Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
~ T. S. Eliot
I have many friends who would be philosophers, and most of them are of a decidedly pre-modern bent. Philosophy has often been at odds with the idea of ‘knowledge,’ of hard empirical facts, as it were. Many western philosophers once claimed that knowledge of reality was secondary to the overarching structures of philosophy, which could only be arrived at by pure reason and/or the special revelation of the Creator, while many eastern philosophers claimed that everything we see as “reality” is only an illusion over the surface of the ineffable Real behind it.
This question is often confused by the fact that the terms ‘knowledge’ and ‘wisdom’ are often vague at best. Today, dear readers, I’m going to try to clarify them.
I’m going to approach the issue from a purely pragmatic standpoint. My reasons for adopting pragmatism as a philosophy are not the subject of this essay; I’ll clarify them in a later post. I will, however, say a little more about what I mean by the term. In my view, reality is a dynamic system constructed of an almost infinite number of parts, each of which can be broken down into a further system in itself. Every part influences every other part, and the workings of the tiniest details influence the system as a whole in the same way the rules of the overall system control the workings of its smallest component.
However, at the human level of experience, that system is not chaotic; while it is a pretty idea to think that a drunkard flapping his lips in China might start a vast political storm in the United States, this is rarely the case. And, if it is, a line of cause and effect is present and (theoretically, at least) knowable. So, actions can be taken with effects that follow. Give a starving poor man a loaf of bread and he’ll survive a bit longer; shoot a well-fattened rich man through the heart and he will die regardless of the caloric bounty available to him.
Though there are many useful ways to think about the human mind, the most valuable one to the present question is the model proposed by Richard Dawkins and since expanded on by other thinkers in the fields of neurology and philosophy alike. That is, the human mind functions as a simulator in order to aid our survival–in other words, we have the ability to predict the effect of our actions, and the actions of others, on the world. The effects of this range from the simple–a mother telling a child not to play near the street, because her mind-simulator can forecast possible outcomes of that action, to the profound–Albert Einstein having a radical shift in his perspective towards space-time and gravitational acceleration and forming, seemingly ex nihilo to we mortals, his theory of relativity: a case of mental simulation on an unprecedented scale.
So, how does this concept of the mind as simulator tie in with the philosopher’s ideas of wisdom and knowledge?
Inaccurate mental simulation is at best useless and at worst lethal. Timothy Treadwell, a would-be conservationist who made the news a few years back, provides an example of the effects of inaccurate simulation. His experiences with well-fed and unthreatened grizzly bears in the wild led him to believe that all grizzlies were harmless if treated right. All it took was one bear with a differing characteristic (hunger, or temperament) to fail his simulation. The result, as might be expected, was not pretty.
Mental simulation works by constructing a model of reality inside the mind and then ‘running’ possible actions or environmental changes through it in order to predict results. Note that the model is certainly not to scale–indeed, it is almost absurdly lopsided, focusing the great majority of its resources on our own personal surroundings, environment, and social interactions. We are by our nature extremely egotistical, for if our mental simulations were more “fair,” we would have died out as a species a long time ago while wondering how the mastodons felt about our eating them.
Wisdom is the ability to use these simulations not only to choose those actions which best lead to our long term goals, but also to measure the effects of those goals themselves. Wisdom, in that sense, is power: the power to run an accurate simulation well into the future, in those fields which are central to our lives. “Central” is an important modifier here, because accurate simulation in non-central areas is not generally considered wisdom. An engineer designing the effect of airflow over a wing is not demonstrating wisdom; an elder determining how to preserve a family’s peaceful coherence is. Both are demonstrating sophisticated simulation through complex models of reality, but the life of the family to the elder is central to his immediate community’s life, while the effect of the air on the wing to the engineer is not.
Many reading this will have picked up on the name “Dawkins” several paragraphs ago and have already dismissed the mind-simulation concept as a strictly secular interpretation. This isn’t necessarily so: whether it evolved or was designed, simulation and prediction are inarguably key aspects of the human mind and central to the process of interacting with the world. Wisdom without interaction is nothing, for it has no effect outside the mind of its possessor (apologies to my Taoist friends).
So if wisdom is the ability to accurately predict the outcomes of given causes in meaningful contexts (almost always social), what is knowledge?
This is where the division happens. When we think of knowledge, we think of facts, of floating bits of unconnected detritus that accumulate in the mind and serve primarily to impress people at cocktail parties. Note the similarity to the common conception of history as merely the studies of dates and names.
Eliot’s quote at the beginning of this essay refers to that fragmented type of knowledge, or “information.” This is the same reason many philosophical theorists sneer at statistics, for indeed, what meaning can there be in a list of numbers?
In itself, there can be none. A single packet of information without connection or context is, by definition, trivia. It is like learning one phrase in a foreign language and is often used by the same types of people in the same ways: to convince others that they possess the language as a whole. While it may be impressive to rattle off the date of Constantine’s emigration to the Anatolian peninsula, or a fluent-sounding bit of French, it is useless without the key to wisdom: integration.
Think again of the mind as simulation through model of reality. In order to work accurately, that model has to be constructed on propositions that more or less match aspects of the real world. Those propositions are knowledge after integration. Integration is the process of taking a new fact and connecting it into the mental model so that it can be used. This is like learning the meanings and usages of a word in a foreign language. It is the conversion of a context-less piece of information and converting it to a structural node in a working model of the universe.
Knowledge, then, is necessary for wisdom, but only through the process of integration. This is the difference between a hobbyist and a scientist, and, some might argue, between a bad psychologist and a wise human being. In both cases the first has access to a plethora of information–speed of light, gravitational equations, mental disorders, insecurities–but, without connection, that knowledge is static. In the second cases, the scientist and the wise one have access to the same facts but have integrated them into working reality models, and can then use them to accurately predict and control reality, and to further expand the reaches of their mental models. This is what Arthur Conan Doyle referred to through the mouth of his great fictional detective, Sherlock Homes: there is a difference between seeing and observing. Seeing is merely recording, while observing is putting a thing into its context and connecting it.
Surely this isn’t always so, some will say, I’ve known many people wo were very wise but lacked knowledge. Again, this is due to a misconception as to the nature of knowledge. Remember that we only tend to call wise those simulations which apply to the central, meaningful areas of our life. As it happens, those areas are precisely the ones where knowledge is gained by observation of other human beings and oneself–no formal education required. Indeed, it is often the greatest hardships that produce the most useful observances of “meaningful” knowledge (which lead to wisdom if integrated), while the relative ease and detachment of higher education just as often removes those hardships, robbing the “educated” of what might have been data necessary for what we think of as wisdom.
So, as is so often the case, both sides of a would-be duality are necessary to a successful life. Wisdom is impossible without knowledge, and knowledge is useless without wisdom. The lessons I can see from this are two: first, never dismiss a thing as “mere information,” and second, never assume that possessing that information will be valuable in itself.