Context

An old writing of mine. At the time, I was exploring the limits of the possibility that our cognition is only a simple automatism - that we bounce off our environment like pinballs, thus the computational substrate is mostly the environment, rather than ourselves, and that in fact, we are then not very much sentient at all, we are more like NPCs or zombies, it is the environment that generates the content of sentience, culture, thought.

Writing

Knowledge is a mass of abstraction, formed by cognition, from the source of sense-data, with the purpose of serving the will-to-life. Knowledge serves a purpose that is distinct from seeking truth, and most of us have oceans of abstraction upon abstraction that have no direct objective correlate.

At first we perceive the world through our sense-data alone. We try to gather information about the causality of the outside world. We begin discerning different forms, and the relations between them. Perhaps the not negating a self from the world serves to fuel this process of understanding what different perceptions mean to us; feelings are conflated with outside perceptions, but this is to our benefit as it provides a meaning to the forms we see, guiding us on what to be repelled by and what to be attracted to.

Later we begin to theorize atop the ideas we have about simple unexplained causal relations; creating unifying theories for the different forms and behaviours we have discerned. This forms the second level of abstraction over the direct, empirical study of the world. It is second-order knowledge - knowledge about knowledge.

Example one: the recognition of types of material, of which objects made of express similar properties. This concept links seperate entities to another concept: that of material, which tells us things like smoothness, density, strength, etc.

Example two: the conscious recognition of causal links and properties themselves; the recognition of the process and usage of knowledge.

All ideas originate in source from the nervous system: sense data, and they originate in significance and structure from the cognitive capacities arising from the nervous system.

Some abstraction may be innate or naturally developing, but there are mountain ranges of superfluous, or arbitrary abstraction going to several orders with questionable associability to describing phenomena accurately (being true, holding in all cases, or being measurable at all).

Abstraction takes this form: a set of data is taken to be alike in some particular quality when considered as part of a system. The abstraction itself can be considered a thing itself: a simple, single handle to grasp the idea of a relation between a more complex scenario that exists under the hood.

Abstraction is central to operating within the world. Without it, our brains would not be able to handle the sheer quantity and complexity of relations between the sense data we receive and the desired effect we want to have.

We see the world through abstraction. We see around us objects not as mere impressions, but all individually as standing for different abstract ideas. All these ideas pertain to not how the objects exist as themselves independently to us, but how they exist FOR us. This is not only evident with any degree of honesty, but follows clearly from considering evolution as the sculptor of our bodies and minds.

Our sense of self is a very high-level, ambiguous abstraction. The very consciousness that presents itself to us right in front of our eyes is deeply virtualized. We are not interacting with the real world even secondarily through our sense-data, but through another plethora of intermediates that are all the, often shaky, abstractions we hold. In this sense, it is not our consciousness that is the most accurate representation we have of the world, but indeed, among the least direct and authentic representation. We are thus in, at least, a virtual world within a virtual world, and probably often to much greater orders.

But, in a general sense, interacting with the world we can intuitively and confidently find ourselves in agreement, finding practical, predictable ways of organizing ourselves in the world. So where lies the problem?

The issue lies beyond immediate practicality and mere social agreement. When we begin to act on lies which serve social purposes adaquately but are unexamined beyond that, and this is the default state, we lack a kind of consciousness. In general this is alright for the disinterested common man, but this lack of consciousness, or false sense of consciousness enters of course, the moral/ethical sphere. Placeholder half-truths both can have ethical consequences down the line due to short-sightedness and apathy, and can mean the faulty interpretation of a morally questionable situatution as unimportant or a non-issue.

Example: the belief in God and religious practice as the most authorative source of morality. The belief in God is riddled with evidence to the contrary, poor logic in justification, and ambiguity/incomplete explanation.

Then, it seems that the mechanism of belief is inherently skeptical, or self-concerned with application. The religious believer, even those who don’t assign much importance to their beliefs, are under no pressure to re-examine their beliefs: the beliefs simply work. They serve a social and psychological function, and so as far as they consider, sure, there might be a more useful alternative system, but it’s of no significance to them to be slightly more correct.

It follows that the ease with which beliefs are adopted and abandoned is proportional to the extent to which they are practical and important to the individual. Some influences of the utility of knowledge are social conformity, psychological utility in the sense of purpose and comfort, and technical coherency in the usage of tools and the usage/expansion of theory (art, science, philosophy, …).

It is easily possible for an individual to be acting in a reasonable manner regarding what he does and doesn’t choose to expend energy in regarding the examining of the foundations of his models, but having ethical impacts he would be shocked to learn about.

We tend to inherit our beliefs from our environment. We are inclined to believe other people to know where we do not. Our culture gives us our sense of morality, but it is through no rigorous deductive system. We grow up eating meat without a second thought, unexamined in part because of weak ideas like “the animal was happy”, “eating meat is natural”, “we need meat to survive”. Without the knowledge that something is deeply wrong, we see no need to examine our own belief system and these claims; whatever we and society were doing before is working just fine, so what makes this so different? However, the same person tends to feel deeply empathetic at the sight of ANY expressed suffering - this arises directly or very quickly from sense-data. The person holds beliefs such as “causing unnessesary suffering is wrong”, “animal cruelty is terrible”, “if one has the capability of saving the life of a being, human or animal, one ought to do so”.

Clearly, this is a contradiction, but as we can see, knowledge seems to hold the purpose of merely allowing us to get along practically in the world. We were never natural truth-seekers to begin with, at least, not to all matters at once, or to matters that we have no idea about regarding their true implications.