Replying to LO30580 --
Dear LO'ers,
What do you think of this dialogue?
Shall we continue, or does it loose its lustre and does the outcomes not
matter for you? I myself hesitate, I realy don't know. If some body talks
about information or about knowledge, I try to understand the contents of
what that person has in mind, and after having created some insights of
these contents, the words used become less important for me.
But as At wrote:
> One thought keeps on pestering me -- the relationship between knowledge
> and information must be very close to cause so much confusion what each
> amounts to.
and
> Yet we can learn something very important from the futility to define
> knowledge (or information). It must be very complex to allow for so
> many different definitions of it. I think that we should always bear this
> in mind and not try to simplify things as you have warned.
What I have understood from the latest discussions on this subject is
that:
knowledge is more than information
Suppose that information and knowledge is composed of the same building
blocks. If this is so, the discussion is reduced to a simple matter,
because then the focus should be on the point where the gradually rising
graph leeves the area of information and enters the knowledge area. It is
like the line in a graph that passes the zero-origin which means that
there is a negative and a positive line segment. We could look also to
another analogue. The building blocks are for instance like sand grains.
One sand dune might still fall in the area of information, whereas the
Sahara desert is in the knowledge area. How many building blocks should
information contain, before it becomes knowledge.
But as At has stipulated, the subject and distinction is more complex.
Complexity means that we should look to interrelations and connections.
The more complex, the more relations. The road maps of today are more
complex than (the maps of, say, two hundred years ago. (btw this reminds
me of still another road map, presented as a gift to the Middle East, but
that is something else ;-( ).
Has the difference between knowledge and information something to do with
structure and connections? I believe so. In fact, that was one of the
aspects that I had in mind in my previous contribution : wholeness.
> For example, wholeness is one of the 7Es. As for myself, i can definitely
> say that my knowledge has much more wholeness than the parcels of
> information which i had to digest. But i worked hard to increase this
> wholeness of my knowledge since an insight which i got in 1964 while
> studying physical chemistry. Furthermore, as a teacher i tried to
> encourage
> also my students to increase the wholeness of their knowledge. But this
> did not happen as frequently as i wish it would. Some students just could
> not understand why their knowledge had to have more wholeness.
What is this thing At is talking about? I think that the crux of wholeness
is that as much as possible connections should be activated and opened. It
means also that if an extra piece of data is consuumed by the mind, that
this piece of data should be linked to all that what is already present in
the mind; it thus receives its place somewhere in the mind. That is what I
tried to explain as the multi-dimensional 'space' of knowledge. One is
able to consttruct a table of say, 50 x 50. Fifty pieces of data on the
horizontal and vertical axis. Each combination is a connection in the
mind. This is a 2D construction. It is like the distance table of big
cities in your country. Horizontally and vertically 50 cities and in the
cells the distance between two cities in miles or kilometres (preferably
the latter). If we have such table, it is possible to reconstruct a map of
the country with the 50 cities on the right places located. Butt I warn
you! This is only possible, because the earth's surface, and thus your
country is a virtually a flat plane, 2D. If in such distance table the
distances tell something about the closeness of relatedness (for instance
'knowledge' and ' information' is closely related in this discussion,
hence the distance between the two is small), then it becomes a different
story. If we add to the two items in our mind - information and knowledge
- a third item 'paper', then this new element will be closer to
information then knowledge. Now we add some other items: human, computer,
ink. What are the distances of these three new items to the three already
existing items in the brain? The distance of item 'ink' is closer to paper
and computer than to human, or knowledge. And so on. But surprise: it is
not anymore possible to construct a 2D map of these six items. Even in 3D
it is not possible. And that is the maximum we could represent. With a lot
of cartographic tricks we might be able to make a 2D projection of these
six items, but it will certainly not represent how things are related. In
fact we need a 5D, or 6D space to give all six items its right place. You
could imagine that our minds contain much more items than six. We need
thus also a much moreD space for storage.
And what makes things even more complex is that our mind is able to mix
scales in the same map. Some parts could be detailed, others give an
overview. That is another one of the 7E's of At.
What I am curious is, if some of you think that information is in essence
a static ('dead') thing and knowledge perhaps alive, moving, transforming,
etc. (another essentiality of At).
Information is in my mind a 'slice' or 'scan', or 'projection' of the
multidimensional space of knowledge. And since we can notice only a
limited number of dimensions (in music it is more than 3, but still
limited), information is less complex (because of less
relations/connections) than knowledge.
Leo Minnigh
--"leo minnigh" <minnigh@dds.nl>
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