Francois

A quick peek at a dictionary definition of ‘knowledge’ = understanding,
comprehension, mastery; also, awareness or familiarity gained by experience
of a fact or situation; appreciation, cognition, consciousness.


Say you read a book on how to ride a bike. You ‘get the knowledge’ from the
book, buy the bike, and then proceed to fall off any number of times. You
read a book on how to swim, and then want to swim in the sea, at high tide.
You drown. What happened to all the knowledge you should have received from
these books. It wasn’t there.

Information, facts and figures, these mean something only to those who have
experience of them, like a surgeon reading a medical journal, and even then
the new ‘knowledge’ isn’t … knowledge, not until the surgeon adds to the
tried and tested methods this new ‘outside his experience’ stuff that may
or may not increase his understanding & mastery of what he thought he was
capable of, etc.


Riding a bike does not mean you can ride a motorcycle, and no book can
provide you with the knowledge on how to do so effortlessly … you try out
the new information, and if you are careful you can add to your knowledge
of how to ride a bicycle (upgrading your existing knowledge) in order to
comprehend what the motorcycle information really means, hence the
transformation of existing knowledge + new information > new knowledge.
This might be instigated by a book, but the book does not contain the new
knowledge – you manufacture it.


Where does consciousness reside? Where exactly is it? In your head? No. In
the outside world? No. Consciousness hovers in the air between us, in the
interaction between my knowing awareness of outside-myself, and that
outside-myself, whether that is a person I’m listening to or a book I’m
reading. That is where knowledge becomes, or rather, comes into being, and
even then I can refuse to let it in, perhaps because it clashes with my
previous beliefs.


And so it goes.


Johann

On 25 October 2017 at 19:29, Francois Nsenga <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Dear Johann and colleagues
>
> I have some difficulties with the proposal that certain books, or any other
> artifact, do not contain some kind of knowledge. Unless, like Eduardo, I
> don't fully get the meaning in English of the term "knowledge"?!
> Could someone help, please?
> Best regards,
>
> François
> in Rwanda
>
>
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-- 
Dr. Johann van der Merwe
Independent Design Researcher


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