We wear masks, and with practice we do it better and better, and they serve us well—except that it gets very lonely inside the mask, because inside the mask that each of us wears there is a person who both longs to be known and fears to be known… The paradox is that part of what binds us closest together as human beings and makes it true that no man is an island is the knowledge that in another way every man is an island. Because to know this is to know that not only deep in you is there a self that longs above all to be known and accepted but that there is also such a self in me, in everyone else the world over. So when we meet as strangers, when even friends look like strangers, it is good to remember that we need each other greatly you and I, more than much of the time we dare to imagine, more than most of the time we dare to admit.
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| — | Frederick Buechner, The Hungering Dark (via hollandmatt) |
It is an interesting thought that his obsession with the beauty of printed matter might play a role in the fact that he may never be able to publish the full extent of his knowledge.
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| — | Typotheque: Typeface As Programme by Jürg Lehni re: donald knuth |
File-sharing had rendered us, the knowledge guardians, irrelevant. Within a few years, knowledge had ceased to confer any distinction, and hoarding it had become about as socially advantageous as stamp collecting. Thanks to the Internet, cultural knowledge was now a collective resource. Which meant that being cool was no longer about what you knew and what other people didn’t. It was about what you had to say about the things that everyone already knew about.
I don’t believe that individual people are objective. They bring their biases, conscious and unconscious, to pretty much everything they think about. If you dig into Wikipedia’s underpinnings, you can see those biases clashing as people edit and counter-edit each other.
But I do believe there is such a thing as truth, and that argument among all of us half-blind people moves us closer to it. Wikipedia as a whole is way closer to the whole truth than any one contributor to Wikipedia can be. And you’d like to think that Wikipedia, and even the entire internet, will move closer and closer to the truth. Maybe, long after even the electronic edition of Britannica is gone, the idea of Britannica can remain for us what it once was for me—a kind of Platonic ideal that we aspire to evolve toward even if we can never reach it, something that has a kind of reality even if we can never touch it.
I propose that (some of) the purposes of literature are to reveal what we know but don’t know that we know, and to transform what we know we know into what we don’t yet know. [Literature achieves this by] activating a recursive feedback loop between knowledge realized in the body through gesture, ritual, performance, posture, and enactment, and knowledge realized in the neocortex as conscious and explicit articulations.
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| — | Katherine Hayles (via endofinquiry) |
Kateoplis posted a “Moon model by Johann FJ Schmidt at Chicago’s Field Museum, 1898.” One can scarcely imagine a more beautiful representation of knowledge, that strange abstraction which exerts so much control over the irreducible physical cosmos; as David Deutsch noted in his first TED talk:
Now how do we know about an environment that’s so far away, and so different, and so alien, from anything we’re used to? Well, the Earth —our environment, in the form of us— is creating knowledge. Well, what does that mean? Well, look out even further than we’ve just been —I mean from here, with a telescope— and you’ll see things that look like stars. They’re called “quasars.” “Quasars” originally meant quasi-stellar object. Which means things that look a bit like stars. But they’re not stars. And we know what they are. Billions of years ago, and billions of light years away, the material at the center of a galaxy collapsed towards a super-massive black hole. And then intense magnetic fields directed some of the energy of that gravitational collapse. And some of the matter, back out in the form of tremendous jets which illuminated lobes with the brilliance of —I think it’s a trillion suns.
Now, the physics of the human brain could hardly be more unlike the physics of such a jet. We couldn’t survive for an instant in it. Language breaks down when trying to describe what it would be like in one of those jets. It would be a bit like experiencing a supernova explosion, but at point-blank range and for millions of years at a time. And yet, that jet happened in precisely such a way that billions of years later, on the other side of the universe, some bit of chemical scum could accurately describe, and model, and predict, and explain, —above all— what was happening there, in reality. The one physical system, the brain, contains an accurate working model of the other, the quasar. Not just a superficial image of it, though it contains that as well, but an explanatory model, embodying the same mathematical relationships and the same causal structure.
Now that is knowledge. And if that weren’t amazing enough, the faithfulness with which the one structure resembles the other is increasing with time. That is the growth of knowledge. So, the laws of physics have this special property. That physical objects, as unlike each other as they could possibly be, can nevertheless embody the same mathematical and causal structure and to do it more and more so over time.
It is not solely humanity which is capable of this; all life, to some degree, embodies knowledge as a function of selection processes which reward, so to speak, successful adaptive responses to environments. But humans have a vastly greater degree of precision and accuracy in their knowledge than any other creature, in part because our knowledge is so often explicit, rather being than coded into inexplicit, lossy genomic systems; in part because our knowledge is representational in many ways, rather than merely responsive to stimuli; in part because of our capacity for abstraction and generalization; and largely because ours is aided, in innumerable ways, by tools we have constructed to help acquire knowledge.
These tools now themselves contain models precisely as our minds do; inside this room is a model of the moon, just as inside your mind are the models for countless phenomena you will never witness, never touch or feel, and yet whose shape and behavior you can predict with stunning accuracy. We know a great deal through statistical computation, but all such computation is contingent on explanatory models which “embody the same mathematical and causal structure” as this or that element of the natural world.
Man is above all else the maker of models. Real knowledge is not merely predictive but virtualizes; one needn’t go to the moon; one merely keeps a model of it at hand.
