The Wisdom of Understanding Knowledge

Quite succinct, yes? I certainly think so. ^_^

As a result of one of my usual in-depth discussions with the Scythestone, I ended up revisiting an ideology left untouched and simmering for years within my own head.
I only vaguely remember my sage father trying to explain this to me around my tender teen years, so what has surfaced within my mind is probably not exactly what he intended to pass on to me, but I think it should suffice nonetheless.

Knowledge, understanding, and wisdom. Are you ready?

1) Knowledge: without it, there is nothing else.

Knowledge is also a subset of information. How is this so?

There is information everywhere. The simplest idea it boils down to is to consider each and every subatomic particle in the known and unknown Universe to be a single bit of information, and it easily builds up from there - as computer programs and files are built up using bits, which make up bytes, kilobytes, megabytes, etc. of binary code within the universe defined by computer hardware, so too are all physical things built up from subatomic particles, of which are composed the atoms and thus the molecules that comprise everything within our physical Universe. (As with all analogies, this is not absolute, but it suffices for my purposes here.)

It's not a particularly hard stretch of the imagination, all things considered.

For the religious nuts out there: Information, therefore, is omnipresent, much like God. It would most certainly not be blasphemous, either, to posit that God might even, possibly, be present in that information to some degree. A simple example would be the matter that would have composed Jesus' body - clearly God was present there. You disagree? Try disproving it.

Now that you have an idea of what is represented by information (i.e. everything that exists), knowledge becomes evident as the extent of information that is perceived. What I mean is that, in order for something to be known or perceived, something must exist in order to know/perceive it. Therefore, if the Universe were purely made up of non-sentient matter, all information would still exist, but none of it would be known because nothing would exist to know it. It's an extension of the typical "tree falling in a forest" conundrum - trees could be falling all over the place, but unless and until someone or something is there to observe the falling or to hear the sound made (i.e. the information), it is utterly and absolutely irrelevant since nothing is present to know it.

This, then, is a summary: Knowledge is, at its base, pure information - but it is only a subset of all the information that exists.

2) Understanding - the correlation of knowledge in order to arrive at possible conclusions.

Once you know what you know, of what use is it? You learn how to apply it, or else it would just be "something you know". As any child learning to count can testify - it's exceedingly easy to know that 1+1=2. Understanding why that is true, however, is imperative to being able to extrapolate to 2+2=4, 5+7=12, 9*16=144, and so on and so forth. In this case, without that singular piece of understanding (i.e. the concept of quantities), nothing else based on that knowledge can make sense. One might learn all the numbers and symbols and algorithms in arithmetic, but without correlation of the base concepts of quantity and addition, one can never understand why a particular series of operations always results in a given answer.

In this way, you can see how once the information is known, it can be correlated in order to arrive at understanding.

Encryption in modern communication is an example of where withholding information enables the loss of understanding. A message is encoded by use of a cipher - both of which are coherent, understandable information - to create gibberish, or incoherent information, which can then be communicated. Anyone who does not obtain said cipher can (theoretically) never correlate the gibberish with any other information in order to understand the original message.

Another example, perhaps easier to think about: a woman returning home after work sees her husband running out the door and getting into a car with another woman, who drives off at high speed. In the absence of any other information, she can easily (and therefore most likely will) assume that he is cheating on her. However, since he was in enough of a hurry that he forgot to leave a message, she is lacking some critical piece of information - in this case, that other woman is his sister, and they are both on their way to see their critically ill parent - and therefore she will not have the information available to correlate and arrive at an understanding. Surely this or something similar has been happening since the dawn of human relationships.

Summarizing: Understanding of a given segment of knowledge can only result from the assimilation and correlation of all relevant information.

3) Wisdom - the ability to distinguish what knowledge is relevant to a situation.


Good, so now you know everything. Now what?
Think about that popular TV show, Junkyard Wars. There are heaps upon heaps of scrap lying around, out of which any number of things could be created - the information is there, albeit scrabbled around. What is the first thing each contestant does? Walk around the junkyard, assimilating information (a.k.a. gaining knowledge) and correlating it with the existing knowledge of each piece's function (understanding). The path forward is evident: construct a device that accomplishes the objective.
Sounds simple, yes?
How about no? Let's say, for example, that the objective is to get past a wall. With the wild array of parts available, machines could be constructed to break the wall down, drill through it, tunnel under it, or even perhaps to fly over it. Which path do you choose? The path of least time taken, or the path of highest fuel efficiency, or the path of least distance traveled?
More to the point: pretend you were a competitor in this show. Of what use is your extensive experience with music against the wall? You might make the most killer lasagna in the known Universe, but unless that lasagna can break down brick-and-mortar walls I doubt you'd go far in the competition. Tiger Woods couldn't golf or bone his way past the situation, and even though Tony Hawk would look insanely cool skateboarding around the junkyard, he'd still be on one side of the wall and the objective on the other.
Simply put: Knowledge and understanding will give you the keys to a situation; only wisdom can tell you if it's the right key, and which direction and when to turn it.
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Damn, this took a while. Hope you fellas enjoy.


With love,
Yours truly.

The title of this post is the title of this post.

"That awkward moment when you are trying to get over someone you have never dated [or even asked out]."
Story of my life, eh?

Dear Ms. Smith: Smart, social, and sexy Ms. Smith, you are truly an American dream. I apologize both in retrospect and in advance for all the assholes (and unworthy dweebs such as myself) that you have had to cope with and will probably have to continue to fend off for the rest of your life.
Dear Ms. Paul - that goes for you too, except you're Indian, not American. :-P
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Family meet-up on Easter weekend! Oh yay - good home-cooked Indian food at last, even if only for a short while ... :-)
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If there's any time that I even remotely wished the BOOMing stereotype of Middle-Easterners was true for me, it would be just so that I could get rid of whoever instituted that alumni policy. We get frustrated all the time, but - I'm sure the reader is aware - anger is much different. As someone who rarely gets angry, I really really don't want to be myself right now.
--
That's about it for now. I think.