What does anybody know and how do they know it?

What do you know? I would hope you know your name, where you are, the person that raised you, where you live, and something or another related to your daily life such as information pertinent to your profession, hobbies, or belief system. Theres also the areas where knowledge gets... murky at best for many people. This is evident in the hesitation that is socially expected with questions like Fundementally, who are you? What to you believe about the nature of reality? and the big one What is the purpose the purpose of your life? These are only a few of the peices of knowlege that each and every person must confront at some point or another. If you were to ask me, these questions and all the questions in between are fundemental to the process of being human, from the most basic awareness of ourselvs and our sorroundings to the unanswerable questions that we are at some point or another drawn to grapple with as part of the human condition. My big question is, How do we know the answer to any of them? What does it mean to know? What is the point of knowing?

One could easily say for the first few questions (what is your name, where do you live etc..) are easily answerable. In the case of the name its what people have called us since very shortly after birth, or in other cases is a name we chose for ourselvs or were given later on. It is the most fundemental aspect of idenitiy, the most fundemental thing to know, on par with cogniscence of your own existance, but how do we know it? (Now I would like to make a disclaimer. I am a silly little undergrad at a silly little university, and sure...I take lots of neuroscience classes but I am far from an expert. If there are any real-deal neuroscientists out there or even individuals of any description who see an innacuracy or oversimlification in what I am about to expound please please correct my mistakes. ) I find many of the explanations of the nature of encoded memory and the process of learning provided by my professors uncompelling. Someone could say that our memories are physically represented in the brain as the strengthening of certain neural pathways in specific brain regions, or they could tell you that memories are represneted by changes in rate of synaptic transmission. I honestly don't buy it. It is hard for me to accept that the vast stores of sights, sounds, tastes, smells, textures, meanings, feelings, and experiences we all cary can be represtented with such... for lack of a better word... simple machinery. This is not to say that there is anything simple about the physiological workings of the brain, but based on the current and available data / eplanations the machinery alone does not seem to me, and my humble opinion, to be caipable of the task of storing and vivdly retriving such vast quantities of information. I'm not saying those ideas are flat out wrong, but I doubt thats the whole picture. When diving into questions such as What is a memory made of? and How does a person aquire and store knowledge? neuroscience can provide some interesting insights, but I believe this question to be better suited to philosphers and epistemologists. Even so, I have not found a purely epistemological answer to this question that I find fully satisfactory either. Regardless, the question of how you know your name is the easiest one of those I've begun probing in this post. We could chalk that one up to repition, constant exposure, conditioning what have you, but when it comes to questions like What do you believe about the nature of reality? things get a little more hairy. Now before you come for me saying believeing is not the same as knowing, I acknowldge and wholheartedly agree with that sentiment, but knowing that you have a belief and knowing what that belief is is a very tricky thing to know. I mean just look at the whopping number of religious agnostics there are in the world.

There are also other questions about the knowledge that I fail to find a satisfactory awnser to. What does it mean practically to know something? For basic tasks like tieing your shoes (which I guess Isnt so basic because I will admit that at 22 I still struggle with it Viva Los Birkenstocks!) it means being able to execute a function or task in a precise way without error. Perhaps you could call it the having of a strong metal representation of the thing or task at hand and being able to translate that mental representation into outward action. However, this is not a compelling difinition. For example, I know how to ride a bike, but iIcannot say I have a mental representation of the micro muscle movement and posistioning of weight that is required not to fall off a bicycle I just sit and pedal and steer and brake once and a while. Badda bing badda boom. I don't know how I do it I just do.

That raises the question that any musiscian could answer, do our bodies remember without our minds conciously remebering? I would argue yes, muscle memory is totally a thing, I have had the experiece of wanting to play a song I havn't played in a long time and I don't conciously remember how to play it, but hand me a guitar and tell me to play that song and out it comes. Whether or not this knowledge should be attributed to the brain is not a subject I don't feel the deire to delve in to at this moment. Thus it is clear to me based on my experiences it is absolutely possible to know something without having a mental representation of it. If metal representation is not the criteria for knowledge what is? You could argue on the baisis of my previous example that knowlege does not exist without action, you have to be able to *do* something with what you know or you do not know it. This answer is also unsatisfactory. For example I know a great many things about my great grandmother. My mother esteemed her very highly and told me countless stories about her. When my maternal grandmother passed my mother found amongst her belongings a chest full of love letters my great grandmother sent my great grandfather, personal correspondences between herself and her friends, and best of all her diaries. I read through these matierials which aforded me further knowledge about my great grandmother, her attitudes, the way she thought, her quirks, her flaws, her desires, her habbits, preoocupations, hobbies, feelings and countless other tidbits. Yet, I cannot act on this knowledge. Knowing about my great grandmother does not correspond to any action or procedure, it is simply mental representation of a woman who had left the earthly plane long before I eneterd it (at least in this particular bodily form OH NO TANGENT ALERT, I digress.) . Perhaps one could argue that knowledge is a bit of both or one or the other, again I cannot accept this answer. Here is another tedious example to prove my point. (Disclaimer, I am talking about the way I experience things in my life and the way I conceptualize things for myself and I am making absolutely no judgements, suppositions, or criticisms of anybody else's experience, knowledge, or beliefs in this arena. You do you boo.) I know (not believe) that in the version of reality I experience there is a divine intelegence, cosmic being, goddex(es), universe, universal source / energy, higher power, whatever you want to call it. My personal experience has brought me to know such a phenomena to exisit, yet this knowlege is not directly resultant in my caipability to preform a certain function or procedure, AND I make a point of having no mental representations of this phenomena. I believe strongly that any mental or doctrinal representation of this phenomena would nesecarily be flawed because I know it is beyond human and liguistic caipabilities to accurately and fully describe and attempting such a solid representation dances dangerously close to arrogance. Yet, I fully know that such a phenomena exists, yet I cannot and will not attempt to describe it and it does not result in the execution of a prescribed fuction. SO what does it mean to know?

Now if you have gotten this far though the gnarled mess of thoughts and ideas this is this post, I sincerely thank you for taking the time to play with these concepts with me. I have one more question to explore. What is the point of knowing anything? I mean the answer seems obvious, if you didn't know anything, then you wouldn't be able to do anything, make anything, hell, you wouldnt even be able to walk. Granted some funtional knowledge is important for corporeal existance. If I don't intend on starving to death it's very helpful if I know how to walk to the fridge, grasp the handel with your hand, and chew and swallow the food you just selected. Let us for the moment distance ourselvs from instinctual knowledge like that which I just laid out and instead direct our attention to conceptual and abstract knowledge for the sake of argument. What is the point of knowing anything about yourself insofar as identity is concerned, what is the point of knowing personal and global histories, what is the point of abstract knowledge like that which I detailed earlier in my views of the supernatural? I like to think the point of this knowledge is to guide us, give us a roadmap though life, and inform our actions by making us aware of their ramifications. For the sake of philosphing with no clear destination, let us picture for a moment what it would be to live in a world where theree was no knowledge or certainty about anything at all.

In this hypothetical world nobody knows who they are, were they came from, what they believe, or how any of the machinery of existace works. In this world people wake up in the morning without any ideas about what their day is going to be like because they have no knowlege of the patterns upon which we (in this non hypothetical world) base our expectations. People in this world have basic instictual knowledge, they know to eat when they are hungry, they know that fruit is probably going to successfully satisfy their hunger and that a rock will not. They know that they can move around their envirnment by walking, and they know that fire will cause them pain if they get to close so on and so forth, but they possess no knowledge beyond that basic instinctual point. However, in this world the people are not intellectualy any less developed than you and I are. I would hypothesize that this would be a world where people experienced their reality as one of endless possibilities. If they had no knowlege about what was not possible, of what tragedies could befall them at any time, would they not live in a constat state of possibility? If people did not know anything about themselvs would they not the be completely open to any and all ideas and experiences as there would be no internal or external taboos. If people had no knowledge life would be incredibly frightening and unpredictable. When the sun set in the evening some would worry if it would ever return.

I leave the question to you now. Knowledge, what is it? Is it worth it?

Introductions

Welcome to my brain! You can call me Rosa Moglyeon. I am starting this blog with the primary goal of cleansing my mind of the million and one musings that rattle around in there day in and day out. I fancy myself a philosopher some days day and fool on others. In reality I probably fall somehwere in between. Dispite my distaste for identies I feel it may be conducive to our mutual understanding if I were to present a few (which I still hold dispite my best efforts). I'm a SF kid (Avenues Girl all the way) but I moved around a lot. Lived in India, Mexico and few places around the US. I am chicana/korean, call it mexicasian if you like. I am in university studying to be a therapist, and when I have a free moment or can tolerate acedmia for not a second longer I turn to art, music, writing, and the comparitively informal study of biology, genetics, philosophy, history and religion. I would describe myself spirtually as a non-denominational gnostic, politically as an anarcho-socialist, ocupationally as a teacher, and honestly as a seeker of some unknown source. I am agender, but language doesn't bother me in this context and I present myself in a feminine way so she/her is fine. I am bisexual and happily married to a wonderful man.

The sun is setting, its like the very planet is playing me off stage... alas, I have the unfortunate tendency to talk about myself to much and the compunding unfortunate tendency toward verbosity.

If you should find yourself here, reading through the ideas I cast out into the internet ocean like a message in a bottle, feel free to introduce yourself, I would be honored to know you.