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Draft of My Paper “On the Origin of Knowledge”

2/27/2025

12 Comments

 
Hi all! It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything here but that’s because I’ve been hard at work on a major project. Over the last few years, I’ve been preparing my epistemology thoughts for a peer-reviewed publication. That process has gone through several starts and stops but I’m finally ready to share a rough draft. My proposals are quite ambitious (to say the least) so I’m starting by asking for feedback here before I proceed with the final submission. I have a journal lined up already (This View of Life), but if you have other suggestions for where this would be appropriate, I would very much appreciate it.
 
I literally have about 200 pages of quotes and citations ready for the final paper, but I won’t use most of that. In order to elicit feedback as painlessly as possible, I’ve compressed the arguments into a presentation deck accompanied by about 1300 words below. That’s obviously not in the form of an academic paper yet, but I trust this will be clear enough for you to be able to comment on any weak points or clarifications that you think need to be addressed for the final paper. Thank you in advance for any thoughts you can share! Here goes:
 
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On the Origin of Knowledge*

​In 1900, the young artist Gustav Klimt presented the first of his three “Faculty Paintings”, which he had been commissioned to produce for the Great Hall of the University of Vienna. It was a time of growing confidence in the Austrian-Hungarian empire, the sciences, and the power of reason. However, 
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​“Rather than the anticipated glorifying works, Klimt created mysterious symbolic paintings that, instead of celebrating the triumph of human knowledge, exposed it as powerless. In ‘Philosophy’, a group of naked people drift through a nebulous starry sky, despairing at the reality of their untethered existence.” (Gustav Klimt, p.61)

​This monumental painting, over 4x3 meters in size, was never installed and was later destroyed in a fire in May 1945. All we have left is a black and white photo of the original. But it is still powerful, and in fact captures the present situation of philosophy perfectly.
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Why are we like this? The history of unsolved problems in epistemology makes it clear.

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At the heart of this, is philosophy’s definition of “truth”, which has proven impossible to attain.

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​There are two ways that evolutionary thinking can help with this. First, is thinking in terms of gradualism rather than essentialism.

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Second, is building from the bottom up, rather than using imaginary sky hooks to descend from the top down.

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This gives us a starting point for knowledge as something like a pinpoint of light floating in the complete darkness of a universe that life was ignorant of.

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Living beings slowly learned to navigate their environment using a process we now call cybernetics.

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And so…

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Over time, life develops two “species of thought” in this epistemological world. One is for the realm we can learn about. The other is for the realm where we are totally ignorant.
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And so…

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The field of evolutionary epistemology has identified mechanisms for how knowledge continued to evolve.

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Note that the latest step in this evolution came with the invention of the scientific method. There are many ways this method can be depicted. Here is one example:

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​Reviewing the literature turns up at least 11 more ways that the scientific method has been depicted.

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All of these are actually just extensions and refinements of the original cybernetics loop. Therefore, we could label all knowledge production (including the scientific method) as coming from an epistemological method.

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​Note that the 12 scientific methods identified earlier do map to this very easily. This is important because it helps us understand knowledge as existing along a continuum. So-called “scientific knowledge” or “philosophical knowledge” is related to simpler forms of knowledge.

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With all this talk of methods and loops, it is important to see that we are not merely running in circles! Here is an AI-generated cartoon to help drive that point home.

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​As described in an earlier paper, we raise and lower the credence of our ideas as we discover more and more information about them.

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Our new knowledge is connected to previously generated knowledge. It grows or shrinks with each new turn of the epistemological loop. This turns our 2-dimensional circles into 3-dimensional spirals.

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There is a long history of different truth-seeking disciplines recognizing this and creating hierarchies for their evidence and knowledge.

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Analyzing this history, we see the same pattern emerging over and over. The famous “Photo 51” helped Watson, Crick, and Wilkins win Nobel prizes for their roles in discovering the structure of DNA. That photo showed two crossbeams that determine the size and shape of the double helix. In a similar (though purely metaphorical) fashion, this paper posits that there are two crossbeams that push knowledge spirals outwards.

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​With each iteration of the epistemological loop, it is the quantity and diversity of observations that make for wider and sturdier spirals in our knowledge production.

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This is because “intersubjective views from everywhere” are the closest we can ever get to the “objective view from nowhere” that would be required for full and certain philosophical truth.

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So….

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​We start with an undifferentiated word cloud. (Do not actually read this.)

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Then perform a “functional analysis” on this heap to help make sense of the emerging phenomena of knowledge as it evolves through different hierarchical stages.

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Try to do all of this comprehensively. Tinbergen created his Four Questions for studies of biology, which are mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive because they sit at the four quadrants of a 2x2 matrix where “ultimate vs. proximate” distinctions are located on one axis and “current vs. historical” timescales are on the other axis. Similarly, four questions can be created for studies of knowledge. These lie in the four quadrants made by “objective items vs subjective knowers” on one axis and “current vs. historical” timescales on the other. Answering all of these questions about a piece of knowledge will give you a comprehensive understanding of it.

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After performing such a functional analysis on the word cloud for knowledge collected above, the following hierarchy for knowledge is proposed. Knowledge grows from fragile to robust as the epistemological loops that produce it increase in quantity and diversity. Each piece of knowledge has facts, knowers, processes, and credence associated with it. These progress across five columns based on the knowers — subsystems of an individual, an individual, small niche groups, larger established groups, and globally diverse groups. Each column can only progress so far. The knowledge produced by these groups could also be placed in a hierarchy of quality from A to F. But note there is an overlap between columns as the best knowledge production in small groups transitions to new knowledge production in larger groups.

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Placing all of the terms from the word cloud above into this hierarchy gives us the details we need to more fully understand it and use it for further analysis. (Click here if you want to read the details of this table.)

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There are many points of discussion to be considered from all of this.

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First, some important disclaimers…

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This hierarchy doesn’t apply directly to all forms of culture. However, It can be applied to “knowledge about” the utility of those other items.

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There is an important paradox about power embedded in this view of epistemology.

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This view may also help us understand experts and expertise better.
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We can imagine disseminating this using simplified scorecards for knowledge.

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It may also shed light on another paradox about the perceived quality of knowledge due to its stability or instability.

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It could help with the issues of “fake news”.

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In fact, this evolutionary view can help dissolve all of the knowledge problems of philosophy.

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This brings us back to Klimt’s picture of philosophy. In recent years, researchers have used historical facts and AI analysis to colorize the painting as it may have been originally. The result does not change the meaning of the painting, where its subjects are still floating untethered, surrounded by a universe of ignorance. But it does make things in there more beautiful now. Hopefully, the view presented in this paper on the evolution of knowledge can do the same for us.

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*Now that you have read this post, you can see why I think it is ambitious. The full title of Darwin’s revolutionary book about biology was, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. As a playful ode to this, I’ve been considering the following title for my paper:
 
“On the Origin of Knowledge by Means of Rational Selection or the Survival of Justified Beliefs in the Struggle Towards Truth — How the Universal Acid of Evolutionary Thinking Can Dissolve the Great Epistemological Problems of Knowledge, Scepticism, Relativism, Demarcation, and Disinformation.”
 
That is way more than one mouthful, though, so let me know if you have a better title in mind.

12 Comments
James of Seattle link
2/28/2025 04:19:45 am

I found this short version very readable and interesting. Are you familiar w/ Michael Levin’s work on the intelligence of cells w/o reference to genes or neurons? It might behoove you (yes, I said behoove) to check it out. It doesn’t necessarily change anything you have here but it might color your remarks re: the beginnings of knowledge. Here’s a link to a talk if you’re interested. https://thoughtforms.life/a-talk-on-the-architecture-of-life/

Reply
Ed Gibney link
2/28/2025 01:11:36 pm

Consider me hooved!

Thanks for the light feedback that this was all clear at least. I can't say entirely the same about Levin's presentation but I found it enormously intriguing. I'm really not sure if I've heard him before. If I have, it didn't land. I was thoroughly overwhelmed by the talk, but many of the snippets I could gather — about intelligence, biochemistry, electrical signals, problem solving, and the independence of "selves" at lower and lower levels all the way down — fit my worldview and understanding very well. The last bit about Plato's forms and Occam's razor = mysterianism was dubious at best to me. But, hey, as I said in this post, thinkers need to guess what is "out there" in the dark and then go find out. I think he's seriously barking up the wrong tree with that one, but I'm still going to scroll through the 636 publications on Levin's website to see if I can find something I need to read. His bio-research is vast and I probably need some of it.

Reply
Joseph Carson
2/28/2025 03:31:24 pm

Hi Ed,

thanks for sharing and asking for feedback. It's quite impressive! As I read it, the "mind-body" problem and/or "hard problem of consciousness" came to mind! If there were more knowledge of the source of consciousness/awareness that would, I think, inform our knowledge about the source of "true/truthie" knowledge.

Recently I became aware of the theory that consciousness exists outside of people/other sentient beings and we are just receivers of it. Then i read a paper on consciousness that started from the recent physics claim that spacetime is not fundamental, contrary to what the paper claims is a premise (i.e. spacetime is fundamental) to all existing theories of consciousness, see https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/25/1/129. Perhaps it would be of interest/relevancy to your work on foundations of knowledge.

Reply
Ed Gibney link
3/3/2025 11:12:19 am

Thanks Joe! Glad you found that interesting. I did do a lot of writing about consciousness during the pandemic and that definitely informed my understanding of the evolution of knowledge. I really just mapped what we do have evidence for, though. The source of consciousness is the famous "Hard Problem" that right now we can only speculate about. I have my guesses, but they are just speculative at best. The other theories you shared don't fit with my guesses, but I'll check them out to keep trying to learn about this. As I said in the post above, the more observations and the more diversity the better our knowledge can become. That doesn't mean holding on to things that should be discarded, but in the realm of consciousness that's hard to say right now. Anyway, thanks for chiming in and sharing your thoughts.

Reply
Joseph Carson
3/10/2025 02:55:04 am

"why is there something other than nothing?"

"why is it possible to know anything at all?"

Absent understanding consciousness, there has to be tentativeness in addressing such metaphysical questions. Perhaps space-time is not fundamental, but consciousness is?

Ed Gibney link
3/10/2025 12:35:40 pm

There is definitely tentativeness here. Perhaps consciousness is fundamental. But that is in the realm of pure speculation until someone can figure out a way to test it. What we do have evidence for is that as soon as life emerges in this universe, it starts behaving with the simplest forms of consciouses by moving away from some things and towards other things. Over the course of evolutionary history, there is a clear line of unbroken history where the consciousness gets more sophisticated as the living being does too. So right now I think of consciousness and this space-time physics being tethered together. Neither is "fundamental" as in you can have one without the other. But since consciousness evolves with the structures of the matter, and since non-living things appear to have no consciousness, I'm happy thinking that consciousness is tied to the physical world or even perhaps created along with its processes. That makes sense to me. The philosopher David Chalmers (who coined the term "there hard problem of consciousness") has speculated that perhaps consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe like gravity or electromagnetism. That might make sense to treat consciousness that way. I don't see what "consciousness as more fundamental than physics" gets you in terms of explanation of what we observe.

SelfAwarePatterns link
3/2/2025 06:17:00 pm

Interesting overview.

I tend to think of knowledge as reliable beliefs. Which of course raises the question: what are beliefs? I see them as predictions (or anticipations since "prediction" is sometimes objected to). This seems compatible with what you're describing, with prediction errors serving as the feedback mechanism.

Along those lines, I wonder if you plan to say anything about Baye's theorem, if only to contrast it with what you think is happening with knowledge.

Reply
Ed Gibney link
3/3/2025 12:10:12 pm

Thanks Mike! I think "reliable beliefs" is a fine place to start for thinking about knowledge, but epistemologists are after something more precise. When does a belief actually become reliable? When does "mere opinion" become "justified true belief". That JTB theory of knowledge dates back to Plato and is generally considered the starting point of epistemology. But it has failed over and over. I just hinted at this with my slide listing the titles of all the epistemology problems that have happened, but I'll be clearer about that in my actual paper. I have tons of details about set aside about that.

As for Bayes, yes that definitely plays a role here. But not so much the mathematical theorem as really just the thinking that is behind it. (This is "Baysian reasoning" vs. "Bayesian statistics".) I talked a lot about that in the paper I co-authored for the Winter 2023 Edition of Skeptic magazine:

https://www.evphil.com/blog/the-bayesian-balance

In that article, I also touched on the main epistemological definition of belief (i.e. “what we take to be the case or regard as true”), which comes from Schwitzgebel's entry on "Belief" in the Stanford Encyclopedia.

Reply
SelfAwarePatterns link
3/3/2025 08:04:45 pm

Right, I know my reliable beliefs criteria is broad. And I'm obviously ignoring Gettier and other concerns. Still, for most purposes it seems to work. But I can understand that epistemologists want a much more rigorous a priori answer. Best of luck!

David Good
3/10/2025 03:46:42 pm

Hi Ed

I found this an interesting article and approach. One question that I've been interested in recently is the inherent limitations to our knowledge. These certainly arise in quantum mechanics and complexity theory.

As an example, in his The Primacy of Doubt, the physicist Tim Palmer explains how the atmosphere is a complex system. As a consequence there are fundamental limits to how accurately and how far into the future we can predict the weather. These are limitations not just in our ability to understand and model the atmosphere, but in the nature of the atmosphere as a system. Such inherent uncertainty is also a part of biological systems.

Your approach seems to talk a lot about the limits of what we know, and the process for developing more certain knowledge, but less about the limits of what we can know. Have you given this any thought? I'm wondering where you think it might fit into your approach?

Best wishes
David

Reply
Ed Gibney link
3/12/2025 12:17:08 pm

Hey David — interesting question! No, I can't say I've given a lot of thought to this area. I've spent a lot of time reflecting on philosophy's skeptical arguments for the theoretical limits of knowledge. This convinces me that there limits do eixist *somewhere* and we have to accept that..But I think your question is instead about the actual location of these practical limits. Those limits seem to be everywhere, but I leave it to scientists to continue to push against all of these limits in their explorations. I don't see how we could develop a hard and fast rule to say much about where these practical limits will be. That's kind of the point of having unknown unknowns. Maybe we *will* progress past today's limits, even though they seem fundamental to us right now. I guess that's another point of mine — nothing is truly fundamental, not even my arguments that nothing is fundamental. For now, we just accept that and keep pushing against ignorance.

Reply
David Good
3/18/2025 01:24:33 pm

Hi Ed, thanks for the response. As you suggest, I think it's reasonable that the speific limits of our knowledge are subjects for scientists to investigate, establish and revise as research progresses.
Best wishes
David


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