I think that the connection drawn between Knowledge and Energy by Dull Boy (Rathod) makes sense. Today mankind does the same thing (maybe not exactly same) with knowledge as it does with energy sources. Energy can be converted from one form to another. In the same way, there are subtle changes to the knowledge passed on at each stage in the chain (by which I mean the transfer of knowledge from person to person).
I think that this can be seen by a simple activity, which involves the transfer of a simple message from one person to another via six to seven people. Usually, one can observe that the message given to the first person in the chain differs in some ways to the message that the last person in the chain gives to the intended recipient. This is definitely the effect of the personal interpretation of each person in the chain. Each person interprets the message in his / her own way. That way, might not be the way that the sender of the message intended the message to be interpreted, which therefore will lead to the wrong message being passed on, which is again subject to misinterpretation. This shows how knowledge can be manipulated by language.
Similarly, even perception is subject to biases. For example: One group of people is shown a movie (let's say without dialogues so that it is just the perception which is stimulated) and then is asked to describe to another person, who hasn't seen the movie. It will be seen that all the descriptions will not be the same. There may be some points overlapping, but overall, the mental image that the person who has not seen the movie forms, in each case will be different.
In each of these cases, we can see the manipulation of knowledge. In the first case, the message remains the same, but the last person will have got a different idea of what was expected of him. In the second case too, the movie remains the same... only the interpretation of perception of each person is different. This may occur with the Reason and Emotion too, but I can't seem to find any good enough examples for it.
In comparing this to energy, (using a completely physics approach) if we have a sound emitter which is projecting sound at a block of ice, we will see that the ice will begin to melt. It will be observed (I have tried this for my physics lab) that the ice would have absorbed some energy. And if some calculations are done, we would find that the energy absorbed by the ice to melt, would be the same as the energy given by the sound emitter (almost the same, since some energy will be absorbed by the medium in the transfer of energy). In this way, we can see the conversion of the sound energy (mechanical energy) into kinetic energy, which causes the water molecules in ice to vibrate faster and thus break free of the ice cube. But the total amount of energy is still the same. Similarly, I think that the knowledge changes (if only in a small way) with each person in the transfer, and that the total amount of knowledge (if it can be called amount) is the same. The correlation with the experiment can also show the loss of some amount of knowledge at each stage.
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Thanks for reinforcing the idea. But i think using your examples we are treading the thin line between knowledge and INFORMATION. I find this a difficult subject to think about. what you illustrated with your example of people in a chain passing on a message is more a loss of information than a loss of knowledge. Do you get what i mean? Information is being lost at each stage, not knowledge - because then you could think of wikipedia as a host to knowledge as it has so much to say about so much, but you cant right? Knowledge is what we 'make' of information according to me but my thinking is always ruptured at this point so maybe you could help me out there the little genius that you are. And also my main point was in saying that 'we killed knowledge' (absolute knowledget that is) because of our minds and perceptions....
Also, what is the purpose of knowledge, truely? Dont just say it is to aid us in progress etc etc,,,,
Mebbe you are right. I think that there might be that small difference in definition. I think most people define knowledge by how much uncertainty it reduces. And that is why we can represent it by 1's and 0's, where 1 stands for true and 0 for false (standard binary programming values). I think those who take comp. sci. will know this. But I don't agree with the absolute knowledge stuff. I think Information is absolute and knowledge is subjective to personal biasses. Which brings us back to the principle of the Master World. Are all the things on this world defined in a master world? What are your thoughts about this?
Good job guys..........keep it going. Wish more could join-in. Please do invite/encourage others as well.
Shravan, you could try a link www.tashian something. It babel translates perfectly sensible enlish into other languages and then back into English, using software. I am not too sure about the "we killed knowledge" concept, because if we go by the premise that "all action eventually culminates in knowledge" (source : Bhagwad Gita), then, if there was no action there would be no knowledge. If there was nobody existing to take action, then did knowledge exist? Who was there to validate its existence?
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