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May 29, 2008
Savvy About Knowledge?
Just what is it about knowledge that makes it so.. interesting... so... appealing?
On National Public Radio's KQED show "Forum", much of what was discussed recently about the elusive nature of knowledge had to do with the experience of being "certain" or "uncertain", and how that experience could be provoked, as it turns out, by altering not only the state of consciousness but the state of the brain itself. This argued that we must be able to admit the difference between believing we know, versus objectively being correct.
But it's not so important that there is any state of being absolutely "right or wrong" about what is real or what is actual.
Instead of right or wrong being the decisive criteria, what matters is that knowledge as an embrace of abstraction is different from knowledge as an embrace of concreteness.
Abstraction leads us to expect that future experience will have some particulars; concreteness leads us to accept that current experience has some particulars. Abstraction provides models; concreteness provides examples.
In both cases, selectivity is a critical determinant; maturity in knowledge broadens our scope of selectivity.
And in both cases, our mind invents experience as well as receives experience. Note that we constantly take models as examples of something, and we constantly take examples as models of something...
This "flexibility" shows that as an ongoing phenomenon, our knowledge is continually tested by the activity of inventing and receiving particulars into what we call our awareness.
In the end, we are certain that we have awareness, but we may be uncertain of whether our awareness is all it can or should be. This throws the value more on being knowledge-able than on "having" knowledge; a mind is a terrible thing to close, and uncertainty is actually a key to generating the value of knowledge. Ultimately, the important thing about "knowledge" lies in what knowledge makes you do.
Posted by Malcolm Ryder at May 29, 2008 10:42 AM