Knowledge

Version 1.2  (~10 Min Read, use the Pocket app for audio reading)

by Jesse Ray Nichols

Date: 2019-04-04

What infinite pools do you wish to build a life within?

What puddles of joy do you wish to play in?

A brief overview:

Knowledge is a type of information that people create by solving problems, not just within the lab but within our entire life. This process leads us closer towards knowledge, i.e. understanding reality. The structure of knowledge follows a pattern not only similar to biological evolution but is itself under the umbrella of the modern idea of evolution – that of variation and selection.

This modern evolutionary umbrella concept contains both memes, a word coined by the biologist Richard Dawkins to describe ideas that get themselves copied by people, similarly as genes do. We have this memetic evolution of ideas, and this genetic evolution: the kind of evolution that happens within genes.

Life itself, as we experience it, is best characterized by a process of problem solving. It is done by those two types of replication, but it is memetic and explanatory evolution that creates the fastest rate of the overarching progress we experience now. We have gone far beyond the bacteria and every other non-human animal, and we are now making progress towards amazing goalposts.

We are on the brink of solving extraordinary problems that will showcase what it is to be a thinking being using and creating knowledge. The culture we have created in the grand scheme of it all is only in its childhood stages, and even though we have solved many great problems we still have many more problems to play with.

The greatest problems we can solve within the field of knowledge are:

• Moral problems within philosophy

• What is the best way to live a life?
• Answers to the problem of what to do next.

• Theory of Mind

• Qualia

• What is the explanation behind the subjective aspect of sensations?

• Creativity and free will

• Has immense implications on artificial general intelligence
• Whole areas of psychology deal with theories of knowledge dealing with subjective reality within a mind.

Knowledge is a toolkit

• A person's toolkit, their theory of knowledge or epistemology, is foundational and determines how they can think about their place in the world and thus how, and how fast, they can grow.
• There is no limit to the growth of any person’s toolkit which is composed of better and better error correction ideas.

• Having the best toolkit, based in a fallibilist framework is necessary to understand how to make optimal choices.

• We can know of different modes of explaining some phenomenon which can allow us to connect different theories into simpler ones.

• Within physics we can think of the possibility of unifying general relativity with quantum mechanics, or the past unification of electricity with magnetism

Everyone should read these:

David Deutsch’s article in Nautilus writing about fallibilism (20 min read), on why being able to be wrong lets us access an unbroken chain of infinite progress. He describes why the nature of knowledge will give us ever better problems to play with, and why this is a great fact of about how the world works.

There is a startling explanation that is undervalued here: we can solve a problem at any scale within our lives and then we can birth ever more beautiful and attractive problems that, with the embodiment of childlike curiosity, can rid us of our current assumptions and errors which leads a person to a life of unending flourishing,

Further, David Deutsch's book The Beginning of Infinity takes these ideas of knowledge and explains why we have been able to make so much progress since the enlightenment.

David's book was inspired by Jacob Bronowski's epic BBC series The Ascent of Man:

The root of the problem of how a person can attain knowledge can be seen in the writings of Karl Popper here (15 min read) at in an excerpt from his landmark book Conjectures and Refutations, which could also be thought of as Guesswork and Criticism, but that doesn’t have the right ring to it does it?

His focus on the theory of knowledge started when he was trying to separate where the line between science is, and where nonscience or pseudoscience is.

His masterpiece Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge is available as a free audiobook here.

Richard Feynman talked about knowledge in the context of his studies in physics, he often would wit about saying things like 'science is what we have learned about how to keep from fooling ourselves.'

We should keep fighting for a world where his essay linked below isn’t so relevant today as it was when it was written 44 years ago, because there is so much fun to be had, so many ideas to play with, there are spacecraft to fly and bongos to be played...

CONTINUE READING:

I’ve reposted Feynman’s must-read essay in full where Feynman reflects out loud at Caltech’s 1974 commencement address which is titled Cargo Cult Science.

Past versions, because we are all fallible and make errors that should be easy, and fun, to update.

Version 1.1 here

Acknowledgments:

Thank you to Scott Hamilton for helping in version 1.2

To Elyse Hargreaves for at the time of writing, producing Karl Popper’s Conjectures and Refutations audiobook.

Dustin Cox for the countless conversations.

David Deutsch for being The Spark.

I have not loved much as I have loved my errors