On Epistemology

Experience of the physical universe is not received by us as "matter and energy", or "particles and atoms". We do not live life as if it were a rubber sheet, uniform in material and different only in rough or smooth texture, concave or convex indentations. For the human mind, the universe is not just matter and energy - it is distinct forms. A table is not just a collection of specific types of atoms energetically bound together, distinct only in its collection. Those raw materials make a new thing - what we can recognize as "table". The human mind can identify these new forms, instances when raw material becomes more than the sum of its parts, a new thing. We can separate them from their environment, picking them out as distinct realities, with names that not only categorize but individuate these objects. Even attributes of nature not immediately detected by sensory experience can be detected, distinguished and made comprehensible by a name, such as time, life and death, known as such only to the human mind. Only we experience these things as more than yet another set of sensory data flashed before our eyes against the endless cave wall of reality.

This quality of the human mind is one of its most central attributes, if not the most central. It is the root of all distinctly-human capacities, such as abstract thought, symbolism, language, art and creativity, and our ability to empathetically relate to other people not as "it" but as "you". With our distinctive creativity, we can express ourselves in imaginatively-altered versions of our experiences, changing them to fit our internal desires and contemplations. From this derives all artistic and technological pursuits. Even science, rife as it is with categorization, recognition of natural laws and patterns, utilizes this fundamental human capacity, going beyond mere direct empirical experience.

We have even learned to take our capacity for abstract thought to ever higher grounds, using the attributes of the physical universe and our internal lives as evidence for the existence and nature of unobservable truths. With this abstract reasoning, we can contemplate truth and even discuss it amongst ourselves to develop our ideas about what is and is not true.

Our capacity to separate and identify things we experience is directly related to the nature of knowledge and how people acquire and formulate it. Our senses do not "know" what they experience - they simply receive information from their environment without question. Without our cognitive ability to distinguish forms, we would experience life as animals do. Sensory information would be treated according to its direct relevance to us and our internal desires, whatever compels us. We could not treat something as a "thing-in-itself", something with its own existence independent of us. By giving something a name, we are doing just this, recognizing its individuality and, with adjectives, giving it even more distinction. A man is not just "large thing that could potentially harm me or feed me, so I'll be suspicious until I see what it does" - he is Mr. Smith, a chef at a local restaurant, husband, father of two children, with red hair, bright eyes, a confident smile and an air of calm and politeness. Without our uniquely human mind, these factors would bear little relevance, if they were even recognized.

It seems that "knowing" is a step after direct sensory experience, and ultimately beyond it. This faculty resides in our mind. Truly it is difficult to determine whether knowledge originally depends on physical experience or not, due to the nature of our interior lives. Do we know the love of our mother before we are born? These questions naturally lead to the idea that there are different ways of knowing, and different sources of knowledge. One can know something by "common sense" (a posteriori), verified by physical experience without the necessity of deeper scientific inquiry. One can know something independent of physical justification, but still ultimately dependant on something experience of the thing in question - the idea "all whales are large" is independent of experiential justification, being a general statement, but depends on knowledge of whales (a priori). Ultimately, this depth of the types of knowledge proves that "knowing" is more than reception and acknowledgment of information. Knowledge is belief.

To know something is to make a mental idea formulating our physical experience, taking into consideration our internal influences such as emotion, logic and conscience. Distinguishing a car as a car from its surrounding environment, recognizing its distinctive qualities, even without any prior experience of a car we are capable from this very primitive stage of conducting a scientific inquiry to determine what a car is, how it functions, what its purpose is, etc. However, our ability to do this requires even deeper mental attributes, namely, an understanding of purpose, function, normality and abnormality, and the ability to conceptually link all the aspects of a thing in order to understand what it is and why it exists. By examining the material a car is made out of, what its various parts do, we can piece all this information together to see that the car is built to move, and that it is indeed built, being contrary to the way metal objects form in nature. Again, this touches the deepest aspects of human cognition, specifically the ability to distinguish, identify and understand something we experience, and the extension of this to recognize the "agent nature" of other human beings, their shared capacity for invention, use of natural materials, and their own unique goals and desires.

By all of this, what we know depends not only on what we are thinking about, but how we are thinking about it - the basis of our understanding, as well as our purposes for thinking about it. We can distinguish, generalize, identify, categorize, but why should we? What is the purpose or necessity to go beyond reception of sensory information and a biological perception of its relevance? That question is answered every time a human thinks about something, and our desire or purpose for thinking about a particular topic determines the way in which we think about it. If we are thinking about trees, we could simple cycle images of various kinds of trees through our mind without reference to what kinds of trees they are, where they come from, etc. Images should suffice, but they rarely do. Rather, we contemplate trees for a reason - to understand them better, to use them in some way, or perhaps out of an emotional preference for a type of tree or even a particular tree, or even a tree from our imagination.

Our understanding about something, what we think we "know" about it, depends on our purposes for thinking about it. If we contemplate trees, we can come to many different conclusions. We can say, oak trees are beautiful; or, trees are very tall; or, trees live a long time; or, trees can be very destructive if they fall. Abstractly, we can even go beyond this: trees are apart of the living earth ecosystem; trees are distinct, living beings; trees deserve to be treated with respect. Even farther, we can attribute supernatural or mystical qualities to trees, such as a soul, sentience, an afterlife, etc.

To say that one person who believes trees to be merely organic plant organisms, and another person who says that trees are our spiritual brethren in a larger spiritual pantheism, experience trees differently is a biased presumption. The beliefs people derive from an experience does not differentiate their experiences, or the object of their experience. Two people can experience the exact same tree, the exact same way, and come away two completely different, even opposing beliefs about it. This depends not on the tree, but on the way they think about the tree - their methods of examination, their abstract interpretations, etc.

Sensory experience determines little more of what we know or believe about something than experiencing paint, a brush and a blank canvas would give us an understanding of a work of art or its artist. Truly, even an experience of a finished painting is nothing without subsequent mental contemplation and perception. Knowledge is always biased, subjective, personal. There is no "factual knowledge". The only facts we can directly "know" are that of sensory information, and even that modern science has determined to be largely biased by the nature of human sensory organs and the neural faculties that receive and translate them into coherent ideas. In truth, knowledge is almost synonymous with belief. Once our experiences are translated, perceived, formulated and categorized into an "understanding", we make conclusions about those experiences that are ultimately beyond direct experience, since they take into account distinction, identification, adjective qualities, etc., things too often presumed without being seen as uniquely human faculties detached from pure sensory experience. Because of this ultimate detachment, we are compelled to give some degree of acceptance or dismissal, agreement or disagreement with our conclusions. Our standard for what is factual or not, true or not, right or not, cannot be derived from experience alone. It comes from our interior faculties of reason, conscience, logic, emotion, or from some external revelation that violates the boundaries of the senses and touches our deepest nature. But these interior faculties are not, by nature, sources of truth, fact and morality themselves. They are meant to abstractly recognize those qualities in our experiences, independent of ourselves and, indeed, independent of nature itself, above and beyond all, yet directly relevant to and governing all.

What we "know" to be factual, true or moral is thus indistinguishable from what we believe - that is, the way we interpret our conclusions, which we accept or dismiss, how we categorize them as true/false, factual/impossible, and right/wrong, and which we attempt to live by. Our knowledge, like our belief, is ultimately dependent on us, and always obscured by our inescapable limitations. But one thing can be recognized in all this: the human mind and body are not built to create ideas, facts, truths or moral qualities, but to recognize them. Our very nature presupposes the existence of these things and is made to recognize, desire and contemplate them, and to make them the basis for our choices and perceptions of life. Truly, man is spectator to the art of existence, taking part in life not as originator, judge or giver of life, but as a visitor to an art gallery, examining the various art pieces out of curiosity and love, interpreting them, preferring some to others, but having a certain deep affection for the entire gallery as art, as expressions of the artist who made them.

Our life is a life of love, the very heart of our being, the most active (if not the only active) aspect of our psychology, that which determines what we choose and why we choose it. A love of life drives survival; a love of knowledge drives study; a love of one another drives romance, friendship, parenthood. Whether what we love and how we express our love is correct depends on truth, fact and morality, and what we believe about it, as well as the influences on us we cannot necessarily choose or control. But we must always strive to love that which deserves love, and live by that love as far as we may. That is the meaning of the human, and the root of all knowledge.