Honestly. Why is knowledge so important? What about experience? Are they the same? Why know things that don't benefit or apply to you? Why bother learning and studying? Is it all to play a necessary role in evolution?
"The educated brain is the wreckage left after the experiences of training." (W Ross Ashby) I follow the threads here with the same questions in mind, curious to observe the individuals who post rather than the subjects at face value. There is no science, no experience without the people. --- Ron.
Knowledge is someone else's experience. How can you accurately tell in advance what you might find useful to know? If we accept that our intelligence is our biggest asset, and that intelligence benefits from knowledge, then I suppose it must play a critical role in our survival.
Clearly we all need knowledge to survive. There are only two ways to get it, experience and teaching. Life is complicated and there is a lot to learn in order to be successful in such a complicated endeavor. So much that it takes us almost twenty years to learn enough to be able to more or less survive on our own. It's very difficult to predict precisely which knowledge any individual will need. We don't know where her life will take her. It's dependent on so many things, her interests, her aptitudes, the opportunities available in the time and place where she becomes an adult--a lot of it is pure luck and can't be predicted. So we err on the side of caution and teach our young people more stuff than they will need. We just don't know which is the excess because it's different for everyone. You ask why you should bother learning "things that don't benefit or apply to you." There are three answers to that. One is, as I've already said, that we don't know which of the things we're teaching you will benefit you so we overteach you to be safe. It's far better to know how to find north and never need to know how, than to find yourself completely lost and not know how. The second is that the benefit of knowing certain kinds of things is not obvious. We want you to be able to contribute to the community you live in, to participate in the maintenance of the civilization you're part of. That means you need to understand its history, the way its people get along (or not) with each other, the things that routinely pop up to endanger its cohesion. In our country that means that you need to know enough about what's going on to be able to vote intelligently, and we still have to hope that enough of you bother to vote for us to be able to call this place a democracy with a straight face. Third is the fact that humans are curious and enjoy learning. This is not always something that young people appreciate, because they're so busy being pumped full of stuff they can't see any use for, that the last thing they can imagine every wanting to do for fun is learning. But it happens to most people to one degree or another eventually. We want our young people to be sufficiently knowledgeable that they can go out into the world and learn what there is to learn. There's sort of a threshold of learnability. People who know less than a certain amount about their time and place find it very difficult to learn, because they lack some of the basic concepts and rationales that everyone else takes for granted and doesn't go around explaining. Is it all to play a necessary role in evolution? Yes, but it's the evolution of civilization, not the evolution of Homo sapiens as a species. On the balance we've been mighty pleased with the results of having invented civilization. We've had our setbacks but by and large this is a nicer life than the survival-obsessed one of a nomadic hunter-gatherer with almost no literature, music or other art, no pets, no hobbies, nothing more than what we can carry on our back from one camp to the next. So we're rather protective of it. We want to make sure that the next generation keeps it going. And frankly we're so impressed with the advances we've made over our ancestors (again we've had our setbacks but the trend has been positive) that we figure when you get older you'll feel the same way and you'll want the next generation to be able to build on it and make it even better. So we teach you more than you need, as a catalyst to prompt you to be creative and advance civilization in some small way. You might not all do that, but we don't know which one of you will so we prepare you all to be sure.
Absolutely no reason! But there isn't knowledge which does not benefit you! Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Some cave-men were sitting in circle, laughing to some stupid people, who spent all day thinking about "why does fire warm you?" and something called "atoms". Buncha no-good thinkers.. Little did they know that this would lead to the invention of the nuclear reactor and computers!!! Now they're sitting online, laughing to scientists and nerds who waste all day thinking about stupid stuff like Qvarks or "Why does gravity pull us?" There should be a "If you don't know how it works, you can't use it" law, really...
Experience always leads to understanding. Knowledge only sometimes leads to understanding. If I have enough experience, and thus understanding, I do not need knowledge. Knowledge tells me water boils at 212. Big deal. Experience tells me water exposed to heat boils, and enough experience will tell me how much heat to apply to how water. Now I can boil water.
Nah. It takes some thinking as well. Experience associates thing (like fire+wate=vapour), but doesn't, for example, explain why it happened. You would associate fire (like campfire) with steam, but not heat, for example. Experience is just a more complex sort of knowledge. Proper theories is understanding.
Well, if you’re saying a rock does not gain insight from being in a river, I’ll have to agree with you. If you’re saying a human can experience something without thinking during and after the process, I just do not see it. I did not equate experience with understanding. I said experience leads to understanding. They are still two different things. Experience and thinking provides an understanding that it happens. More experience and understanding explains it. Knowledge is data. Data requires input to be assimilated, and we can say this input is an experience, I suppose, if we have to, but really. . . I can be provided data/knowledge about fire, water, and steam, and yet have no experiences concerning any of them. This knowledge may accumulate to the point where I have understanding, or it may not. Knowledge is raw data that does not go beyond what is presented. It is the cold, hard facts. Understanding takes the raw data and adds to it (by this ‘thinking’ you mention). Once this understanding is attained, no more knowledge is needed, no more thinking is needed. The understanding stands on its own. Experience the same as (complex) knowledge? I do not see it. Experience can provide knowledge. Experience can provide understanding, without knowledge. Experience can show cause and effect, which I would say is understanding. The person may still be lacking the knowledge of how first this, than that, but has understanding of the cause and effect none the less. Theories attempt to take knowledge and, with thinking, yield understanding. Formulation of proper theories involves a melding of knowledge and understanding. Theories require both. Are you saying understanding requires formulation of theories? If so, I would disagree.
