How is knowledge possible?

Question

I haven't studied Philosophy and I get this is a fundamental question one cannot answer in one line.

But I want to phrase it in this particular way: even in a finite possibilities-predetermined (few) known rules world like chess, "knowledge" is hard. Up to now, chess is not a solved game, and as everyone who's played it knows, its vastity allows for an enormous difference in terms of variety in its knowledge.

Given the world is absurdly "bigger" (a countless number of variables, logic rules, incognita, physical rules, etc.) than a chess game, and put in this perspective, how is some form of knowledge even possible in principle? Basically, any non-strictly scientific conclusion one reaches should be of tremendous and unachievable difficulty.

How is kowledge possible?

Answer 1

In the chess context it is instructive to read about the computational methods, especially weighted tree searches, and evolutionary algorithms. Convolutional neural networks are a powerful tool which seem to mimic methods found in brains. They have a kind of hierarchic structure, say used in vision a layer might be scanning for lines, then pass up abstracted line info to the next layer, which is working out edges, passes that up to next layer, which infers 3D form - optical illusions help us see these processes in action often by interfering with specific steps in this kind of chain.

Knowledge is about abstraction, conceptualising. It is the construction of a shorthand, which picks out what is important from noise, and helps in constructing context-specific salience landscapes that highlight what is useful.

The emergence of sponteneous order and self-organisation is a feature of complex systems, which minds have evolved to take advantage of through abstraction, to make understanding the world tractable.

Answer 2

This seems a reasonable and convincing argument.

However, saying that knowledge is hard in the case of chess seems not quite the situation. It don't believe that any one human being could imagine all possible games. We might want to argue that this is at least possible in principle in the precise sense that we know all the rules of the game. But this is certainly not true in practice. The human brain is not fast enough and big enough for any human to go through all possible games.

Assuming that the laws of nature, analogous here to the rules of chess, are in finite number, maybe it is possible in principle to compute any state of the universe at t + 1 knowing the state of the universe at t. But we don't know the state of the universe at any one time, and so we don't know it at t, and so we cannot infer it at t. So, the limited number of rules doesn't help. The crucial factor here is the size of the universe, and the size of the human brain.

The reasoning above may sound convincing, but it is flawed. Suppose there has been a time t = 0, and suppose that the state of the universe at t = 0 could be expressed as a small set of data, as seems indeed the implication of the theory of the Big Bang. Then, in principle at least, we could know the small set of data describing the universe at t = 0, and then use the equally small set of the laws of nature to predict the state of the universe at any one time after t = 0, in principle.

However, the fact is, we weren't there, and nobody was, presumably, and for good reasons. If the state of the universe at t = 0 was simple, then no human being, and indeed no being with the intelligence of even a snail or a nit, could have been there at t = 0. If a human being had been there at t = 0, then the state of the universe at that point could not possibly be described by a "small set of data". The presence of a human observer at t = 0 would contradict our necessary assumption that the universe was simple at t = 0.

Thus, knowledge is not possible simply because the human brain cannot even know itself, for all sorts of reasons but also because no physically real cognitive system could even in principle represent itself.

This, of course, is no problem since we absolutely don't need that our brain should be able to represent itself completely, nor any other brain for that matter, and not even any substantial part of the universe. What we need is that our brain should help us survive in our environment, and this is obviously the case. Knowledge of the world is a red herring. All we need are beliefs that are reliable enough for us to survive, nothing else.

Unperfect knowledge is not knowledge. Either we possess knowledge or we don't. If we don't, we may instead have beliefs, in which case we need to know our beliefs, and we do or else they wouldn't be beliefs. All we need is that our beliefs about the world be good enough for us to survive. Seems to work so far.

Answer 3

What makes knowledge possible, is in your prefrontal cortex :)

That's a short answer, anyway. After that, however -- and for reasons too sad to mention -- things quickly become complicated... OK, I'll mention them anyway. See, while everyone has the "hardware", few people use it at all, and almost no one use it in the way it was intended for. 'Cause no one explains us how... not anymore.

That why no modern language has a word for that thing (and for a few other things) but we know the words from some ancient languages, like Greek "lógos", or "miltha" in Aramaic, or in Sanskrit it's "ātman". Latin was too modern, so "lógos" they ended up translating it simply as "the Word", ha-ha... What it really means is your conscious, rational Self, or simply human Soul -- but also the God's soul, the divine spirit.

It makes it possible for us to understand the objective reality that we share. How? -- well, it is, actually, in opening of John's Gospel:

“Through [the Lógos] all things were made; without it nothing was made that has been made.

And that's what knowledge is, the Truth about how things really are, but also why they ended up this way, and how they could have been otherwise -- limiting what's possible. So we know our options and can make a conscious choice, a.k.a. the free will.