"We"?

1. You have written a post.
2. In English.
3. That appears superficially to make sense.
4. We know how to read and write English.

I wonder if there is a difference between 'what we know' and 'what we really know'? What work is the extra word doing?

Your reply is interesting because I am questioning what we think we know and what we 'really' know, which casts some doubt on apparent knowledge. This is partly my intention because I am coming from the angle in which human beings think that with scientific sense they know so much, and I am wondering how much we really know of 'truth', despite the bombardment of information and 'knowledge'.

So you can imagine a circumstance where what I have claimed we know, could be untrue. I might be a robot, for instance. Or you might be hallucinating this discussion, or...

If "absolute and indubitable certainty" is what you mean by 'really know' then we know nothing, including whether or not there is a 'we'. But that is an abuse of language, because actually we use the word 'know' in a different way - I could be wrong about this, but as it happens I am not, so I know...

I know that some people have suggested that Socrates claimed to 'know nothing', and I am inclined to think that he knew far more than the average person. However, I think that we have moved into an era of which some speak with uncertainty, but others herald the ideas of science. I am trying to balance all of this because we are in an age of information, but I am sure that there are limitations of our current knowledge.

I am sure that there are limitations of our current knowledge. — Jack Cummins

If that its your project, you have started poorly. Start with the idea that we really do know some things, and then see how far you can extend these things. I think I am quite certain that the world is not flat. Some people believe otherwise, but they are in error.

I am sorry that I have started poorly, and it may be that my thread will not work at all. My point is probably that many think we have such great knowledge in our grasp. I am not denying that, but I think that it is possible to become inflated and not recognize the limitations. We don't even have the knowledge to cope with the problems of our time, such as climate change and the future of needing petroleum, so my own thread is about remarking on limitations. But, it is likely that many on this site will only see the strengths of human rationality, rather than wishing to look at deficits.

I am sorry that I have started poorly, and it may be that my thread will not work at all. My point is probably that many think we have such great knowledge in our grasp. I am not denying that, but I think that it is possible to become inflated and not recognize the limitations — Jack Cummins

I hold a different view and don't think that knowledge features prominently in people's lives. I think most people are content to know that which is helpful in sustaining a livelihood and pursuing some interests or hobbies. The rest of human knowledge is for those who need to use it or care to learn it. I certainly sympathize with this view. (The mistake, as Jack London's Wolf Larsen bemoans, is in ever opening the books) The enlightenment view that everything can be known and that a person can become a Renaissance man with the right reading and tuition is surely gone, except in certain subcultures.

Jack, I wasn't sure if your question was about epistemology - your use of 'we' referring to human beings - or if you meant 'we' as in people generally.

I tend to think of knowledge as being like a hardware store - there are tools and materials crammed in every aisle and I will never need or use more than 1% of what's there.

My initial thinking was about epistemology and how much we really know, but with the implications in people's lives and a veneer of knowledge based on science.

I am definitely not opposed to the methods and findings of science, but, even then so many variables come into play in the interpretations of scientific findings, including the role of the observer. I am not trying to dismiss the basis of science, or rationality. I am not even trying to say that our knowledge, based on reason, or the senses is entirely inadequate, but I am asking how much we know in the context of our means of knowledge, and what remains unknown. Questions of the unknown remain as speculation, and it is important to establish where this is differentiatef, and what is possible to know and, what must remain as unknown. How do we consider the areas which we can know potentially from those which we cannot.

Ok. It's always an interesting question, but as I say I don't think people in general really care that much. Knowledge is about what is useful to us and that which can be established 'for certain' is not really a concern of most folk. Me included.

I tend to hold a view that knowledge is tentative and fallibilistic and changing. Some knowledge can be used to create and predict things. As a time limited human being with a job and obligations, attempting to understand the ultimate nature of reality is unnecessary to my experience of life.

I agree with you that in many ways knowledge is about what is useful. I am probably stepping into the realms of the extraordinary because my life experience is really leading me to question the foundation of knowledge as we know it. In some ways, I think that knowledge is socially constructed and is not absolute.

My initial thinking was about epistemology and how much we really know, but with the implications in people's lives and a veneer of knowledge based on science. — Jack Cummins

I'm curious as to what you think it would be to "really know" something; how would it differ from what is generally considered to be knowing something?

It's hard to answer that question without getting into semantics of what it means to "know" or to "have knowledge". I'll bypass all these sometimes sophisticated and often cumbersome arguments to say that whatever knowledge is, is gradational.

That is, we know some things "more" or "less", depending on our information on the subject matter, our position in life, our experiences and all these other factors that are extremely difficult to enumerate, because there are so many.

Having said this, I think there is good historical evidence and indeed some simple questions one can ask to find out how much we know. I'll keep coming to physics, not because it is the most important subject - I don't think there is such a thing, - but because our knowledge of it is the best tested knowledge we have. All other knowledge we have in other areas of life pale in comparison to the quality of evidence we have in physics.

So ask a simple question: "what is gravity?", "what is a particle?", "what is magnetism?". The answers given are only the effects we can perceive of the phenomena. As to what these things are, we don't know.

Now go up in complexity to chemistry, biology all the way up to psychology. We multiply particles by billions. Minds enter the fray as do complex emotions. This complexity, if you stop and think about it, is truly mind-boggling. As the saying goes, if our knowledge is limited - as it is - our ignorance is infinite.

In some ways, I think that knowledge is socially constructed and is not absolute. — Jack Cummins

Isn't all of human knowledge derived from human perspectives and experience? So I'm not sure how it can be anything but tentative, constructed and far from absolute. I'm not even sure what absolute knowledge would mean - can you provide an example? Are you heading towards transcendence and such? Glimmerings of higher consciousness? You'd need to establish that belief in such a thing is warranted.

So ask a simple question: "what is gravity?", "what is a particle?", "what is magnetism?". The answers given are only the effects we can perceive of the phenomena. As to what these things are, we don't know. — Manuel

Yes, we approach and try to surround these events thanks to science.

Quantum gravity remains elusive because it is a universal effect and so it cannot be renormalized such as was done with the electromagnetic in QED.

The electric and the magnetic transition one into the other and back, and so forth, as a self-generating wave. An elementary particle is known to be the certain stable energy quanta of its quantum field.

We know in general that more and more complexity emerges from the simpler and simpler from past to future.

Yes, we approach and try to surround these events thanks to science. — PoeticUniverse

Without science I can approach and try to surround these events too. So can my dog.

Without science I can approach and try to surround these events too. So can my dog. — MikeBlender

My cat decided that a static discharge was a pain and so growled at the person who did it ever since.

In some ways, I think that knowledge is socially constructed and is not absolute. — Jack Cummins

But what if the vague notion of the 'absolute' is one more social construction? It sounds like God, and perhaps the vague idea of knowledge-beyond-utility or knowledge-beyond-social-construction serves the same purpose. A cynic might call it a philosopher's self-flattery. It's tinged with unworldliness. Those who build and run the machines of the world don't 'really' know anything. But (they might answer, if they could find the time and cared to join in a questionable game) it seems that philosophers don't 'really' know what it means to 'really' know something.

So ask a simple question: "what is gravity?", "what is a particle?", "what is magnetism?". The answers given are only the effects we can perceive of the phenomena. As to what these things are, we don't know. — Manuel

I agree with a point I think you are trying to make, but still: what kind of knowledge beyond the usual, practical stuff do you (or others) have in mind in the first place? What form would an acceptable answer have?

"[G]ravity, also called gravitation, in mechanics, the universal force of attraction acting between all matter." https://www.britannica.com/science/gravity-physics

So then we can ask what 'force' means and so on. What anchors this network of words if not our work in the world? Is there a vague longing for something more than 'knowing' how to build a bridge, set a broken bone, etc.?

G]ravity, also called gravitation, in mechanics, the universal force of attraction acting between all matter — Zugzwang

Gravity is not an inertial force like electromagnetism or the color and hypercolor charge. It is the varying metric of 4D spacetime. Maybe the three mentioned forces are associated with a varying metric too (of a curled up space) but this is questionable. The associated gauge particles are spin 1 particles, contrary to spin 2 gravitons taking care of the varying metric of large 4D spacetime. The effect of the three base forces is what is actually felt as force. Gravity alone not.

We have stone age brains which are ill-suited for everyday living in the information age we've inherited and find ourselves menageried within. Thus, e.g. anthropogenic climate change neglect / denial (i.e. 'precautionary principle' be damned and exacerbated, of course, by neoliberal capitalism, etc). I think a more useful, probative, inquiry is this:

How much of what (we think) we "know" is just illusions of knowing?

What role do illusions of knowing play in living contemporary lives (e.g. ideology, spectacle-simulacra)?

And to what degree does this agnotology occlude understanding of oneself-with-others-in-the-world?

It would be interesting to be able to have knowledge of the actual thing or phenomena that produces these effects in us, that is, what grounds the effects that we perceive as laws of nature or even ordinary perception.

There was a time in which this was the aim of science, roughly Descartes' time up until Newton. The Universe was comprehended as a universal machine - like a giant clock - if you can build it, you can understand it. It appears to be our innate way of understanding our given common sense world.

But Newton, to his own astonishment and disappointment, proved the world does not work mechanically.

Thus science was forced to reduce it aims: from understanding the world to understanding theories of the world. That type of knowledge Descartes and others wanted, would be nice to be able to access. But is beyond our comprehension. Chomsky and E.A. Burtt speak about this in interesting ways.

Yes. And it many ways, it's counterintuitive. The most familiar things to us, say an ordinary tree or a slug or a flower are immediate percepts. Yet our knowledge of them - what we can say about them in depth - is very, very little.

Yet when we go "down" to the uber-microscopic level, we have all these fancy theories, which are very hard and only a few people can comprehend them.

I think you are missing my point. Consider my question: what kind of knowledge beyond the usual, practical stuff do you (or others) have in mind in the first place? What form would an acceptable answer have?

I ask because the talk of 'really' knowing gestures toward something vague and unworldly. The best way that I can see to figure out what we are talking about is to look at what we do while we are talking as we talk. For instance, certainty is manifest in (or simply 'is'?) carefree, confident action. Knowledge is manifest in (or 'is') the control and prediction of one's environment. So what is the 'real' gravity or magnetism 'under' our current successful application? Maybe the 'thing' isn't 'under' the phenomena like a blanket but more like a useful pattern we find in them (and which allows us to see them in a certain light to begin with.)

It would be interesting to be able to have knowledge of the actual thing or phenomena that produces these effects in us, that is, what grounds the effects that we perceive as laws of nature or even ordinary perception. — Manuel

I confess that I find the idea of the 'actual thing' problematic.

There was a time in which this was the aim of science, roughly Descartes' time up until Newton. The Universe was comprehended as a universal machine - like a giant clock - if you can build it, you can understand it. It appears to be our innate way of understanding our given common sense world. — Manuel

In the above I find (correctly or not) two different ideas. First there's the 'actual thing' (which I can't make sense of, ultimately) and then there's 'you can understand it iff you can build it' (which I agree with.) The first idea expresses the metaphysical itch. The second is more pragmatic. Do you not find some tension between these ideas?

Thus science was forced to reduce it aims: from understanding the world to understanding theories of the world. That type of knowledge Descartes and others wanted, would be nice to be able to access. But is beyond our comprehension. — Manuel

How about the 'reduced' aim of better technology? And perhaps it's only 'beyond our comprehension' in the sense that we don't know what we are even looking for (or, really, I'd say it's a feeling that folks are looking for in metaphysics.)

Global Data Storage Calculated At 295 Exabytes

295 Exabytes = 295 billion gigabytes = 295,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes = $2.95 \times 10^{20} bytes$

Mankind's capacity to store the colossal amount of information in the world has been measured by scientists.

The study, published in the journal Science, calculates the amount of data stored in the world by 2007 as 295 exabytes.

That is the equivalent of 1.2 billion average hard drives.

The researchers calculated the figure by estimating the amount of data held on 60 technologies from PCs and and DVDs to paper adverts and books.

"If we were to take all that information and store it in books, we could cover the entire area of the US or China in 13 layers of books," Dr Martin Hilbert of the University of Southern California told the BBC's Science in Action. — BBC

That's only information, not knowledge; even less a measure of (anyone's) understanding.

That's only information, not knowledge; even less a measure of (anyone's) understanding. — 180 Proof

Mind if I pick your brain on,

1. What is understanding?

2. What's the difference between information and knowledge?

Mind if I pick your brain on,

1. What is understanding?

2. What's the difference between information and knowledge? — TheMadFool

1. Understanding denotes conceptual reflection (i.e. metacognition) by which knowing is distinguished from, and contextualized by, not knowing.

2. Knowledge denotes (A) proven proficiency, (B) accurate description, (C) well-tested explanation or (D) a combination of two or three of kinds of knowing. And information is merely the contents (i.e. disambiguated / aggregated data) of which descriptions consist. In other words, oversimply put, knowledge is form and information is (descriptive) content.

(My "picked brain's" usages, Fool, which might not be dictionary standard.)

My own thinking on knowledge is that it is different from information in the sense of it being about a connection with the information and ideas in some kind of meaningful way. I believe that it is connected with understanding, because it involves being able to make use of what one has learned. Understanding may be something which we think we have, but I am not sure that it is that simple because it is about whether we are able to make use of what we consider to be our knowledge, and apply to the experiences which test our capabilities. In a way, my own view of understanding is related to the concept of insight. I think that it is a kind of deeper level of knowledge based on being able to reflect on the ideas which we have and take them on board to live in a greater conscious and responsible way. I am not sure that I am fully able to live with insightful awareness, but I am seeking to be able to do so. It probably also comes down to various levels of meaning and analysis, ranging from the personal context to thinking in larger, systemic ways.