A New Kind of Dualism: Information and Knowledge
written in 2024 for philosophy of media and culture under Glenn McLaren at Swinburne University
Do men know nothing? I know many men who, in common things, are not to be deceived; who trust no moonshine, who count their money correctly, and know how to invest it; who are said to be prudent and knowing, who yet will stand at a desk the greater part of their lives, as cashiers in banks, and glimmer and rust and finally go out there. If they know anything, what under the sun do they do that for? Do they know what bread is? or what it is for? Do they know what life is? (Thoreau 1848)
Here, Henry David Thoreau (1848) meditates on the nature of knowing. Not an analytical argument as to whatever equivocation lay between knowing how to count money and knowing what life is, but instead a wielding of descriptive language to evoke a feeling for this difference. It does bring to mind something more philosophically bound, like the debate between Thomas Hobbes’ materialism and René Descartes’ dualism (Joel Walmsley 2016). Whilst both were a pursuit towards reductionism–perfect reasoning distilled down into symbols and formal rules that lead to truth–they differed conceptually as to how exactly symbols possessed meaning. In the end, Descartes reasoned himself into the existence of God, and Hobbes to the contrary (6-11). God was the logical answer to Descartes as to how anything could possess meaning (6-11). These two opposing views have never been reconciled; their estrangement so central to human musing that writers like Thoreau contrast the two opposing paradigms of reason and meaning through archetypal narrative.
In citing prominent figures who wielded synonyms for our fundamental big questions, the point of this essay surfaces; it will outline the human-made advancements in information technology, and the proliferation of the information induced. It will argue that human interaction with information as externalities has ultimately shaped us, and that our being shaped by information has led us to equivocate information as knowledge. Whilst information technologies have enabled us to catalogue and observe its change over time, it also enables us to trace our sustained pursuit of knowledge in like fashion. It then argues that information alone is not sufficient in answering these questions, and is in fact obfuscating our human experience of meaning through its dilution of knowledge. Remaining near to this amorphous, but consistently documented experience of meaning, will be central to remaining human in the midst of our technological advancements.
Grounds For Equivocation
As Noah Lemos (2007) elucidates in their Introduction to the Theory of Knowledge, the concept of Truth is divisive; past, present, and most probably future. No one person can claim a firmer grasp on the concept than any other, such is its nature, but we can invoke the knowledge of the greats to seek some truth amongst their seeking of the truth. Epistemology is a seminal branch of philosophy that concerns such knoweledge: What is it? How do we come to know something as true? What distinguishes knowledge from information? (1). Although a conclusive understanding of knowledge has always been the principal pursuit, such questions have inspired differing conceptions as to the nature of knowledge, so much so that we seem to no longer seek any definition of the concept in the Aristotelian sense; ceasing to go straight to source when defining its essential conditions. It was Plato who originally said that knowledge was justified true belief, but after protracted debate, the closest thing we have to an explanation is that justified true belief is viciously regressive, and perhaps justified true beliefs aren’t even knowledge in the end (5). But we cannot claim to be any nearer to the truth than Plato, despite a subsequent two thousand years of accumulated information to aid in our understanding of the concept; why is it that knowledge cannot be defined by the field defined by it? Perhaps, our excess of information is to blame for this dilution of knowledge.
This excess of information is a profound achievement of the human race, in that its emergence owes to a significant technological advancement that is the written word. Some would argue that writing stands as the single most consequential form of information technology that humanity has brought to bear. Writing, as Walter Ong (1982) argues in Orality & Literacy, catalysed a restructuring of human consciousness, allowing for the objectification of words, and the reflexive capacity of thought; enabling more abstract, higher-order thinking (78). We owe our very nature and its capacities to writing. Due to this objectification of memory through the physical location of the word in both time and space, humans have recorded their ideas, detached themselves from the work, and returned once again. These works as objects can then be shared, read, analysed and expanded, expounding upon what previously could only ever be thought.
This transference between information and knowledge marks an important distinction between the two terms. It is commonly conceived that information is externalised knowledge or facts, and that knowledge is information internalised, interpreted and applied (Hobart and Schiffman 1998, 2-4; Svendsen 2005, 29). Given that our conceptualisation of information is still relatively new, the sharp distinction between the two terms is only evident in hindsight. Thus, prior to our conceptualisation of information, there likely existed a long-standing equivocation between the two terms, as we had no better label to refer to the contents of the written word other than knowledge. Still, reflexive figures like Plato and Thoreau intuitively spoke to the difference, their seemingly innate ponderings now inseparable from the written word, since our language and way of thinking has been shaped by it. Regardless, just because the written word can enable us to formulate these questions, that does not necessarily mean that it can answer them in kind.
You Say You Want A Revolution?
One leap forward in creating information came by way of another technological revolution; the printing press (Eisenstein 1986, 186). This technology harnessed the power of the written word and upscaled its effects by a great order of magnitude. For this reason, some scholars argue that the printing press catalysed profound societal transformations, such as the discipline of politics and the advent of modern science (Eisenstein 1986; Habermas 1989). Though, such profound power is not ascribed to the printing press alone, with scholars returning to the written word that the technology simply wields (Ong 1989, 114). Through the written record, it is evident that the big questions remained at the forefront of ponderance consistently across time, though the means to answer them underwent seismic change. Sustained focus on mathematical and scientific advancements as the logical course of human progression engendered hope that we could escape the circularity of debate, with concerted attempts to reduce words and their inherent subjectivity down to objective symbols with a singular meaning (like numbers). As a result of the printing press, humanity surmounted a scarcity of information and literacy (Eisenstein 1986, 188). Discourse followed, with academic proliferation and scientific discoveries to show for it. It was by this process that technological advancement became the principal aim of the species, rocketing men through the firmament to the lunar surface, and reckoning our development as a species against one technological revolution to the next; from the written word, to the printing press, and finally to the computer (Hobart and Schiffman 1998). Thus, our newfound thirst for information eclipsed our age-long search for knowledge.
The advent of the computer enabled us to remain true to this trajectory, quickly distilling human knowledge into information (Hobart and Schiffman 1998). Now, as quickly as we create new information, it is more permanently, completely and accessibly stored as information for our instantaneous use. Information is being developed at a rate that far outmatches the pace at which we naturally develop meaning, and by extension develop knowledge. This information revolution is marked by excess. But perhaps humans are simply fallible machines, entirely unlike computers in that they are not algorithmic; algorithmic to mean a computational formula that takes an input and always produces the correct output based on the computational rules it’s been programmed to follow (Hobart and Schiffman 1998, 161). And if something resembling reductionism is to deliver us from a relativist peril as Descartes once hoped, then perhaps our newest revolution, Artificial Intelligence and its subsidiary machine learning, can reconcile that fallibility by having no other directive than to follow these computational rules to cold perfection.
It’s Not Binary
Since the computer serves as the terminus for all the information that we’ve managed to impart upon it, it stands as a remarkable achievement in scaling Descartes hopes and dreams of eliminating subjectivity to a truly unprecedented degree. Therefore, if we cannot manage to escape vicious circularity, we should in theory be able to defer to our information processing successors. But one cursory exchange with an A.I. Chatbot reveals, based on its information processing rules, that the answer to what is truth is nothing more substantive than a shallow list of competing theories.
Following the logic established thus far, it seems that a lack of information was never really an existential problem in the end. Further, there remains those among us who doubt whether pure language learning and algorithmic responding constitutes anything approximating the creation and possession of true knowledge, at least as we conceive of it in our working theories. The general tenor of this doubt is keenly articulated by Noam Chomsky, “Concern because we fear that the most popular and fashionable strain of A.I. — machine learning — will degrade our science and debase our ethics by incorporating into our technology a fundamentally flawed conception of language and knowledge.” (Watumull, Chomsky, and Roberts, 2023). Whilst information technology has fundamentally altered us as human beings, shaping our societies and defining their cultural norms, we can at this point conclude that despite technological advancement being central to our collective identity as a progress-bent species, we still stand separate from the technology itself as something notably distinct; human.
In that way, it can be argued that technological advancement may well have been the correct course in fulfilling our collective search for meaning, just not in the ways that we hoped for ourselves. Even if this course has only served to instruct us that we are not comparable to technology, then at least it has produced answers; our bodies are not merely organic machines, nor machines merely synthetic bodies; that our thoughts and feelings are not algorithmic, nor are algorithms thinking or feeling. It seems that the term revolution really does imply its circular origins. One turn of the wheel later, from the printing press to the computer, and we find ourselves returning right back to the Descartes-Hobbes divide. Descartes may have devised an entire branch of mathematics, but he could never escape that his mind had to impart what the symbol represented in order to implement it (Walmsley 2016). Ultimately, he could not escape meaning. And so it seems fitting, in the revolutionary fashion, to cite the original concerns over the written word that Plato articulated in the Phaedrus (1997);
“[Writing] will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practise using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own. You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding; you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality. Your invention will enable them to hear many things without being properly taught, and they will imagine that they have come to know much while for the most part they will know nothing. And they will be difficult to get along with, since they will merely appear to be wise instead of really being so.” (551-552)
Even if writing does serve as a tool for reminding rather than one for remembering, its containment within information technologies enables the form to endure as a guidestone to our humanity; a marker of our newfound purpose to collectively tend to the preservation of knowledge. And perhaps so much has changed since Plato first warned of the consequences of writing that we can never truly know what being human meant to him. Perhaps our humanity is simply of a different kind now. Yet essential, big existential questions remain one and the same. Thus to remain human, it seems we must cease equivocating between information and knowledge, lest we lose all semblance of meaning in the sea of information that we ourselves created.
References
Eisenstein, Elizabeth. 1986. “On revolution and the printed word.” In Revolution in History, edited by Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich. N.p.: Cambridge University Press.
Habermas, Jurgen. 1989. The structural transformation of the public sphere : an inquiry into a category of bourgeois society. Translated by Thomas Burger. N.p.: MIT Press.
Hobart, Michael E., and Zachary S. Schiffman. 1998. Information Ages: Literacy, Numeracy, and the Computer Revolution. N.p.: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Hutchinson, D. S., and Plato. 1997. Plato: Complete works. Edited by John M. Cooper and D. S. Hutchinson. N.p.: Oregan Publishing.
Lemos, Noah. 2007. An Introduction to the Theory of Knowledge. N.p.: Cambridge University Press.
Ong, Walter. 1989. Orality and literacy : the technologizing of the word. N.p.: Methuen & Co Ltd.
Svendsen, Lars. 2005. A philosophy of boredom. N.p.: Reaktion Books.
Thoreau, Henry D. 1848. “Letters to Harrison Blake.” https://monadnock.net/thoreau/blake-1.html.
Walmsley, J. 2016. Mind and Machine. N.p.: Palgrave Macmillan UK.
Watumull, Jeffrey, Noam Chomsky, and Ian Roberts. 2023. “Opinion | Noam Chomsky: The False Promise of ChatGPT (Published 2023).” The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/08/opinion/noam-chomsky-chatgpt-ai.html.