constant ringing drowns out the voices in my head. 🙂
And yet animals do mostly the same thing. How do birds learn to build nests? How do monkeys know what to eat and what not to?
There is knowledge in animals that evolution has no answer for.
They can suggest other ways of understanding ourselves and others, but those insights would still need articulation and explication.
Are internal reflection and meditation themselves religious practices? Following Pierre Hadot’s work, let’s call these “spiritual exercises”, which is his translation of the Greek term askesis. (See his Philosophy as a Way of Life.)
This depends as much on the religion (and what we mean by “religion”) as on the spiritual exercises themselves.
In some cases, spiritual exercises were developed in explicit rejection of the prevailing religious practices — for example, in early Buddhist teachings there’s an emphatic rejection of the dominant Hindu practices and institutions at that time.
In classical Greece, the Hellenistic period, and throughout most of Roman history, the spiritual exercises taught by the different philosophical schools were just not related at all to the religious practices at the time. The philosophers had different teachings about the gods, all different from accepted religious practices, but no one seemed to care all that much about whether Stoics believed in Jupiter or if Aristotelians believed in Zeus.
Anyway, I think that meditation and cultivated self-awareness can certainly play a crucial role in our psychological and moral development, without them being “religious” in the sense that we tend to take for granted in the Christian-dominated West.
Are you suggesting that evolution can’t explain the fact that most animals are able to learn, some by trial-and-error and some by observing what others are doing?
Here is where our biologists can help us out. My very limited understanding is that there is a sort of spectrum of behavior, ranging from entirely instinctive and inborn at one end, to entirely learned at the other. Most animals fall somwhere along this line. For example, humans learn language but seem to be wired to do this at birth. Birds must learn to fly, but it comes easily to them. I would guess most nest-building is innate but some is learned, whereas most monkey diet is learned by some is innate.
So generally speaking, for all behaviors, there are varying degrees of learning all built on innate abilities and proclivities. All of which is not only fully explained, but explicitly predicted by evolutionary theory. People who say “evolution can’t explain X” generally 1) don’t know squat about evolution; and 2) are determined to stay that way. Knowledge is often the enemy of belief, and must be defended against.
Acartia,
I’m at (beyond, really) the point of needing some kind of hearing aid. Following a group conversation is difficult for me now.
Kantian Naturalist,
I was using “civilization” simply (loosely, perhaps) to indicate the change to sedentary living in large groups in permanent sites, the first cities. The requirements being a reliable food source, somewhere to store it and the means to defend against external threats. Bread first, then circuses.
I’m very appreciative of your contributions and thanks for the links. Just in time for the winter solstice.
Haha, that was my first instinct as well. It’s one of those phrases. I feel it needs some more details:
@Alan: What is “religious knowledge”? In what way does it differ from secular knowledge?
To what extent are internal reflection, meditation and revelation ways of acquiring religious knowledge? I can see why revelation is in there, but what religious knowledge is gained by meditation?
Flint,
Indeed, innate and learned behaviour aren’t opposites, there’s a spectrum. Humans, who seem to need to learn more than other species, exhibit innate behaviour patterns that they can refine by imitation and experiment, learning and practice, trying a little imagination to test reality.
Pretty sure there are no formal training programs for birds in nest-building. But complex behaviours in birds are observed that must then be inherited and that makes it subject to natural selection. Behaviour patterns are as selectable as physical attributes. Indeed, the two are interlinked. An organism can only do things that its physical form permits, the instinct to fly only helps if you have wings.
Bonobos collecting and cracking open very hard nuts to reach the edible kernels using suitable rocks selected for the purpose of hammer and anvil is learned. Youngsters spend a long time observing and imitating adults. The technique takes a long time to master.
The question of how innate behaviour is inherited, how behaviour is carried in genes, is a question that, as yet, science has not answered. I suspect however there are no other ways to know how innate behaviours are encoded in genetic sequences than the scientific approach, though it may need inspiration, a flash of imagination.
Maybe Eric has some thought on how to tackle this gap in our knowledge.
Yes, that part amused me as well. Why do we detect DNA sequence similarity in the first place? Could that be because these nucleotide positions are homologous? I also got a hearty laugh out “if entire segments can be rearranged and swapped, such as is known to happen with micro organisms”. Yeah, totally no inversions or transpositions happening in multicellular organisms.
I think this is a bad assumption-that all the behaviours animals do they learn from other animals. Do you think a beaver couldn’t build a dam if other beavers didn’t show it how. Every beaver learned from the very first beaver who tried it? Surely no
Same thing with birds, do they need to be taught to make a nest?
So Alan is claiming that these things are inherited. Knowledge is inherited? Maybe Alan is a closet Lamarkian. But as he also is forced to admit, science has so idea how. Saying knowledge exists in your genes is a pretty far fetched idea. the problem is, there is no other explanation that suits the Darwinian framework they are stuck with.
So do you think a spider that never met any other spiders won’t know how to spin a web? If you think it will, then how? And why do humans need to be taught, if other animals can just do?
This is funny Flint. You admit you have no idea howthis knowledge is passed down, but you claim others who question this “just don’t know squat about evolution”.
If that isn’t a slavish devotion to a theory, when you yourself haven’t a clue how, I don’t know what is.
You don’t know squat about it, but your faith is strong nonetheless that someone somewhere, someone much smarter than you, must know how.
https://releases.jhu.edu/2017/12/18/johns-hopkins-scientists-probe-mystery-of-spider-web-spinning/
It’s being actively investigated. Which you’d know if you bothered to even spend 30 seconds looking, but why look when you already know everything?
Which allows us to turn to you and hear your explanation of how spiders know how to build webs. Does your Intelligent Designer design it so perhaps?
I look forwards to hearing the competing Intelligent Design theory.
Ironic given your slavish devotion to Intelligent Design and your inability to say a single thing about it.
That’s a good question for someone who believes in Intelligent Design to address. Why don’t you give it a go?
Likewise, from an ID perspective how do spiders know how to build webs?
Whereas your faith tells you that if it’s innate, evolution can’t explain it. But if it’s learned, evolution can’t explain that either! And if it’s some combination of an inherited tendency amplified by learning, evolution can’t explain that as well. You KNOW this, no learning necessary. So were you born knowing evolution can’t explain anything, or was this learned?
(I have read many times that humans in every culture invent gods, different in nearly every way but gods nonetheless. The specific differences are cultural, but faith in gods transcends culture. So is religious faith inborn or learned? You and I both have faith – I believe explanations are possible without resort to gods, you believe otherwise. So we have faith in common; we’re human.)
If I had to guess, I would say that beavers learn how to build dams by observing how other beavers do it. My bet is that if you separated a beaver kit from its parents and raised it without any other beavers around, it wouldn’t be able to build a dam, or know which kinds of plants are edible, or do most of what wild beavers do.
My guess here is that there’s a nest-building instinct, and each bird builds its own kind of nest based on what materials are part of its local environment and diet, its own physical limitations (including the shape and size of its bill), and individual trial-and-error learning does the rest.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s some trial-and-error learning here too.
The ability to learn by trial and error is extremely old — at least 500 million years, if not more. I recommend The Evolution of the Sensitive Soul: Learning and the Origins of Consciousness on this. I don’t think it’s great as a theory of consciousness but they have a super-interesting theory about the evolution of associative learning.
The question as to why humans need to be taught is really fascinating, given that learning is ubiquitous among animals but teaching is extremely rare — except that teaching is ubiquitous in all human societies. Kim Sterelny takes a stab at this in his The Evolved Apprentice. He thinks that we evolved teaching as we evolved culture, and we evolved culture because of the very specific kind of ecological niche that humans have as obligate cooperative foragers.
In every ecosystem that human cultures have been found, the people in that society have a massive amount of culturally transmitted information about how to transform the plants and animals of that ecosystem into materials that satisfy our needs. Often this involves specialized knowledge about where to find food caches (eggs, tubers); how to make the tools necessary for extracting food that other animals can’t easily get at (e.g. digging sticks); how to make the materials necessary for nets, snares, traps, spears, boomerangs, harpoons, etc; how to make boats, sleds, clothing, etc.
And all of this is tailored to specific environments: a tribesperson of the Yandruwandha would starve in the forests of Amazonia, just as a Yanomano tribesperson would starve in the area of southern Australia where the Yandruwandha flourished. (By contrast, most Americans and Europeans of today would starve if deprived of a supermarket!)
So the question to ask here is, I think, why do humans teach? And why do humans learn differently from all other animals — including our nearest extant relatives, the great apes?
Orphaned beaver builds dams from shoes…
The other way of learning ios someone telliny you stiff. rightly no option ios given hear for space aliens however God/Gods word is a way of knowing and the best way.
W are unique in being created in gods image unlike animals etc. e
Kantian Naturalist,
Spiders learn by trial and error after they weave a number of ridiculous shapes? No, better still, FIRST they use this spinner they don’t know why they have to try fishing, or to try lassoing. When that doesn’t work then they start weaving complicated tunnels, that butterflies fly right through and out the other side. After weeks and months of this frustration, cold and starving they sit on a limb contemplating their future. Some of them simply leap to their death, but in a stroke of fortune a gust of wind comes and sweeps them up into the air, and in a spiral, and as they are in this mini-cyclone silk is flying everywhere, until it makes this perfect fly catching weave. Its is just a coincidence that every spiders web look surprisingly similar. Suicide sometimes takes on this form.
And no beavers don’t learn dam building from other beavers. Its is said to be “innate”, but since no one knows what innate means in terms of heredity, we might as well call this ability “who the fuck knows” since its exactly the same thing.
So, since you are wrong about this, does it change your theory about how life works, or would anything ever change a skeptics mind who doesn’t want to be skeptic?
Well, if you are so sure about those explanations being wrong , does the designer do it? How can you tell?