Obviously there
are many different positions one can hold in response to this question,
and the one I am about to suggest it by far from the most accurate or
all-encompassing, but I think it is important.
Life, for me, at
the moment, is about the generation, acquisition and dissemination
of knowledge. And about the study of how we go about those things -
which of course is also generating knowledge, meaning my
experience. This study is technically called epistemology, but I
don't personally think the word enhances the communication of the idea.
How do we know something?
That's a good
question. Elsewhere, I have defined knowledge as a 'level of
certainty based on proof'. But how do we hold that level of
certainty? I have also argued (or, more precisely, stated) that we
build and maintain models in our minds which we use to predict what
effect our actions will have. I would suggest that we hold a level of
certainty about a particular thing as a part of that model, and that the
level of certainty increases as we gain experience of the predictions
from that model holding true.
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Knowing as a mind
state
We are capable of having many pieces of knowledge in our
minds, and each of them must be stored somehow within our minds. I
believe that they are stored within the network of neurons within our
brains.
We can juggle many pieces of kowledge - and my
perception of this is that I can have several 'in my minds eye' at the
same time. Indeed, in order to be able to work with them, we must
be able to manipulate at least three pieces of information at a time, in
order to be able to handle relationships between things. Unless, of
course, we have some way of using temporal relationships and of somehow
manipulating the representations of our models in such a way that... on
balance, I think it easier to suppose that we can actively reference
multiple internal models simultaneously.
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