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On the Nature of Knowledge (pt. 2)
12 years ago
Experience and Truth
I find that it would have been smarter to write these little posts in a linear and orderly fashion, but it appears that I don’t plan things when regarding philosophy and hence my posts become disjointed and bounce between topics. This post takes a step back and moves into the realm of human interpretation of knowledge and the perspective. This is incomplete as it is a piece of philosophy that is still being worked through. That’s what these are all about, after all, exploration of knowledge. Please say something if I do miss a thing.
There is one perspective each human has and it is called experience. This perspective gives us our perceptive interpretation of reality which we copy into our minds, where things become more complex. This experiential perspective, however, is limited to what we can experience, and thus our minds are limited to recalling and constructing off of what we’ve experienced. We can’t create more than what we can make with the building blocks of reality we’ve exposed. This collection of perceptive info is sorted through with our minds and this sorting out we call understanding. This process of understanding uses reason and comparison to create relationships. It is these objects –perception, understanding, and relationships– that we call knowledge.
This knowledge, however, is not infallible. From knowledge it is possible to make false knowledge: misunderstandings, incorrect relationships, and delusions. These bits of false knowledge are found to be contradictions with what the truth is.
True means something along the lines of “in accordance to reality.” In the case of knowledge, untruth becomes whatever is not in accordance with reality. It becomes contradiction, which means that something is wholly wrong. Contradiction cannot stand against reality (consequently truth is reality).
The question has been raised before and it will likely be raised again: How do we know that the stimuli we are experiencing are true? The answer is quite interesting and has broad implications. If we observe reality for a long time, we begin to pick up patterns. Repetitions, constants, trends, much more. These things will likely always be there and are likely consistent. If they are, then they are likely the truth and knowledge can be gained through observation. Regardless, what is acknowledgeable once is often enough to satisfy our knowledge, until circumstance deems otherwise.
It is possible to have incorrect information, in which the brain has misinterpreted something or something entirely unusual happens and is something unexpected. This, however, does not dismiss the concept of truth, since if no human reasoning is true then no knowledge can be gained, and thus the whole human experience is dismissed as entirely random interpretation. Even the most basic actions require an understanding of some other thing, and if that is assumed to be possible without there being a truth, then it is experience as a whole being turned down as utter nonsense. Such would be the way of living with no knowledge, and is quite impossible.
The place of truth enters next on whether it applies to everything or not. If human reasoning cannot be trusted (held against some rule, often truth itself), then there is no concept of knowledge or truth between humans or within a human. Knowledge is derived directly from experience. For the most direct statement, it would be said that truth is reality and that is what we experience until our reasoning skills take over.
There is another major danger to knowledge that must be brought into the open. In order to try to produce truths without being forced to use reality as a guide for every single thing, we use reasoning (logic); the answer created by this we’ll name Conjecture. Logic has limits, and that limit is the base of knowledge and previous Conjectures. Logic as a system of reasoning, ideologically, would be close to perfect, but perfect logic requires perfect knowledge and that is something that humans will never be in possession of. However, the guesswork of our system of logic produces the Conjecture. Conjecture, in reference to earlier terms, is almost completely comprised of understandings and relationships. Once a Conjecture is tried against perception, then it discerned to be truth or not.
From this conclusion, it is safe to say that most of our knowledge is comprised of Conjectures, which although they may have been tried to others, have yet to be tried against the holder of the Conjectures. It is possible to have a Conjecture throughout the duration of someone’s life and never have it tried to be true or false. While something is a Conjecture, it is already (basically predetermined) true or false, but the knowledge of that status has yet to be discerned to the holder of the Conjecture.
This creates a gap of knowledge to anyone who examines their life: What do I know that I know is really true or not? Or in the terms of this post: Which of my Conjectures are true? Which of those Conjectures are lies, and which of those “truths” are only true under lies or false circumstance? How do these Conjectures affect my knowledge?
There is a lot of speculation to reasoning as a whole and to what extent can the products of such be held true.
I find that it would have been smarter to write these little posts in a linear and orderly fashion, but it appears that I don’t plan things when regarding philosophy and hence my posts become disjointed and bounce between topics. This post takes a step back and moves into the realm of human interpretation of knowledge and the perspective. This is incomplete as it is a piece of philosophy that is still being worked through. That’s what these are all about, after all, exploration of knowledge. Please say something if I do miss a thing.
There is one perspective each human has and it is called experience. This perspective gives us our perceptive interpretation of reality which we copy into our minds, where things become more complex. This experiential perspective, however, is limited to what we can experience, and thus our minds are limited to recalling and constructing off of what we’ve experienced. We can’t create more than what we can make with the building blocks of reality we’ve exposed. This collection of perceptive info is sorted through with our minds and this sorting out we call understanding. This process of understanding uses reason and comparison to create relationships. It is these objects –perception, understanding, and relationships– that we call knowledge.
This knowledge, however, is not infallible. From knowledge it is possible to make false knowledge: misunderstandings, incorrect relationships, and delusions. These bits of false knowledge are found to be contradictions with what the truth is.
True means something along the lines of “in accordance to reality.” In the case of knowledge, untruth becomes whatever is not in accordance with reality. It becomes contradiction, which means that something is wholly wrong. Contradiction cannot stand against reality (consequently truth is reality).
The question has been raised before and it will likely be raised again: How do we know that the stimuli we are experiencing are true? The answer is quite interesting and has broad implications. If we observe reality for a long time, we begin to pick up patterns. Repetitions, constants, trends, much more. These things will likely always be there and are likely consistent. If they are, then they are likely the truth and knowledge can be gained through observation. Regardless, what is acknowledgeable once is often enough to satisfy our knowledge, until circumstance deems otherwise.
It is possible to have incorrect information, in which the brain has misinterpreted something or something entirely unusual happens and is something unexpected. This, however, does not dismiss the concept of truth, since if no human reasoning is true then no knowledge can be gained, and thus the whole human experience is dismissed as entirely random interpretation. Even the most basic actions require an understanding of some other thing, and if that is assumed to be possible without there being a truth, then it is experience as a whole being turned down as utter nonsense. Such would be the way of living with no knowledge, and is quite impossible.
The place of truth enters next on whether it applies to everything or not. If human reasoning cannot be trusted (held against some rule, often truth itself), then there is no concept of knowledge or truth between humans or within a human. Knowledge is derived directly from experience. For the most direct statement, it would be said that truth is reality and that is what we experience until our reasoning skills take over.
There is another major danger to knowledge that must be brought into the open. In order to try to produce truths without being forced to use reality as a guide for every single thing, we use reasoning (logic); the answer created by this we’ll name Conjecture. Logic has limits, and that limit is the base of knowledge and previous Conjectures. Logic as a system of reasoning, ideologically, would be close to perfect, but perfect logic requires perfect knowledge and that is something that humans will never be in possession of. However, the guesswork of our system of logic produces the Conjecture. Conjecture, in reference to earlier terms, is almost completely comprised of understandings and relationships. Once a Conjecture is tried against perception, then it discerned to be truth or not.
From this conclusion, it is safe to say that most of our knowledge is comprised of Conjectures, which although they may have been tried to others, have yet to be tried against the holder of the Conjectures. It is possible to have a Conjecture throughout the duration of someone’s life and never have it tried to be true or false. While something is a Conjecture, it is already (basically predetermined) true or false, but the knowledge of that status has yet to be discerned to the holder of the Conjecture.
This creates a gap of knowledge to anyone who examines their life: What do I know that I know is really true or not? Or in the terms of this post: Which of my Conjectures are true? Which of those Conjectures are lies, and which of those “truths” are only true under lies or false circumstance? How do these Conjectures affect my knowledge?
There is a lot of speculation to reasoning as a whole and to what extent can the products of such be held true.
