Knowledge????!!!!

[Ekental]

Ok... so this forum is awash with threads about how people think, is there such a thing as intuition,etc. It's a constant struggle to define what we believe is knowledge of some topic and what are effective ways of approaching and explaining such a topic.
Each question has a spectrum of points of views that define or at least greatly effect the way that a question or idea is said.

i.e. the common question of what is love:

On one side of the spectrum you have a response that may follow:
Love is the spiritual connection between two people who care deeply for each other... etc.
On the other side of the specturm you may have:
Love is a complex set of chemical triggers in the brain that exhumes a desire to take care of another... etc.

People fall somewhere in this spectrum.

So what exactly is knowledge? How would we explain it? Are some ways of knowing better than others? (I.e. knowing because someone says something is true, knowing based on observation). How do we know something is true? What are the limitations on knowledge through various means (Reason, Emotion, etc.)

[C Elegans]

An excellent topic for discussion. However, epistemology (the study of what knowledge is) is a really heavy issue, so I make this a placeholder for a later post when I haven't worked myself totally brainless

[dragon wench]

I agree with CE on this one. My brain is presently unable to process something so simple as what to cook for dinner, so I think I'll try to reply when I'm feeling somewhat more alert and better fed.

[jopperm2]

No comment, see multiple other debates.

[C Elegans]

Actually, I'd be very interested in JopperM2's view at knowledge, since he is a fairly new poster and I find his statements in other threads very confusing. Sorry for the spam, I will post something useful later, I promise. My students are killing me

[jopperm2]

I'll give comment on this as well tomorrow.

[dragon wench]

Perhaps, it would be an idea to pose here that quintessential question, usually thrown at students just embarking upon a study of epistemology:

How do we know that we are not simply brains in a vat?

[fable]

So what exactly is knowledge?

How can the knower understand the nature of reality, given that it is part of whatever reality it seeks to know? It's impossible. It's also, with respect, a hamster wheel of a subject. Philosophers should put their great squishy frontal lobes to figuring out how political leaders can be held accountable for doing more than being lip service to ideals: *that* would be an achievement.

[Vicsun]

Ekental, are you by any chance taking the IB?

[Bakunin]

"True knowledge exist in knowing that you know nothing."
Socrates

[jopperm2]

Frankly I think the question is pointless. I agree with fable here. Whether this life and reality is real or not, it seems real so treat it as such. The only person you canbe somewhat certain isn't a hallucination is you, and that can be sketchy sometimes.

[Weasel]

Originally Posted by fable

So what exactly is knowledge?

How can the knower understand the nature of reality, given that it is part of whatever reality it seeks to know?

I had thought this was answered with.."We're all a bunch of Weasel's"

Fable my alter-ego to put forth knowlegde.
DW my alter-ego to put forth caring.
CE my alter-ego to put forth science.
BS...my drinking binges.

[C Elegans]

Ok, time to try to make a contribution to this thread. What is knowledge and how do we gain knowledge is a very important question as long as there are powers in society that wants to control knowledge, and where truth is a political or commercial value. For many centuries, Europe was dominated by religion that kept many people living according to an illusion - today, we live in a media created illusion instead, where images of what is right and wrong, what is known and not known, what are the reasons for politicans to acts a certain way, how are humans, blahblah. This is not a mind game for philosophers, this part of epistemology is a social and human issue that affects us all.

However, I grant Fable and Jopperm2 that one part of epistemology is improductive and pointless for others than the few professional philosophers who likes to ponder this type of questions like mathematicians ponder mathematical problems (most philiosophers don't, they think it's as pointless as we think), and it is this part:

Originally Posted by Dragon Wench

How do we know that we are not simply brains in a vat?

This is a modern adaptation of Descartes' "evil demon"-problem, but the principle is the same. The question is how we can know that the entire world and our own perceptions are not an illusion.

Although there are different philosophical solutions to this question, my answer is that we can't, and it doesn't matter. We humans must live in the world as we can percieve it, and try to make the best out of that. Whether it's all an illusion set up by an evil demon, or an illusion which hides another level of reality that is for ever concealed for us, is irrelevant (until the day that demon decides to reveal something to us, or the illusion disappears in some way, but let's deal with that then). Instead, I'd like to point at some issues I think are fundamental for every person to take stance to:

1. Do you believe in an objective reality that exists outside your perception, or do you believe nothing exists outside your (or other's) perception? (In case of the latter, go to "solipsism" )

2. If you believe in an objective reality, do you think we humans can percieve this realilty more or less correctly corresponding to the actual objects, or do you believe the true nature of the objects cannot be percepted by human senses? (If the latter, go to "idealism" )

3. If you believe in an objective reality which can be perceived more or less correctly corresponding to the objects themselves, then you must ask yourself what is the most accurate methods to collect knowledge about those objects, and how to avoid the many possible distorting "filters" you will encounter on the way. Human perceptions gives a certain interpretation of things - for instance our sensory system makes us perceive waves of a certain wave length as colour, at a longer length as sound and yet a longer wavelenght as vibrations. Also, human cognitive functions have made us apt for overgeneralisation, selective information processing and other distortive biases. How to cope with this? Should we trust all our senses equally much? What about conflicting information between our senses or ours and others senses? Can knowledge be found by our reason (rationalism, we can sit in our chamber and think out the true nature of our world)? Must knowledge be found by observations (empirism, what modern science rests on)? Can true knowledge not be observed (idealism, such as Kant's the "Ding an sich")?

Obviously, I think the scientific method is the best way to gain knowledge about the natural world. (And I don't believe in any other worlds than the natural, but if transcendence would exists, scientific method would not be suitable to gain knowledge about it). My position is roughtly that of coherentism, which is also consistent with scientific method.

[jopperm2]

@CE well put and thought out.. It is hard to say what is the "real" world. Most of what people know about everything is second hand knowledge, most of that is even more detached. Think about history. I don't KNOW for a fact that anything in that history book is true. Some historian read it in a book and copied it over to his book, the author of the book he read did the same most likely.

A friend of mine once asked my how to tell if the color he saw as red looked the same as the color I saw as red... I don't have an answer to that question. We both pick it out and call it the same thing, but does it look the same to us? Maybe that's why people have different aesthetic tastes.

[C Elegans]

To use your example, I would analyse it like this:

Originally Posted by Ekental

On one side of the spectrum you have a response that may follow:
Love is the spiritual connection between two people who care deeply for each other... etc.
On the other side of the specturm you may have:
Love is a complex set of chemical triggers in the brain that exhumes a desire to take care of another... etc.

Love is a phenomena that is precisely defined, and can be both subjectively experiences and observed objectively according to a coherent structure of definitions. Thus, I conclude that as a phenomena, it exists. (Contrary to a god, a magical unicorn or ESP, which all can be precisely defined and subjectively experienced by an individuals, but it lacks inter-observer reliability, ie those who experience it do not experience the same things, and also, not everybody experience it, only a few. Furthermore, they cannot be objectively observed (ie registrered by instruments, observed by individuals regardless of their personal beliefs etc) )

So, love exists. What is love? You can approach the question from two different perspectives of knowledge: subjective and objective. In theory of science, pain is often used as an example of this. Who knows more about back pain, the patient who has a chronic back pain disease, or the orthopedian who has never experienced pain but know all about pain as a phenomena (cause, mechanism, treatment)? Who knows most about love, the loving individual or the psychologist who is an expert on human emotions and behaviour, but has never loved anyone?

I would say these are two different types of knowledge, and it's impossible to say who know the most since they cover distincly different aspects, but personally, I would say the orthopedian and the psychologist know more about pain/love respectively, because their knowledge is objective. Objective knowledge is more useful than subjective knowledge, since objective knowledge must be possible to generalise by definition, whereas subjective knowledge is limited to the subject who has the experience.

Subjective experience can vary in very inconsistent ways, who is to say your back pain feels the same as my back pain, and that our respective experience of pain has the same or even a similar meaning to us? It is simply not very useful knowledge to anyone else than ourselves. Only objective knowledge grants us to make knowledge generally useful, thus objective knowledge is far more valuable to me than subjective knowledge. My subjective knowledge is only valuable for me personally, as a private person.

So what is love? Love is an emotion with has been selected for during evolution, due to it's survival value for the species. Love is a subgroup of what psychologists call attachment, a bond between individuals that makes it pleasurable for them to stick together and thus also inclined to collaborate and work for each other. The most obvious examples are parental love and sexual love, both necessary for reproduction and survival of the offspring.

So much for cause. We love because it is evolutionary adaptive. Now, to the mechanism: love, like all emotions, is an interactive biochemical event. Current research shows that we humans are very dependent on smell when we choose partners. Both parental and sexual bonds are dependent of release of a hormone called oxytocin, which elicits certain experiences in us, such as a a sense of relaxation and well being, and it also degrades stree hormones such as cortisol. Oxytocin is released after orgasm in both men and women, and it is also released adult men andn women have physical contact with babies, regardless whether they are our biological children or not. Little is known about the biochemical mechanisms of love, it is a complex system, but ut us certainly a biochemical system.

Ok, the mechanisms that mediate love are biochemical. As for subjective experience, the experience part of an emotion is actually not so important per se, the important thing is that it acts as a drive, a motivational force that makes us act in specific ways. Then of course, I personally think love and being in love is a great experience I really enjoy, but that's only important for my private life. To me, it feels like a deeply personal and private connection between me and my loved one - nice Why do I not believe this deep connection is "spiritual"? Simply because there are no objective evidence that anything spiritual exists.