From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Sat Dec 14 2002 - 18:53:11 MST
On Sat, 14 Dec 2002, Samantha Atkins, commenting on my poorly
put comments wrote:
> If "knowledge base" is just another name for everything the
> person knows, believes, is programmed with and so on then this
> explanation explains nothing.
In less complex entities, say moths, most of the knowledge is
preprogrammed into the genome and we would generally call it
"instinct". In more complex entities, say humans or elephants,
most of the knowledge base is gained from experience.
> There is, for instance, ignorance of the kind
> that is not merely misinformed or uninformed but willful refusal
> to see and integrate information for whatever *reason*.
Well we have to split some hairs here. "Misinformed" could well
be "beyond our control" -- the goal of a free press (not commercial
press as we have more and more in the U.S.) is to hopefully prevent
people from being intentionally "misinformed" by self-serving people.
"Uninformed" could be due to a lack of motivation (which could in
turn be genetic or experiential) or a lack of access to information
sources (most 3rd world people) or a lack of time to become informed
(because one is simply dealing with the day-to-day struggle for survival).
"Willful refusal" can be intentional (in which case the person is
just simply being bad [at least from an extropic perspective] or
it can be because their mind can simply not grok the concepts.
Typically I think this is because a concept sets up such
cognitive dissonance that they have to reject the evidence they
are being presented with or develop a split personality disorder.
Holding onto concepts that tend to disagree with each other is
not an easy thing. [This is one of the reasons I very much dislike
the wave/particle duality of light in physics.]
I look at it like -- "If I'm alive everything I know must have
worked and so therefore it must be right -- if you are telling
me something that contradicts what I *know* then I either have
to flip (your strategy is better than mine at promoting my
survival) *or* I have to reject what you are asserting to be
true.
The alternate path is to believe that we could both be "right".
You are right within your experience and I am right within mine.
So now a debate becomes a more interesting activity as its really
about figuring out which set of experiences may be more relevant
to the topic under discussion. In that case all parties may
discover that they are "right" and be enriched because the
learn a new set of rules that should be applied in specific
circumstances.
> I cannot invalidate someone else's experience but the conclusions
> they have drawn or failed to draw can certainly be less than
> correct or reasonable. There should be a distinction made, I
> believe, between what really works and what one has simply not
> been killed by yet. :-)
Agreed. If they are dead, then they got it wrong (at least if survival
was their goal). If they are alive you may assume that at least some
of them just got lucky. The more interesting question (at least to me)
is figuring out when they got it right and how do you learn from their
different set of experiences. This is presumably what human story
telling and fairy tales are all about. I might be generally uninterested
in stories of UFO abductions but I just might might be interested
in stories involving the survival of UFO abductions. Lacking the
ability to absolutely prove UFO abductions are false I should
reasonably consider whether knowledge of how to survive UFO
abductions would be useful. Of course if I'm smart about it
I might place information about how to survive falling into
a lake (if I can't swim) or how to time starting a business
as somewhat higher on my priority list.
> I don't think you can explain it all like that. There is real
> rudeness and bickering present that doesn't have anything to do
> with the knowledge base except being either evolutionary
> programmed patterns or learned patterns that have not been
> overcome even when time after time they are shown to be
> inappropiate and counter-productive.
There is a book about the history of Maine that my mother showed
me once. In it I believe it described "down-mainers" (as they
are known) as "just plain ornery". My mother observed that that
described my father (descended from a long line of down-mainers)
*exactly*. I don't know whether this is a genetic Bradbury trait
or one we have just learned over many generations. I'd simply
observe that you can take a Bradbury out of Maine but you can't
take the down-mainer out of a Bradbury (at least not very easily).
But in social species (e.g. humans, dogs, etc.) there is a
time for peace and a time for war. The entities here today
span a distribution range from from those that lean one way
to those that lean the other (because their ancestors evolved
to strike the correct balance and pass it along either through
genes or experience).
Hope this makes some of my thinking a bit clearer.
Robert
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