Quick thought: reading this I get a sense that some of our collective confusion here revolves around “knowledge” as a quantifiable noun rather than “knowing” as a verb, and if we give up on the idea that knowledge is first a quantifiable thing (rather than a convenient post hoc reification) we open up new avenues of understanding knowledge.
Yeah that resonates with me. I’d be interested in any more thoughts you have on this. Particularly anything about how we might recognize knowing in another entity or in a physical system.
I don’t really have a whole picture that I think says more than what others have. I think there’s something to knowing as the act of operationalizing information, by which I mean a capacity to act based on information.
To make this more concrete, consider a simple control system like a thermostat or a steam engine governor. These systems contain information in the physical interactions we abstract away to call “signal” that’s sent to the “controller”. If we had only signal there’d be no knowledge because that’s information that is not used to act. The controller creates knowledge by having some response it “knows” to perform when it gets the signal.
This view then doesn’t really distinguish knowledge from purpose in a cybernetic sense, and I think that seems reasonable at first blush. This let’s us draw a hard line between “dead” information like words in a book and “live” information like words being read.
Of course this doesn’t necessarily make all the distinctions we’d hope to make, since this makes no difference between a thermostat and a human when it comes to knowledge. Personally I think that’s correct. There’s perhaps some interesting extra thing to say about the dynamism of these two systems (the thermostat is an adaption executor only, the human is that and something capable of changing itself intentionally), but I think that’s separate from the knowledge question.
Obviously this all hinges on a particular sort of deflationary approach to these terms to have them make sense with the weakest possible assumptions and covering the broadest classes of systems. Whether or not this sort of “knowledge” I’m proposing here is useful for much is another question.
Quick thought: reading this I get a sense that some of our collective confusion here revolves around “knowledge” as a quantifiable noun rather than “knowing” as a verb, and if we give up on the idea that knowledge is first a quantifiable thing (rather than a convenient post hoc reification) we open up new avenues of understanding knowledge.
Yeah that resonates with me. I’d be interested in any more thoughts you have on this. Particularly anything about how we might recognize knowing in another entity or in a physical system.
I don’t really have a whole picture that I think says more than what others have. I think there’s something to knowing as the act of operationalizing information, by which I mean a capacity to act based on information.
To make this more concrete, consider a simple control system like a thermostat or a steam engine governor. These systems contain information in the physical interactions we abstract away to call “signal” that’s sent to the “controller”. If we had only signal there’d be no knowledge because that’s information that is not used to act. The controller creates knowledge by having some response it “knows” to perform when it gets the signal.
This view then doesn’t really distinguish knowledge from purpose in a cybernetic sense, and I think that seems reasonable at first blush. This let’s us draw a hard line between “dead” information like words in a book and “live” information like words being read.
Of course this doesn’t necessarily make all the distinctions we’d hope to make, since this makes no difference between a thermostat and a human when it comes to knowledge. Personally I think that’s correct. There’s perhaps some interesting extra thing to say about the dynamism of these two systems (the thermostat is an adaption executor only, the human is that and something capable of changing itself intentionally), but I think that’s separate from the knowledge question.
Obviously this all hinges on a particular sort of deflationary approach to these terms to have them make sense with the weakest possible assumptions and covering the broadest classes of systems. Whether or not this sort of “knowledge” I’m proposing here is useful for much is another question.