Knowledge

 

INTRODUCTION

 

Unlike everything else in creation, humanity has the spark of self awareness.  We are that tiny fraction of the universe which knows itself.  Despite its familiarity, consciousness is surprising because it is not apparent how the mechanistic matter of our brains could become sentient.  Indeed every scientific measure affirms the cosmos is deterministic, governed by unchanging natural law, and not subject to the whims of arbitrary or capricious influence.  Lightning bolts are not the hammer of Thor or even the passing fancy of Allah.  Rather material objects seem to be imbued with intrinsic and unvarying properties that alone generate “secondary causation.”  This would seem to prohibit qualities of independent action arising from inanimate matter making us impossible.  But here we are, we think. 

 

This apparently super-natural aspect of the human condition is often called a “soul”.   A defining feature, of which, is our drive to understand the world and our place in the order of things.  Towards this end we assemble our thoughts in orderly patterns and arrive at conclusions we deem reasonable.  We think about it.  But almost as soon as we start, we discover logical limits to knowledge.  And so despite best efforts, certainty is elusive.  In fact we now have well respected proofs that many aspects of existence are theoretically unknowable.   And significantly these constraints apply to both religion and science, which rather than being distinct, share common assumptions, methods, and certitudes.

 

Fortunately, we are not defenseless in spite of unavoidable limits on certainty.  But neither are we at the mercy of magical and mystic forces beyond understanding.  Rather we have developed well trod paths to knowledge in spite of significant theoretical constraints.  And our ability to refine what understandings we can achieve is our claim to fame as true marvels of creation.

 

FOUNDATIONS

 

The methodology to knowing anything is to first make assumptions, hopefully as simple and self-evident as possible, and then to derive logical consequences.   And any systematic study cannot avoid at least some assumptions.  Concerning knowledge, a famous set of epistemological axioms that have proven resistant to serious objection are

 

1.  We assume the existence of ourselves.  This was originally expressed as “I think therefore I am” or in Latin “Cogito, ergo sum”.

2.  We assume the existence of the outside world which we experience through our senses.

3.  We assume the validity of human logic.

 

Note that we do not endorse the so far futile attempt to derive the second proposition from the first but take both as axiomatic.  Interestingly from this start we can demonstrate absolutely, that we cannot be absolutely certain of anything. Despite the obvious retort “Are you certain of that?” this somewhat tortured assertion is not totally unreasonable or self-contradictory.

 

CAVEATS

 

Obviously if any axiom is somehow mistaken, then the whole house of cards built on this shifting sand will fall.  This is because a false premise implies anything.  “If the moon is made of green cheese, then Julius Caesar is currently President of the United States.” is actually a true statement.

 

It can also be shown that any set of assumptions will necessarily lead to contradictions.  Famous verbal challenges to Aristotle’s fundamental assertions are “This statement is false.” and “Can an infinitely powerful God create a rock too heavy for Him to lift?” and so forth.   Note that these conundrums do really say anything about whether truth or God exists but rather reflect only our own inadequacies to resolve them.

 

And further yet, any set of assumptions must be incomplete in the sense of not being able to demonstrate all theorems that are true under that set.   And so to the extent we can rely on our ability to reason, we can demonstrate its own inadequacy and incompleteness.

 

But whether these are limits of human logic, or of any finite being, or even more foundational, we cannot tell.  Fortunately within these constraints, we can and have developed incredible libraries of results that have fostered and enriched modern civilization.

 

PROGRESS

 

Lacking absolute certainty we rate belief in terms of probability. 

 

And we constantly refine our assumptions.  Science is constantly overturning existing models and searching for new equations that fit new data.

 

And finally we seek to further understanding by developing novel insights within existing frameworks.

 

REASONABLE SOURCES

 

Our sources of knowledge are several and well known.  They fall into mostly self-evident categories as follows.

 

1.      Self Awareness.  We have thoughts and thereby know we exist.  This was succinctly expressed by Rene Descartes as “cogito ergo sum [I think therefore I am]”.  We can remember the past.  We can extrapolate from experience and imagine future events.   We can dream of what never happened and even of what could never happen.

 

2.      Perception.  Most obviously we have the direct evidence of our senses.  We can see the world.  We can feel the warmth of the sun and the cold of the night.  We can touch a surface and know whether it is rough or smooth.   Our senses allow us to take the measure of the greater world around us.

 

3.      Reason.  We can form abstract ideas and judge their relative merits.   Our logic forms the basis of geometry and indeed of all mathematical pursuits.  Our minds can imagine perfect forms unattainable in the natural world.  And this is knowledge that is just as real as sensory input but which could never be discovered or demonstrated by physical measurement.  A famous example from antiquity is the fact that the square root of two, which is the diagonal length of a unit square, cannot be expressed a fraction containing only whole numbers.  And modern mathematics provides any number of similar examples.

 

4.      Shared Morals.  Every human being has a conscience which acts to restrain selfish needs and wants.  Even as children we know the difference between right and wrong.   And while we share instincts with even the lowest forms, our inner sense of right and wrong sometimes compels acts contrary to even our very survival.  Societies universally eulogize selfless heroes who give their lives to save even unrelated individuals.

 

5.      Communicated Experience.   Others can tell us of what they have experienced.  And beyond that we can know their hopes and fears and thoughts and discoveries.  With the advent of the written record, we can access the collected wisdom of even those who have long since passed.   And this store of information across countless generations is many times larger than all others combined.

 

6.      Sacred Scripture.   This refers to revealed truth from a supernatural source and is thus controversial.  But if we believe in the existence of free will not strictly determined by natural law, then our every conscious choice has a touch of the supernatural or that which is above or beyond nature.  Also given the evidence for a “Big Bang” origin of the universe, this source cannot be considered unreasonable since it is logically impossible for the universe to have created itself from nothing under the sole agency of natural law.  Nor is a Creator inconsistent with observations of increasing entropy, meaning the state of disorder, which also implies a physical beginning “ex nihilo”.

 

DERIVED SOURCES

 

While other means to knowledge are sometimes proposed, they are in general terms but different sides of the same coin.  That is they are but alternate descriptions of those already given above.  Some of these include the following.

 

1.      We have a homeostasis or our self regulating body chemistry as well as our involuntary autonomic reflexes whose results we experience but in the same qualitative manner as external stimuli.

 

2.      We have an almost instinctive kinesthetic awareness of our surroundings and our position in it.  This provides a muscle memory allowing us to walk and run, to hit a baseball, and to play the piano with more ease than might otherwise be the case.

 

3.      We have an instinctive fear of falling or of snakes or of lightening but again this is triggered by a sense of our surroundings and our imaging the danger.

 

4.      If we are passionate about observing people and well enough practiced, we may almost subconsciously form snap judgments of another’s thoughts or intent.  Because humans are similar enough to share common instincts and concerns, we may recognize our own situation in others from the most subtle clues and infer another’s thoughts almost as if we could read minds.

 

5.      We tend to learn from our own mistakes albeit in a often haphazard and inconsistent fashion.

 

6.      In a similar fashion we may make an almost involuntary connection between various ideas and experience a flash of insight.

 

In every case these latter items are derived and not fundamental sources different from those previously described.  In addition the information they convey to our conscious mind are of a constructed and secondary quality

 

FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH

 

Faith has been famously described as the belief in things unseen.

 

Religious faith is based on the dictates of our conscience, our innate sense of right and wrong, which every human being experiences albeit not in equal measure but which is still common to all.

 

Scientific faith is based on the accuracy of our curve fits to experimental data.  Basically we first search for equations and arbitrary parameters which match observations.  And then we look for governing principles or features of natural laws that allow us to derive these equations.  A case in point is that Newton’s Laws of motion predict a high probability of the sun rising tomorrow.  But since we only have only measured a small fraction of everything and to finite precision, we cannot be certain of those either.

 

QUALITIES OF SOUL

 

Our soul must of necessity be beyond or above nature, that is to say super-natural.  The path of one rock falling from a cliff is entirely determined by physical law and so in principle are a million rocks or millions of electrons buzzing around in our brains.  But as rocks are not conscious, neither can any collection of material objects be so.    And physics, which is only the description of the position and movements and interactions between material objects, is therefore theoretically unable to predict or to understand the phenomena of soul.

 

We can imagine perfect forms not possible in nature.  We can imagine and consider properties of infinity which cannot exist in a finite universe, e.g. numbers without limit or the concept of a physically dimensionless point or the vacuum, and so forth.  We can speculate on the future.  We can imagine what never was or ever could be.   We have free will which is the ability to deliberate and decide which is not limited by purely physical processes.   It would seem that each decision, to the extent it is not predetermined, must be something of a miracle.  And as such we are not entirely of this corruptible world.

 

CONSEQUENCES

 

Many of these considerations have been collected in textbooks on Epistomology, which is the study of truth or “justified belief”.  Unfortunately while we must believe that truth exists, absolute certainty is a logical impossibility to include both faith and science.  Also knowledge is not necesarily understanding, much less certainty.