Wednesday, May 16, 2018

Transmitting Knowledge From Generation To Generation

There are no shortcuts to knowledge that circumvent the omnipresent need for logicality.  If a being is omniscient, that being would have direct, infallible apprehension of the logicality of all truths in the same way that I, a being riddled with epistemic limitations, have direct and infallible apprehension of logical axioms and my own consciousness.

Suppose that in the future, you become omniscient--there is no knowledge that you do not possess.  You write an exhaustive multi-volume series of books on all aspects of reality (which would be an enormous undertaking that could easily not be completable in a single human lifespan [1], but for the sake of the hypothetical entertain this notion).  The purpose of this mammoth undertaking is to preserve all of your knowledge for future generations.  The difference between this and the ordinary preservation of knowledge through writings, clearly, is that there would be no new knowledge for the following generations to discover if they absorbed the full contents of the series.

In this hypothetical scenario, would you have the ability to transmit omniscience, in a way, to those who come after you?  Yes.  But even if your books contained neither errors nor ignorance, people would still have to scrutinize the texts, not assuming anything in them is true without proof--either the immediate proof of self-evidence or the proof of valid deduction.  They could not legitimately rely on your alleged authority and omniscience as confirmation that your claims are true.  Wherever you go beyond the basic knowledge obtainable from simple logic, introspection, and the senses (these categories of knowledge are available to all normal persons), they would need to carefully test your words.

Even in a world where one or more persons becomes omniscient, the omniscience of some could never erase the epistemic limitations of others.  The others must still rely on logic itself.  If some were omniscient, the others would still have no guarantee this is true apart from systematically assessing the words of the omniscient.  This is why there is never such a thing as a generation (short of a generation born omniscient) that can just relaxedly inherit the ideas of the preceding generation.  Every idea must still be weighed, every claim analyzed, every belief strictly proved, every unverifiable notion regarded with skepticism.

There is a sense in which one generation might be granted special benefits by standing on the shoulders of the ones that came before, though this only applies in very specific disciplines like science.  There is never a generation barred from grasping logic in its entirety.  Every person with a developed intellect can deductively reason with perfect logicality, irrespective of his or her geographical position or era in time, yet scientific knowledge, by its very nature, must accumulate over a time far longer than a single person lives.  But I cannot legitimately assume that the scientists who came before me were right, as reason demands that I must still, in a sense, treat their work as uncertain until I myself come to grasp it.  This is why one cannot simultaneously have an epistemologically secure worldview and merely rely on the words of preceding thinkers.  These things are exclusive.

Sometimes people might, childishly, might I add, claim that there are no undiscovered ideas.  How could I know this even if it was true?  I have not spoken to every person from human history, and I have no ability for my consciousness to gaze into theirs.  The more important point, though, is that even if this was the case it does not provide any shortcuts to my own knowledge.  Besides, I have myself discovered a broad range of very specific truths that I almost never hear anyone acknowledge [2], and I have never heard of these issues being tackled properly by historical philosophers or theologians.

Logic is the simplest thing in existence.  Nothing could be more foundational, more universal, more omnipresent than logic.  But the information that one can use logic to critically analyze can be quite complex.  Each new generation must embrace the simplicity and intrinsic infallibility of logic for itself, challenging the claims of previous individuals and accepting the ideas that survive this examination.  Without this, there is no transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next, only a passing on of assumptions.


[1].  It is logically possible that unknown aspects of reality are much simpler than they seem, and that there is not as much to come to know as some may think, thus rendering it possible to document all knowledge within one lifetime if only epistemic limitations were removed.

[2].  These truths range from things like the impossibility of logic and space not existing (even in the absence of all minds and matter), to proof that I have a physical body, to proof to myself that I am not dreaming while I am actually awake, to specific details about Biblical ethics (especially sexual morality), to hundreds of other precise details about miscellaneous things.  Do not think that others telling you that your ideas have been previously discovered means that this is actually the case!  But even if it was true, this would not help you at all in itself.  You must still discover for yourself what can and cannot be legitimately proven about a given subject.  The alleged credibility of others, historical and living, offers no assistance.

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