Archive: Knowledge vI - 2008

Archived webpage from 2008 probably before. "Real" here is used in the sense of what lies outside theories/images themselves, and why images can't construct themselves. This is the state of the SRH before it became the SRH.

Knowledge

We can't know everything

While many philosophers and scientists become absorbed into investigations about the world, amassing datas and deducing the logical implications of these findings through constructing elaborate theories, there is one thing which they invariably overlook. All this activity is only possible because in the first place we are here and there is a world to investigate. No matter how sophisticated our theories become we can never overcome that initial requirement that the theories themselves were caused by something.

This situation is a little like the hands in M.C.Eschers famous 'Drawing Hands' (1948). There is one hand at the top, we might call Tophand, apparently drawing another at the bottom, say Bottomhand, which in turn is drawing Tophand. Suppose we are Tophand. We are busy drawing an excellent model of the universe, that is Bottomhand, which even seems to explain where we came from - it is drawing us. For Tophand everything looks explained, that is until someone points out that Tophand is effectively drawing itself, in which case it is just making it all up.

In defense Tophand would say that it is only making a representation of a "real" hand, and it is the real hand which is drawing Tophand. The analogy being that knowledge is only "about" the world, and it is that world which is real. So what is the difference between knowledge and the real world? One thing we know already is that the answer can't be a type of knowledge! That is one limit to knowledge already. The other is the admission that it is the real world that does the drawing, not knowledge. The existence of our theories (the drawings made by reality) is evidence for the real world, not what is in those theories (the drawings we do). Which is good, but it means that knowledge is limited to being about the world, and it always depends upon the world. If we ask ourselves where we came from, then it makes sense to would say that Bottomhand had drawn it. A seemingly accurate and good theory. However when we see Tophand in the process of drawning Bottomhand it all seems a little suspicious. Maybe Tophand just drew Bottomhand to make it look like it had come from somewhere! What we need to know is who started drawing first. If the initial page was just Tophand then we see the deception and Tophand is just making things up. If the initial page was Bottomhand then Tophand has successfully shifted the question of where it came form to an equal question of where Bottomhand came from. If they both existed at the beginning, as Escher is suggesting with both hands at the same stage of completion then its a paradox. A theory which could explain this would explain how and why it came into existence. Everything in the theory would explain everything in the theory, and so the theory could be about nothing but itself. It would be a completely closed, esoteric and meaningless theory. See the essay on Artificial Intelligence. A useful theory must always explain something real, explain some observation, explain some data or explain some real world, and so can never explain itself. A problem always arises when we have things which try to explain themselves. This will become more apparent by looking at an example.

Can we see what the brain "sees"? or What does a painting of itself look like?

In biology classes it was explained that the eye is connected to the brain by nerves and it is in the brain that the visual processing occurs to give us vision. I had originally been under the belief that the eye was some kind of window that the brain looked out of, but now I was being told that the brain only 'saw' nerve impulses. This raised an enormous problem for me - far beyond the A-Level Biology syllabus. If the eye was taking an image of the world and turning it into nerve impulses that were being sent back to the brain for processing, how did the brain understand how to turn these impulses back into the world? The point is that the brain has only ever known electrical impulses from the eyes, there has never been a window to see the world directly, and so we can never know the external world directly. If we accept what the biologist is telling us then what we see is actually brain excitation created by an external world that we can never see directly! From scientific experiments it looks like we can deduce the existence of a world outside our senses which causes our senses, but beyond that we know nothing about it! Well I did and it has taken me 20 years to unpick the mess caused by misunderstanding a biology diagram! There are all kinds of problems created by a dualism like that described between a "real world" and a "sense world" (examine any Western philosophy). The biologists diagram is accurate, so where can the problem lie?

Consider what happens if the researcher believes that they can understand their own process of seeing by observing a patient in the laboratory. They will be able to gain considerable superficial understanding it is true, but they won't be able to understand the most fundamental bit because they are using seeing themselves to observe the patient. Whatever this deep bit is, it can't be "on display" (what the scientist is seeing of the patient) and "how it is displayed" (that he IS seeing himself) at the same time. That would be like a painting of itself?

In 1806 a philosopher Hegel got this point brilliantly out of the way in the foreward of his book. There had been a program before him to try and validate the mind, to examine it to see which bits worked and which bits were false. He simply pointed out that if the mind was a telescope for examining the world, how could we use the telescope to examine itself meaningfully? If we used a mirror to point the scope back at itself then any distortions in the scopes glasses would make it impossible to gain a "correct" view of the imperfections. It is a futile venture. For Hegel the mind is to be used as we find it. We cannot know or make objective judgements about the mind because we need that mind to do the judgeing.

To understand the biologist diagram correctly the whole thing must be identified with the whole part of experience. When we experience the world there is just the real world around us. There is no process of unseen things causing our experiences, there are just those things. There is no time ticking past, we can't see into the past except in memories and we can't see into the future except in imagination, there is no past, present or future to look into there are just things unfolding just as we are used to them. The linear process that the biologist draws out with an imaginary time ticking past, of unseen things causing images on the retina and brain excitation is a representation of our seeing things as it appears if we do some anatomy. But it is just a representation, a painting, it is not the "real" thing. The real thing is what we experience when we do some looking either at the biologists diagram representation, or in a real anatomy class, or even just looking at the words on this page.

Knowledge is not Real. There is only Experience.

The reason for this lengthy article is to argue ironically for the simplest thing. Before there is any knowledge there must be the simple fact of experience. This fundamental part of our life and existence is what I wanted to highlight. There is always the temptation when we get to understanding things and knowing things to try to find knowledge that will replace ourselves. Whether we take our job skills too seriously, or our education and training too seriously. Knowledge is only ever a painting of the world, it can never take the place of the world. I have proved to myself without any remaining doubt, taking almost 20 years, that it is impossible to understand the basis for existence and experience. The world just "is", there is no fundamental basis, there is nothing there to know, that is the bottom line. Science and knowledge will always remain just images of reality, and it is critical to not let them distract us too much from that reality. That reality is what I am calling Nature in this web article. It is what inspires people to explore the world in the first place, it is what their studies are about, it is what they hang their theories upon, it is what gives light and meaning to what are otherwise black texts upon a page.