Knowledge is not Enough

A continuation of “What is Science?”

This is a continuation of:

https://medium.com/life-tips/how-to-think-e024fdd8c62a

To begin this discussion, I invoke an explanation of the uniqueness of the human species put forth by Richard Feynman:

“There was on this planet an evolution of life to a stage that there were evolved animals, which are intelligent. I don’t mean just human beings, but animals which play and which can learn something from experience—like cats. But at this stage each animal would have to learn from its own experience. They gradually develop, until some animal [primates?] could learn from experience more rapidly and could even learn from another’s experience by watching, or one could show the other, or he saw what the other one did. So there came a possibility that all might learn it, but the transmission was inefficient and they would die, and maybe the one who learned it died, too, before he could pass it on to others. The question is: is it possible to learn more rapidly what somebody learned from some accident than the rate at which the thing is being forgotten, either because of bad memory or because of the death of the learner or inventors? So there came a time, perhaps, when for some species [humans?] the rate at which learning was increased, reached such a pitch that suddenly a completely new thing happened: things could be learned by one individual animal, passed on to another, and another fast enough that it was not lost to the race. Thus became possible an accumulation of knowledge of the race. This has been called time-binding. I don’t know who first called it this. At any rate, we have here [in this hall] some samples of those animals, sitting here trying to bind one experience to another, each one trying to learn from the other. This phenomenon of having a memory for the race, of having an accumulated knowledge passable from one generation to another, was new in the world—but it had a disease in it: it was possible to pass on ideas which were not profitable for the race. The race has ideas, but they are not necessarily profitable. So there came a time in which the ideas, although accumulated very slowly, were all accumulations not only of practical and useful things, but great accumulations of all types of prejudices, and strange and odd beliefs. Then a way of avoiding the disease was discovered. This is to doubt that what is being passed from the past is in fact true, and to try to find out again from experience what the situation is, rather than trusting the experience of the past in the form in which it is passed down. And that is what science is: the result of the discovery that it is worthwhile rechecking by new direct experience, and not necessarily trusting the [human] race[‘s] experience from the past. I see it that way.”

The purpose of this post is to explore in depth the nature of this disease.

The individual body of knowledge for most people is an aggregation of prejudice — information absent of understanding. Just as the bird knows to fly south for the winter, the prototypical human knows the earth revolves around the sun. Both have absorbed some information and act on it deliberately, and neither can provide any justification as to why (for further discussion on this distinction, see my answer to the question what is science?).

Although humans have the ability to access a vast repository of information, for most this information is rarely understood, only recalled or referenced.

Those more intelligent than the prototypical are those who are able to internalize and distribute inherited information. Most intelligent people can adequately explain that the earth revolves around the sun because of the gravitational field produced by both bodies and the velocity of the earth tangent to the direction of the gravitational force. They could even define gravity and force, producing an intuitive abstraction such as the one provided below:

The blue circle represents the earth, and the arrow marked “centripetal force” represents a gravitational force

Yet there is no discussion as to why this particular explanation is in fact, correct. No precise definition of the gravitational field is provided, let alone a proof of its existence. We accept the explanation only because it is sophisticated and seems plausible. Upon close examination, this knowledge is again exposed as a prejudice.

We tend to respect as intelligent those who produce plausible yet sophisticated prejudices.

There are, however, in the annals of scientific inquiry, well-defined models of reality. These advances, born from the intuition of geniuses, occasionally strike upon a fundamental reality. The theory of gravity, among other attempts at understanding the universe, has been developed over millennia, with interpretations expressed through rigorous mathematical exposition. The essential problem is that these truths are propagated by those who do not understand them from first principles, and can only articulate the results. By this process, the truths of one generation are absorbed as the prejudices of the next.

The solution Feynman proposes, to doubt the prejudices of the past and learn again from experience, is flawed in two respects. First, this introduces inefficiencies of the same character as those faced by lesser organisms, and second it does not discriminate between the acquisition of truth and the understanding of truth.

We now find ourselves in need of a second revolution in the propagation of knowledge, one which ensures that what is inherited from previous generations is both the information and intuition required to construct our own models of understanding, whether they be consistent with or entirely orthogonal to those of the past.