knowledge
Posted at 2015-09-04.
Being human is knowing. Being human is conciousnes, will to know and learn. Any other race that knows about the world in the same way we do, for most people, would deserve the same treatment as a regular human.
In which way do we know? We find patterns in the world. We see trees, and there are many and they all look alike. We call them 'trees', and we learn to find the rules that bind them together. From their characteristics, we find the common consecuences, the "behaviour" and the workings. This knowledge allows us to find uses for everything. This is what made us human in the first place, the basis of our evolution: knowledge.
This kind of knowledge is based on patterns, on repetition:
- A tree is similar to itself some time ago. Thus, it will behave as it did in the past. Tradition.
- A tree is similar to another. Thus, it will behave as the other does. Generalization.
- A tree is similar to a human, in some ways. Thus, in some ways, it will behave as a human does (it will grow, reproduce, die...). Metaphor.
The last one, metaphor, is the more abstract of the three. The abstract patterns that we find in artistic metaphor, for example, are not even useful in a practical way anymore. They are pure knowledge, ideas that change our perspective. They are there only to learn more, to build a more complete scheme of the world.
Knowledge looking for knowledge.