vol III Development:
Chapter 3: Cybernetics
page 8: Knowledge
None of this discussion would be happening without knowledge, that is internal representations of ourselves and our environment which we can communicate. On this site we are trying to create a theological representation of the Universe designed to guide us in our navigation through life. As we collect knowledge, we become more aware of the meaning of the events in our lives and how to deal with them. Knowledge involves the three steps in the cybernetic control loop: sense, decode, act, sense . . .
The ancients, like Aristotle, argued that our ability to know proves that we have a spiritual soul. Matter, they felt, was too inert to accept the infinity of impressions that enter our minds through our senses. Since that time we have learnt that matter is very active and has an enormous amount of invisible structure. Even something as small as a hydrogen atom has a countable infinity of states each carrying a different message. Hydrogen - Wikipedia
Knowledge is in a way the inverse of creation or complexification, since our knowledge is always a simplified or abstract version of the thing known. My knowledge of my friends does not encompass the incredibly complex details of their lives but rather such general features as their appearance, habits and responses to various inputs. Similarly, this site represents my knowledge of my world compressed into strings of words infinitely less complex than the world itself.
Knowledge is made possible by symmetry, that is sameness or similarity. 'All people are mortal' tells us that the feature 'mortality' is common to us all. Symmetry exists in the world because it was once a simple singularity. Although this initial symmetry has been broken in an infinity of ways, traces of it remain everywhere. So, even though we say all electrons are identical particles, electrons also differ in their locations in spacetime and their particular interactions with their environment. Symmetry - Wikipedia
The utility of knowledge arises through meaning, that is the mapping between the simplified known version of something and the thing itself. True knowledge models reality. Such modelling creates an advantage since it takes much less energy to think about something than to actually do it. Experience shows that a bit of thought, checking through the possible ways to do something, can often save a a lot of labour. Knowledge increases productivity. Semantics - Wikipedia
We formally model the mappings involved in knowledge by the algorithms used to encode and decode the messages that realize these mappings. As a corollary, knowledge can only be shared by systems that have common communication protocols. If I say 'I'll make the tea' to someone who does not understand English, they may not have any idea what I am talking about. However, if they are familiar with the tea ceremony, they can easily decode my meaning as soon as I start working with kettle, teapot and cups. Hill: A First Course in Coding Theory
The purpose of science is the generation of new knowledge. This is equivalent to finding new ways of observing, decoding and encoding the world. This is equivalent to discovering new languages to express the new meanings that we find in the world. Bronowski The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination
The purpose of this site is to develop a language to see and express the divinity of our world. Natural theology explains the unity in our diverse world by exposing the flow of communication and meaning that both binds and diversifies it. From this point of view, knowledge is not something specific to human or even animal life, but an element of any process.
Knowledge and guidance
Cybernetics is the science of control and communication, both in living systems and engineered machines. To control itself, a system must import knowledge from its environment, evaluate the knowledge and act on it to achieve some purpose. As we grow up, we gradually learn to improve this algorithm. Little children are pretty hopeless at catching balls. We throw them easy catches and their hands react some time after the ball has gone past. But as the years roll by, they become more and more adept and some go on to reach elite levels in ball based sports.
We can make machines to perform similar tasks. Ships, planes and motor vehicles can be guided by global positioning systems. By listening to the system, the vehicle can work out where it is. Either automatically, or through a human driver, this information is evaluated and used to steer the vehicle on the desired course.
From a theological point of view, we are seeking to know the 'will of God' and to steer ourselves, individually and collectively, along the divinely ordained path. In the past, the 'will of God' has been interpreted to us by prophets and other theological authorities. In general, however, we steer ourselves using local knowledge harvested through our senses.
Measurement of knowledge
We can measure knowledge using two parameters: the amount of data involved and the amount of meaning in that data, which we discern by decoding the data.
Data is measured at the physical level, usually in bits (for volume) and bits per second (for data flow rate). Although we assume that data have meaning we must learn how this meaning is encoded in the data before we can decode it and extract the meaning. There may be many layers of encoding and decoding in a network between the user layer (which is concerned with meaning) and the stream of physical data. Our eyes, for instance, receive huge numbers of photons which are first transformed into physiological symbols and then pass through may layers of neural processing before we 'see' something.
Seeing something usually leads to doing something. We might simply think 'how beautiful', or duck if necessary to avoid an incoming missile. Further computation is needed to plan and execute this action. This action may be monitored to check its effectiveness and the data so received.
We may say that knowledge is stored meaning. We can measure meaning in the same way as we measure data. In communication theory, the information content of a point in a space is equal to the entropy of that space. So the measure of a particular meaning, considered as a point or vector in a 'meaning space' is equal to the entropy of the space. The entropy of a space is simply a count of the number of points in that space. This space may be very large. Although there are only a finite number of words in natural languages, we can construct a very much larger set of meaningful sentences with these words.
We can imagine a dictionary, for instance, with 65 536 entries, each of which can be represented by a sixteen bit binary word. A transfinite version of this dictionary may contain ℵ0 entries. Each of these entries defines its headword with a sentence constructed of words taken from the same dictionary.
Even in a relatively settled language like English, each headword may have many different definitions, so that the space of definitions is bigger than the space of headwords. If we go to the mathematical limit, each of the ℵ0 headwords may be defined by a string of words ℵ0 long. There are thus ℵ1 possible definitions. This space of definitions contains all possible combinations and permutations of the headwords. . . .
From this we can conclude that the meaning of a set of symbols depends upon the network layer in which it is being coded and decoded.
Truth and deception
Each item of knowledge comprises a body of data and an interpretation of that data. When I say I see John coming I have processed a lot of photons, and decoded them as an image of John walking toward us.
We naturally classify incoming information into the extreme categories true and false, and intermediate gradings depending on our experience of the source.. There are tue sources of falsehood, bad data and wrong interpretation. If the source is emitting bad data, there is not much we can do. We can, however use the mathematical theory of communication to remove error in the transmission of the data.
Correcting erroneous interpretation of data is more difficult because there are usually a vast number of possibilities. The history of science shows repeatedly how much trial and error was required to arrive at each forward step on the path of discovery. Fortun & Bernstein: Muddling Through
The scientific method is our principal social means of arriving at the truth about the world. We have a good understanding of simple physical systems, but as systems become more complex and possibilities grow exponentially, certainty is hard to come by. In the realm of economics and politics, we have to deal not only with data which are difficult to interpret, but differing ideological approaches to the interpretation of data, secrecy, falsification and all the other complexities that human politics is heir to.
Courts and justice
Systems of justice around the world also have formal system for determining whether people have performed acts that have broken a law. The most serious cases involve homicide, rape, grievous bodily harm and similar violent offences.
The meaning of life
These ideas enable us to give a meaning to the noun phrase 'the meaning of life', which for each of us is our decoding of everything that we experience. If we understand that the Universe is divine and all experience is experience of God, the meaning of life becomes in effect the sum of our knowledge of God.
Knowledge and life
Each of us is defined by bodies of information: the genome that we inherit from our parents and the cellular mechanisms for decoding the genome that we get from our mother; and all the practical and cultural information we absorb through life, the sum of our experience.
It is unfortunate that as we age, errors begin to occur in our systems which can no longer be corrected, either by our own healing and immune systems or by the health care systems available in our communities. These errors lead to forgetfulness, inability to look after ourselves, and ultimately to death. The knowledge of life can only be stored and maintained if the physical foundations of our information storage and processing systems maintain their integrity.
(revised 12 January 2019)
