What is the purpose of knowledge?
I had various ideas about that throughout my life.
When I was a small child I marvelled at the fact how much adults know. I asked them as much as I could and most of the time, they could give me answers. I still remember how I stood in front of a street sign when I was in kindergarten, thinking: “I’ll never be able to understand what is written there”.
Little did I know, that one day I’ll understand it…
…and another language
…and writing in that language.
It was at the same time that I got to know a wild shrub with white flowers. In my kindergarden group it was called the “granny plant”, because it was said that touching it would “make your skin turn into grandmother skin”. To this day I marvel at the simplicity and effectiveness of how kids model reality.
Later in life I found out that this particular plant can evoke a photo-toxic reaction in the skin that resembles a burn - that in turn resembles something like wrinkly skin - an old person’s skin.
When in my youth we used to go out into nature I was the only one that actually “saw” this white shrub. I asked my friends about the “granny plant” but they did not go to my kindergarden hence they did not know about it. For them it didn’t really exist. Right now, I was inclined to say that it was “just another shrub” to them, but to be really precise - it did not exist in their perspective. They couldn’t see it.
Sure photons from that particular plant hit their eyes, they probably saw it physically in a materialistic way. But in their minds it struck nothing, not one cord, their spirit had no connection to it. It was like water running through a sieve, it does not stick.
I tell this story as an example for the supposition that “we perceive what we know” and not vice versa. Thinking about it, it seems relationships are prior to any form of knowledge. When you walk down an alley, you’ll see many pedestrians but unless you know a particular person, you won’t get distracted from your usual chores. You perceive “pedestrians” almost like an homogenous group.
So knowledge seems to make the difference between mere seeing and perceiving. When speaking of knowledge we also tend to use the verb “to grasp” in relationship to an idea. There are many instances where you can verbally repeat an idea but it still hasn’t occurred to you what all the implications are. Notice how we usually say “it occures” to somebody, as if realization is not fully in your subjective control, but something outside it, hence the notion that “it” happens “to you”.
So in the end, what is the purpose of knowledge?
To make you better than everyone else? To talk down on people and consider yourself their king? To speak in tongues about things that have no relationship to reality whatsoever?
When you look carefully, these three examples have one thing in common: an abusive or neglectful relationship. You either derive your worth as a human from the treasure of knowledge you have or you elect yourself into a higher position or actively deceive them. Your relationships in general deteriorate and this seems to go against the intuitive aim of knowledge, that is to “make you relate to things you haven’t related to before”.
But what if things compete to be included in your vision? When you cannot see the forest for trees? Then you bundle them together into a higher identity. When you gather wheat from the field you gather wheat and leave the chaff, throw it on a pile and recycle it later. You won’t mix wheat and chaff as this goes against the purpose of collecting grain.
You do the same with knowledge, mostly subconciously, you gather phenomena under a certain event or movement. A bundle is much more handy than single stems. A meaningful story is much more powerful and useful than 100 random Harry Potter facts.
What was new for me during the past couple years was the fact, that more complexity wouldn’t change my life or the world at large. As a computer scientist that grew up on scientific discoveries, early on I equated “complexity” with “knowledge”, thus I ventured out into the most complex scientific structures. One day I would be able to understand them and derive “sacred” knowledge.
Ironically there wasn’t as much “holiness” in this complexity. It took me some time to become aware of it, but more of this complex scientific knowledge wasn’t making me content, but anxious. I delved deep into physics, (neuro-)psychology, health in general and many more things. The idea behind all that was to uncover the mysteries of the universe (physics), what it’s all about (I don’t know where to locate this form of knowledge) and how I function as a human (neuro-psychology).
The answer to life was still eluding my hands, that’s why I thought I must be more efficient therefore optimizing my life. (Un-)fortunately I found self-help literature and went down the rabbit hole of “self-improvement”.
My life became an unsculpted rock, ready to be made into something. But nobody could tell me, what I should sculpt it into, so I decided to go with countless tutorials on “how to sharpen my tools” or “add more tools to the toolbox” or “the introduction to sculpting”.
Watching self-help videos and reading self-help literature was a great way to avoid doing actual work, even though in that very same moment, I felt like doing great progress hence after some time I called this phenomenon “pseudo-progress” or “pseudo-work”. But to be fair to myself: knowing about doing and doing are both important. Since I always felt behind in life, I thought I had to ace “knowing about doing”, so I could finally catch up to the guys, that have both feet steadfast on the ground.
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I always had a picture in my mind that condensed what I was doing there: back when I was a small kid I used to play a game called “Cossacks” - a real time strategy game set in the time when gunpowder and cannons became the main weapons on the battlefields. In the game you could build an armory and in that armory you could research two different kinds of metallurgy: one made further research into metallurgy more efficient, that is using less time. The other sank the cost of producing soldiers by researching ways to use less iron or something like that.
I loved maxxing out the first option, because it made everything after it so much faster. I took the first research option and extrapolated it on my life, thinking: “I’ll just try to maximize my time efficiency and one day, when I find that thing I want to learn, I’ll learn it as quick as nobody else”. That was how I thought about knowledge when I was a 10 year old and later when I was in university, that very same conviction entered my mind when consuming self-help literature.
But what is the purpose of super sharp tools? What is the purpose of knowing everything about boulders but never really working on one?
There’s a paradox that you encounter once you embark on such a trip to make things more efficient - you’re not becoming free. I see this in my work as a SysAdmin among many companies that try to digitize their workflow. Ambitious leading positions try to digitize the work to make processes faster. Workers, in turn, do things faster but after the things are done, they’re mostly not allowed down-time - they should get up (because they’ve free time now due to efficient digitized work, right?) and do other things - ultimately making them do MORE instead of LESS - though in a shorter amount of time.
The overall workload increases, making digitization in this example not a help but another weight to shoulder. I’m not against digitization here. Digitized processes really make tasks easier and faster to accomplish, but the overarching system in which it is embedded - work paid by time (and mostly not by effort) - forces workers which could rest a little more because of more free time, to invest this free time into more work. Materialistically it makes sense, but seen from the interhuman perspective, it’s a vicious cycle which ultimately results on overall increasing numbers of tasks and switching of contexts, which ultimately puts more stress on workers, the more “efficient” the work is. Again - the current systems runs on “time at work” mostly and not “amount of work done”. Coming back to self-help literature, this was exactly how I perceived it. Only in the beginning it felt like I was making progress, it actually saved up some time but it still wasn’t clear to me what to do, I was just being confused faster.
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The same can be said about many of the scientific videos and podcasts I was listening to at the time. I became eerily aware of the many things that influence my health and I became a sort of control freak trying to optimize every aspect of my life. My sleep, my eating, my workout, my schedule, my finances.
Don’t get me wrong, being aware of these things is great to tweak some things in your life and move it in a certain direction. But like with most things in life, they can become an unhealthy obsession - which is funny, because me obsessing with these things covered the real problem I had for a long time.
I was without direction.
Science, as interesting and high as I still hold it, couldn’t tell me about values in life, it couldn’t say anything about what is worthwhile, about what to focus on. Sure I could be fast and efficient, but towards what? I was like somebody who had a Formula 1 race car ready to drive anywhere, but I did not know where to drive to. So by not showing me what’s “positive” in life, I concentrated on evading what’s “negative” and that was evading detriments to my health.
Until then my childhood fascination with unknown sentences and wild shrubs completely got lost in the background of my mind. What I became more and more obsessed with the older I got was numbers. Some numbers should be higher (finance, weight on my benchpress, sleep duration) and some number should be lower (weight on my scale, blood pressure, time spent on social media). I’m condensing many experiences here and at that time it might have not looked as bad, as I portray here, but in retrospective I was losing myself in complexity and it wore down on my mental health. (You see the similarity to the efficient “digitized” worker?)
At many points in time I wondered “How is it, that life is so complex? What world has God created in which I find myself struggling and grabbing onto driftwood all the time?”. The complexity that I admired so much left me utterly unable to navigate my life in a sensible manner. I felt like a ship without navigation or let’s be more precise: with too much navigation. I felt like the guy in the following zen koan:
A japanese zen master, Nan-In, received a university professor who wanted to inquire about Zen.
The master served tea. He filled the cup and kept pouring.
The professor, after some time, couldn’t restrain himself anymore and said: “Stop, nothing more will go in!”
”Like this cup”, the japanese master said, “you are full of your own expectations and opinions. How can I show you Zen, unless you empty your cup?”
In my unholy communion with efficiency and complexity I felt like I was led into the wilderness with promises of great achievements with minimal effort while enjoying great praisal for my gems of knowledge. In the end I found myself in a world that people with less knowledge, in my estimation, could navigate a lot better. My ship was still out at sea and I saw other ships navigating the waters and I envied them.
What is the purpose of knowledge? What good is my knowledge, if it leaves me utterly powerless, hopeless?
Fortunately I found someone who could help me with navigation. She listened to my lamentations about the ultimate meaninglessness of life and my fruitless attempts to continue sailing. When I was done declaring my defeat towards life she said:
That might be true, but you cannot live like that
My self-limiting believes were like an iron plate that was bolted on my head, to keep my spirit in a small and neat space. Her statement was like a crowbar that unbolted the plate, releasing the ghost that was trapped inside. For the first time in my life I became aware of the fact, that my knowledge isn’t a monolithic thing in itself. To be worthy of “my knowledge” it has to enhance my life, be useful, come into relationship with me. I mean let’s look at it from another angle: a piece of knowledge that resides in the mind of a human that ultimately makes this human go miserable and lifeless, what is that? It sounds a lot like a parasite, doesn’t it? What’s a map worth if using it makes you feel horrible and there’s actually no use of it. It sounds like a cursed map, left behind from evil sorcerers that seek to infect the mind of restless wandering people seeking for direction.
Restless is what I felt from early on, no wonder I was vulnerable to such attacks.
It was a simple sentence that nudged me back on track. All the wisdom of a myriad of podcasts and videos, but the simple sentence of a woman that cared for me weighed much much more.
As you might expect I was confronted with the validity of some of my beliefs. Not only did complexity a bad job regarding navigation of my personal life, but also efficiency turned out to be a false promise.
This disillusion shifted what I admired. Now I looked for simplicity regarding my personal life and how it is connected to what is really working while not making you utterly miserable. At the same time I saw that this turning away from complexity was something that is usually punished by those that call themselves upperclass or academics. Simplicity was equated with stupidity.
With the help of symbolism I tried to become aware of basic human experiences and their meaning in life. Matthieu Pageau at multiple occasions emphasized that modern man thinks that he doesn’t understand stuff because it’s too complex, when in reality, these things most of the time are too simple. Think of a zip-bomb: it looks small, but completely decompressed it can halt your computer by overflowing its storage.
Like a paper that has too many notes on it and becomes unreadable, my map of life became unreadable. I was onverwhelmed and I secluded myself and I grew bitter towards my pursuit of complex scientific knowledge.
Rumination
We eat, we digest.
How does what we take into us, become us?
If we do not live by bread alone, we shouldn’t only talk about physical food diets… especially in an age of information overflow.
In the day, we are focused, mostly unified by a single mind and will, governed by a single fire in the sky. In the night, we’re drifting through loose associations, dispersed focus and a firmament veiled by black silk and a myriad of stars and their constellations, like holes in a tent.
Experience goes with retreating from experience.
Eating goes with staying away from eating.
Again, how does what we take into us, become us? How is it done, without losing who we are? It’s foreign to us today, but “how do we eat and not accidentally kill ourselves?” might be among the most important questions of all times.
What the body needs gets extracted, the rest excreeted.
What the mind needs gets weaved into a personal meaningful story, the rest is forgotten.
Meaningful structure is what makes the world exist, on every level of reality - the same way you exist.
Don’t let information overflow drown out your reality
Stories
What is limited to the confines of our own body, isn’t limited by our spirits. When we sit at the campfire at night, multiple conciousnesses can connect and can help digest a collective event. In that way, talking to other people made us aware of the digestive power of the network of conciousnesses - or what usually you would call “culture”.
A quote from Kierkegaard sums it up nicely:
Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.
You might be thinking, that things are obvious in broad daylight, but speaking of what we see in different fractals, that is on different levels of reality, this is not the case here. What I’d suppose is that we (1) do things and after that (2) make sense of them - just like Kierkegaard described. Or let’s keep it like this: it’s not so much a concious act, but a description of how reality actually is. You cannot really escape the fact that "you always make sense of it afterwards.
Look at what people usually do sitting outside at nighttime, when no one instructs them to do something. They remember stories and they tell them to each other. Think of the night sky covered in a multitude of stars and people see patterns in them, they derive names and stories according to their setting. Since they are appearing in regular cycles, they are signs of the times - simple yet accurate signs. They’re like the numbers on your clock, but with much greater implications and here’s why: the constellations tell you about your current position in the cycle of the year. And this is only the beginning. With greater skills you can determine not only time of the year, but even greater cycles. Day and night, spring, summer, autumn and winter, what’s beyond that? Is it time to sow seeds? Is it time to harvest? When to prepare for winter? Don’t lose the bigger picture here: we’re stringing together points to form a coherent whole - wether we string together stars to make zodiacs or we string together words to form sentences or sentences to make stories.
But be aware of this: modern man thinks knowledge equates to power over nature. Imagine in our mental imagery we see the campfire and ancient people talking about the current state of seasons. According to the constellations they say winter is coming. Now imagine a modern man sitting in between them saying “well maybe we can prevent winter from happening” and the rest looking at this guy like he is a madman. But this is the image of modern man and his relationship to knowledge. Not that this form of thinking is bad in itself, it led to housing and heating, but knowledge shouldn’t always be about conquering nature but sometimes about conquering oneself - to come to terms with reality and immutable events, like changing seasons, loss of a loved one and death. But I digress, let’s look at the constellations again.
In this way we’re like a weaver: starting with points, connecting the dots and forming strings, taking strings and making (literal) threads, taking threads and forming stories (learning about weaving and knitting was incredibly helpful to understand this).
That’s what people like to do. And what they really like is, to see to what these things can amount to. Just knit a pullover or something, you cannot believe how a single thread can form a piece of clothing. A seemingly one dimensional thread gets transformed into a two-dimensional potholder and a two-dimensional potholder gets transformed into a three-dimensional pullover. Now imagine a three-dimensional pullover gets turned into a four-dimensional time-spanning body-warming piece of clothing - I’m a little joking, but not that much - these could be our mythologies and legends, that keep our spirits high and willing to go on despite life’s difficulties. Old people still know how to call it, they say it’s “edifying”, or “inspiring”.
Mystery and knowledge
I started to work on this article a couple months ago before I started to seclude myself for a short period of time. Since then, my perception has a little shifted and many of the open questions in this article found their corresponding answers and that is why I decided to add this little chapter to the end.
I guess it might become obvious now but back then it wasn’t. Knowledge and story-telling once were inherently intertwined, but today it isn’t. Facts can be found everywhere over the internet linked to whatever topic one finds interesting. In that way my perception of knowledge was incredibly shrunk down to a small size. Knowledge became just “the process plan of mechanical causality” that is “how thinks work”.
While this particular form of knowledge has jumpstarted our modern society, it’s just a small subset of what knowledge really entails. While our society increasingly builds machines, robots and artifical intelligences, the fact that we are humans is lost somewhere far back in the background. But the more it is lost, the more valuable it becomes to know about it, to the point that it’s like a hidden treasure that no human can even expect to exist. It’s tragicomically complex and simple at the same time:
I forgot that I am human.
As I already suspected weeks ago, the question “what is the purpose of knowledge?” is like chewing on a meat that never runs out and I’m sure it will still be like a companion for a long time.
But for now I’d be more than content to point out, that knowledge is a lot more than “the process plan of mechanical causality”. If I can give you a TL;DR it’s this:
Remember you are a human, made in the image of God.
A highly condensed point, like an incredibly high compressed file that needs time and compute to decompress. A “seed” how it’s called in the bible.
Knowledge is how we see and knowledge is how we stand upright. The way to obtain knowledge is through story-telling, so that it can keep our eyes clear and bright and I backs straight and that our soul is not lying depressed on the ground, but eager to face lifes challenges.
Let me end this by giving you something to chew on from Aleksander Solzhenitsyn:
The meaning of earthly existence lies not, as we have grown used to thinking, in prospering but in the development of the soul.