☀ The Divide.

Factual knowledge and abstract concepts are of the same kind of stuff. That is, they are patterns in our brains with two qualities:

1) We have direct access to them, as contrasted with things like reflexes, muscle memories, and other forms of conditioned or pre-existing reponses, which we normally cannot activate consciously.

2) They can exist in any brain, provided that the brain has the foundational patterns to support them (for example it does not matter if you dervive the Pythagorean theorem yourself or if you learn it from a textbook, you won’t be able to make use of it unless you already possess concepts of arithmetic). These distinctions are important because they qualify imformation which is transmissible; they are what separates shared experiences from qualia, the subjective ones. Experiences tied to the visceral cannot be fully communicated to another person because are so dependent on the senses and psychology of the person experiencing them. Some part of the feeling will be diminished because not every brain pattern which existed in the one who experienced it exists in the one who is being communicated to.

Humans natually learn things through direct experience. Empirical knowledge is internalized in a different way than knowledge acquired through language — it is woven more tightly into the fabric of the mind, becoming close to us and difficult to remove. The distilation of facts and concepts from written or spoken language is an acquired skill. Making ideas out of words takes a great deal of practice and effort, and many years to develop subtlety. When you’re doing this, you’re essentially internalizing another brain’s encoded experiences, so many of the intermediate steps get dropped becuase they’re not required for the final brain-state. However, when a person has matured this faculty, they tend to lean on it heavily, since it allows one who posesses it to absorb ideas quickly and with greater frequency than simple experience (which includes the development of ideas through direct rumination and thought).

A side effect of this new behavior is a change in how one treats language, and more importantly conversation. When words become a medium for information, there is a tendcy to optimize the internalization process by taking every word at its common meaning. When you’re in the habit of ingesting as much information as you can, things like irony and emotional subtext are not often in the forefront of your mind, and because of this they stop being expected. People who read a great deal begin to take all language literally.

This also creates a social and personal gap when literal people want to communicate things which may only be communicated through direct experience: things which might be subjective, or the affects of emotion. Literal people want to use words to compress the information extracted from experience into something portable, and what they end up with is something lacking the essence and the potency of the original experience. Or they will wish to convey the affects of their emotion in words, when it would be more effective to take actions which will allow the listener to directly experience what they (the speaker) is feeling.

Speaking as a literal sort of person, I often find myself thinking not that I desire the ability to communicate in terms of direct experience, to think first in the subjective, but rather a frustration at not being able to communicate in the way that makes me feel most comfortable: efficient, unambiguous exchange of information. This I think is a sort of second-order behavior of what I think is most important here: the prioritization of knowledge above all else, including common human experiences.

This kind of thinking is a very convenient way to make philosophic descions: it gives a wonderful feeling of always knowing what is truly important (this, of course, is seen through the lens of a limited set of knowledge — more on this point later). It is also a very convenient way to buffer your own emotions from the people around you. If all your mind ever has to concern itself with is things that are purely objective and factual, you can easily dismiss what another person feels as tained with emotion, invalid and without merit. This is particularly handy if you don’t agree with the other person, or if you don’t like how the other person’s opinion makes you feel.

The instinct to have both feet planted in the realm of facts diminishes existence by removing community with our fellow humans — it acquits us of the need to acknowledge that what another person directly experiences, their feelings and opintions, are as real to them as ours are to us. No one is fully aware of their own biases or the limitations of ones knowledge. No one can see the back of their own skull, but when the aquisition of ideas becomes a common task it is easy to forget this because after a while you simply feel that you know everything.

I bet you thought this was going to be a treatise on the nature of knowledge.

Objectivity is worthless without empathy. Ideas are impotent if they cannot be shared. Visceral, emperical experience will always weigh more than abstraction. Abstraction is important, because it removes friction from ideas, allowing them to move quickly from mind to mind as all useful ideas must be able to do, but it is not the singular tool at our disposal. The human sensorary aparatus is a hugely powerful thing. Most importantly: direct experiences which can be reproduced directly in other people are the most potent way to transmit ideas.