Fallible Ideas Notes on Knowledge:
- Knowledge is information adapted to a purpose
- Knowledge is solutions to problems
- Always contains errors
- Open to improvement
- Creativity and criticism make knowledge
- Problems are opportunities for improvement
- Physics doesn’t prevent knowledge creation/problem solving
- Happy life is possible with progress
- Don’t need to know everything
- Justified, true belief mistake encourages appeals to authority
- “True” beliefs are immune from criticism and stop progress
- Justification leads to infinite regress or circular argument (self-evidence is circular)
- Pursue error corrections and improvements instead of justification
- Support (evidence in favor) and proof are justificationist
- Act on your best, or non-refuted, ideas
- Knowledge comes from guesses and criticism, or conjectures and refutations
- Criticism eliminates the false ideas
- Criticism: either guess is wrong, criticism is wrong, or both are wrong
- Source of guesses isn’t important because criticism does the work
- Knowing more criticisms restricts possible guesses
- Unconscious mind filters ideas with criticism
- Filters create blind spots, so criticism need improvements
- A library of generic criticisms is a type of knowledge
- Knowing categories of guesses that are mistaken
- Evidence is the main form of criticism in science
- William Paley pointed out the “appearance of design” problem
- How does complexity or purposeful adaptation arise?
- It’s the same problem as, where does knowledge come from?
- People create knowledge and it can’t just come from randomness
- Where did the knowledge in living organisms come from?
- Evolution is the only answer anyone has come up with
- Evolution is accepted based on its non-refuted status, not the evidence (the role of evidence is to refute)
- Evolution involves replicators; in biology they’re genes
- Replicators create imperfect copies of themselves
- There’s copying with small changes, then selection according to some criteria
- Changes meeting the criteria are adaptations
- Adaptations are solutions to problems
- Most random changes make the adaptation worse as a solution
- Animals embody knowledge without understanding; knowledge without a knowing subject
- People select ideas according to their problem criteria just as the environment selects genes according reproductive ability
- All knowledge literally comes from evolution
- Two multiplication algorithms with same inputs/outputs are not necessarily equal
- There can be important differences in knowledge structure
- Different types of multiplication algorithms: repeated addition, counting areas with geometry, lookup tables
- Structure differences matter when you need to make modifications
- Sub-system reuse and modularity
- Ease of examining the structure, finding flaws, and repairs
- Example: single motor car is better than multi-motor
- Knowledge structure deals with all the internal variations that give same results
- Structure is important to programming
- Code readability, isolation, and reusability all effect code maintenance
- A mind’s knowledge structure affects its ability to learn
- Ease of application, integration, and making changes
- Getting correct answers matters less than getting a good structure
- Enjoyable, high effort, voluntary learning creates a better structure
- One truth that’s the same for everyone
- Confusion due to ambiguous questions/lack of specificity
- Relativism: truth differs between cultures
- Mistake to view all knowledge as dependent on cultural context
- Some knowledge is universal, like physics
- COMMENT: Relativism is a variant of subjectivism
- Any piece of knowledge has limited reach/applicability
- Denying truth denies possibility of mistakes
- Mistake to think knowledge is justified, true belief
- Justification is wrong (leads to infinite regress or circularity)
- Justificationism is susceptible to relativism
- Communication is possible via convergence to objective truth
- Definitions aren’t important
- Start with problems and address ambiguities as the arise
- Defining terms wastes time/energy
- Definitions can never be perfect
- Optimizing definitions beyond breakpoint wastes resources
- Concepts/ideas are what’s important, not terminology
- Can’t define everything; leads to circularity
- Better understanding from discussion interactions than definitions