Knowing About Knowing
Is it possible to have knowledge without someone to “know”? Do we have to have a human around to say “…this is knowledge…”?
Can knowledge simply exist?
This is a bit of an existential tree-falls-in-the-woods issue. And perhaps like those issues an appropriate, if not very helpful, response might be: who cares? If unrealized knowledge does exist somewhere, but nobody knows about it, does it “exist” in the sense we usually understand it? Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t. But it’s certainly not very useful. Classical empiricism and hard-core phenomenology say that unless it (whatever it is) is experienced, perhaps it doesn’t exist. There are many flavors of empiricism and, indeed many other -isms and this forum is not the best place to debate them. But as a rejoinder to straight empiricism, the observable criterion for existence required by the likes of John Locke, David Hume and others has been greatly modified by science in the intervening centuries—we may not directly observe or experience radio waves, for instance, but we can be pretty certain that they do exist.
It seems the issue is mostly a practical one. And perhaps the question is better framed as: can knowledge be discovered (or identified, or created, or constructed—your choice) other than by a human? I would venture that, in the current state of the world, the answer is mostly it depends. One of the things it depends on is where knowledge is stored; where it is retained once it has been acquired.
Knowledge-in-DNA
For about four billion years, nature has been using a sequencing of four nucleotides in a spiral polymer called DNA to encode what we humans have come to know as "life." DNA contains, among other things, the “knowledge” of how to (re)create life in its very many forms. It would be difficult to argue against this sequencing being knowledge and containing the knowledge of life since it does, in fact, create life.
So, knowledge-in-DNA can be “created” without the agency of a “knower”—certainly without any necessary human agency [1].
The Storage of Knowledge
Outside of the medium of DNA, when we consider knowledge in other media, the other side of the it depends qualification kicks in. The population of knowledge into other knowledge-storage media (of which more later) currently do require the presence and intervention of a human. However, once the knowledge is acquired, the storage of it does not. For example, once a human has put knowledge into a book, it mostly stays there independent of whether anyone reads it or not [2].
Books do not write themselves, of course. Of the other possible knowledge storage media: knowledge-in-brains obviously requires the brain of a human [3], knowledge-in-hardware requires someone to conceptualize, design, and build the hardware incorporating the knowledge. Knowledge-in-software currently requires the services of a human programmer though that may likely change soon if it has not already. We’ll look at these knowledge storage media later.
FOOTNOTES
[1] The question of whether or not there is some external agent that created life (and usually the universe in most religions or philosophies) is another issue that people have wrestled with forever. I will not wrestle with it here.
[2] As I can personally attest. My book The Laws of Software Process published in 2004 has been read by only a few people and probably nobody is reading it now. But it does exist and it does contain knowledge. Trust me.
[3] I will generally limit my discussion of knowledge-in-brains to knowledge-in-human-brains. Clearly, the brains of other animals both contain knowledge and can have knowledge imparted in them through experience and training. Where I reference non-humans, I will assume that the animal qualifies as the “knower” in this case, but I won’t process it much.