Where Knowledge Comes From

This is another topic that has occupied the attention of philosophers since we’ve had philosophers...

...does knowledge intrinsically exist? 

Based on the logical arguments from the Knowledge, Knower, Store section, it is reasonable to affirm that, once knowledge has been discovered, identified, created, or derived, it can exist independently of anything other than the medium in which it is stored.  The knowledge in a book, once written, stays there as long as the book medium stays there.  One could argue that the knowledge in an old book might be outdated, that it has been replaced by newer, better knowledge—but the original knowledge is still there in the book as long as the pages are physically there and readable [1].

Is Knowledge Intrinsic or Created?

Rather than wondering whether knowledge intrinsically exists, perhaps a more pertinent question is: where does the knowledge originate?  Is knowledge intrinsic to and originates in the material world or must it come from a human brain?  In an earlier example, I considered that, while a rock is arguably not knowledge per se, the characteristics of the rock (its structure, hardness, density,…) are.  We could further argue that the rock’s density, being a characteristic of the rock, is intrinsic knowledge and that measuring it is simply accessing that knowledge.   However, a more credible argument is that the measurement activity creates the knowledge.  It is true that a rock has some density whether measured or not.  However, knowledge of the rock's density is not absent any metric and unit of density—it is the density in that unit and metric.   So, identifying, uncovering, or creating this knowledge requires a priori knowledge of the density unit and how to measure it—the two aspects (benchmark metric and measurement process) of knowledge acquisition mentioned earlier.  Another way of viewing this, using the (N)DIKW model, is that the rock is the noise and the metric unit and measurement process are what converts the noise into data.

At the current state of the art, the initial identification of the unit and the process are the province of humans.  Once a machine has been programmed with the unit and process for assessing objects in that unit, it can measure the density of a rock and store that data, if necessary, without intervention of a human.  Presently, however, such machines cannot function without being programmed with at least some starting metric.  So we are back to the view that, while machines can process and store knowledge once it is defined, they cannot independently identify it or initially create it.

Then, if humans are the only things that can create or identify knowledge, where does it come from?  Is it intrinsic within us and we just have to learn to identify it?  Does it spontaneously arise through thought?  Are thought and knowledge the same thing?  If so, and I think of something and then forget, was the knowledge created and then destroyed?  Where did it go?

To come to some reasonable answer to these questions, we will need to look at the nature of thought.  But first, an observation. 

Thinking and Thinking about Thinking

It is clear that all animals think.  Even primitive animals have a nervous system that allows them to react to their environment.  The nervous system of most animals can learn, even if it doesn’t look like anything we could reasonably call a brain.  Some living creatures think differently at individual and collective levels—ants, for instance, behave one way as individual ants and in other ways when they act in concert.  Higher order animals have considerable capacity to learn to deal with complex situations and perform complex tasks.  Humans are members of this club, of course, but they seem to be different both in degree and in kind.  While all animals think, only humans appear to think about thinking.  This capability is recognized in the Latin name for the current version of the human race which is Homo Sapiens Sapiens.  The second “Sapiens” was added by anthropologists and paleontologists to differentiate modern humans from their earlier anatomically modern Homo Sapiens forebears (specifically, so-called “Cro-Magnon”).  H. s. sapiens means, almost literally, “…man who thinks about thinking.”  Dogs, cats, snakes, and bats clearly think, but there is no evidence that they do, or can, introspect. 

Of course, simply considering the concept of knowledge is thinking about thinking.  And there’s a clue.

Thinking and the Environment

The development of a nervous system, from an evolutionary perspective, arose to allow a living thing to better deal with its ever-changing environment.  Static entities, such as plants, whose environments did not change rapidly and which possessed few mechanisms to respond if they did, had no need of such a sophisticated response to stimulus.  Once mobile organisms evolved, they required quicker input from their environment because, by moving, their environments changed.  The ability to move toward helpful stimuli such as food and away from harmful stimuli such as fire became valuable and drove the evolution of more complex and effective nervous responses.  These systems became powerful enough that their owners could anticipate what might happen and proactively move toward or away from stimuli proactively, before the stimuli occurred.  Once organisms could react, not just to what was happening around them but to what might happen around them and could act appropriately, they started to think.

Since nervous systems and the thinking mechanisms they generated were initially developed to improve the creature’s interaction with its environment, it’s not too big a stretch to imagine that the environmental interaction became the foundation for thought.

We see hints of this sensory foundation to thought in the way we talk about it:

This idea stinks!...

   Well, it looks good to me,…

Well, maybe it’s a matter of taste, but it doesn’t feel right to me,…

    No.  It’s a sound idea; it deserves a hearing.  Don’t you see my point?

I’m sorry, it just doesn’t carry any weight with me

   But if you just step through it slowly, you should get close to understanding it

More on this later in A Sensory Basis for Knowledge.

FOOTNOTES

[1]  There are some ancient texts (eg., Jiahu and Banpo from China's 7th and 5th BCE respectively and the Dispilio Tablet dated to the 5th century BC Greece) that  have not been deciphered to date and may never be.  These sources presumably contain knowledge of some sort but, since the context for that knowledge is missing, the knowledge is not accessible in any way.   It is another "tree falls in the woods" argument whether this knowledge actually now exists.