Replying to LO27767 --
Dear Organlearners
Bill Hancy <WHancy@silosmashers.com> writes:
>It is irrelevant whether the new knowledge is useful
>or not, because in either case, learning takes place.
>As the process of learning unfolds, we are "becoming"
>through "association" to other systems. At some point
>of familiarity, confidence, and comfort, the previously
>unknown knowledge "units" with our known knowledge
>as "being."
Greetings dear Bill,
Your first sentence quoted is on its own already worth a Nobel prize.
99%+ of the students who enroll at our university do so for getting useful
knowledge. The vast majority of them ends up by getting brain washed with
vast amounts of information. They use their very rote learning to wash
their brains.
As I have explained long ago in
"Efficiency and Emergence LO22451."
< www.learning-org.com/99.08/0068.html >
it is impossible to have both an emergence and something useful.
It is, for example, impossible to have both a new born baby who
can also work simultaneously.
The word knowledge comes from the Saxon word "cnawlec". The
"cnaw"=emergence and the "lec"=like. In other words, knowledge means
"emergence-like". That is why we cannot have both the useful and the
knowledge simultaneously. Let us bear in mind that "cnawlec" comes through
authentic learning and not rote learning. Only afterwards we might find
something useful for a knowledge "unit". But it first have to grow up like
the baby also has to grow up.
Perhaps we can also speak of your 'knowledge "units" ' as "knowledge
kernels" or "knowledge monads". I find GN Lewis' concept of a "kernel" in
chemistry (not "nucleus"!) most powerful. It is that part of an atom
(nucleus and inner electrons) which cannot be divided by any chemical
means.
For example, the sodium ion Na+ is the kernel of a sodium atom Na. It is
impossible by chemical means to form a Na++ ion. The kernel Na+ may exist
freely as such in solutions. But the kernel C++++ for a carbon atom C will
never exist freely because it is far too reactive. Both Na as Na+ and C in
its thousands of different compounds are necessary in my body.
It is likewise for my "knowledge kernels". Some operate like Na+ and
others like C++++, but it does not make the one kind less useful than the
other kind.
With care and best wishes
--At de Lange <amdelange@gold.up.ac.za> Snailmail: A M de Lange Gold Fields Computer Centre Faculty of Science - University of Pretoria Pretoria 0001 - Rep of South Africa
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