The quest for knowledge

The most elusive question for centuries have always been "What is knowledge?" Even to this day it remains unanswered, and even to the extent that different people will point at different things when you ask them to show an example.

Today, I'm am not going to treat the question of knowledge as a philosophical question (whereby people define, redefine and further confuse what words mean, until concluding that sentences have no meaning or some absurd compromise), but true to my personality, I am going to treat it as a scientific question. So let us take a walk down the road of knowledge right from the very beginning, when the first ever useful piece of information was obtained on this planet. When the time was nearer to the formation of this solar system than it was to this present day. Let us stroll back to the origin of life.

3-3.5 billion years ago, the first replicating molecule arose from the ancient soup of proteins formed by the young environment. It finds itself in a world rich in resources for it to multiply, and happily replicate. However after a hundred so replication, it faces a problem, millions of cousins by its side are using up the resources it needs to continue replicating, it comes face to face with a world that is hostile to its continued survival, and environment that can no longer support it. There is some truth in the quote that "adversity builds character", although certainly not in the way the author meant it. Those small handful of replicators that managed to receive a helpful change in structure to adapt to this new environment started outcompeting everyone else. Therein lies the first piece of knowledge in life, and on Earth, the information needed to map conditions to actions.

Now, I can already here the opposition, how can I say that knowledge exist outside a mind, how can I say that a simple mechanical process contain knowledge, but that is precisely what I am saying. Does a windmill have the knowledge to grind grains? Does a printer have the knowledge to give us a legible piece of information? Yes they do, and it doesn't matter who had made them, they possess that knowledge in the way their structures are being arranged and it only take a little more intelligence to reverse-engineer how those machines do their job. Nature doesn't care how you obtained the knowledge you have, it just care on how you use it. And it rewards those who use their knowledge to adapt better to the real world with increased survival. What nature cares about is efficiency all else might as well be thrown into the rubbish heap.

Fast forward about 3 billion years, and we now arrive at the time the first human walked the face of this Earth. 3 billion years of knowledge selection have already been well defined, digestion takes place with a brilliant efficiency of extracting nutrients from food, our faculties of visions have been fined-tune to be able to track the future positions of a trajectory, our feet balances our constantly shifting body weight flawlessly, ... We have knowledge in the sense that we have what is required to survive in a real world, but we lack something too, the ability to predict what the far future had in store. It so happened then that we were forced by nature to then live in social groups of hunter-gatherers (emphasis on the gatherer part), an environment that we are unfamiliar with, and so as with all obstacles in life, we were once again moulded to fit the environment.

50 thousand years passed and we arrive back in our time, thrown again into a different set of conditions, the human species have had no time to adapt yet. And now we once again find ourselves in another quest for knowledge, but this time we have set ourselves a project so vast in magnitude that the knowledge we seek is accurate enough to predict the last decimal place that we can measure of the future world. Today, we take over the job that nature had always been doing, that is the selection of knowledge. Now, 2 questions then arise, how good is the knowledge we have so far, and how are we going to acquire new knowledge? To the first, we can only say that nature had been very diligent in past billions of years, selecting only those pieces of information that most accurately solve the problems we faced. However, it is not very accurate, perhaps not even accurate to a percent. Nature can't afford too high a cost for more accurate information, it is constrained by general rules that tend to work most of the time, and hoping that those exceptions would never come into play. Even so, the process of the natural selection of knowledge is long and tedious, it takes thousands of years before coming up with creative solutions, time that we humans do not have in our life.

So then, how do we get our knowledge? It must be through a system of checks and balance to carefully sieve out errors, it must be based on this world to accurately represent reality to the last decimal point of a percent, but it must also be done in a short period of time. Hence, our knowledge gathering system must both be rigorous as well as fast, a collective network of information transfer and review. In other words, our knowledge must be scientific.

I'll leave you with Carl Sagan's analysis of what separates science from the rest of the world. (The other parts are in the video responses)