Welcome to Our times, Today and Tomorrow podcast. If you’re a leader or a thought leader, Generation Z or Millennial, or just interested, this could be the place for you.
In this multipart series about spirituality we’re talking about perceptions and how they influence us spiritually. In this we look at the question, does memorizing facts make us smart?
Listen to the complete podcast. https://dorianscottcole.substack.com/p/does-memorizing-facts-make-us-smart?sd=pf
Image Face with monocle emoji clipart as Noto Color Emoji by Google on Creazilla
In previous podcasts I’ve talked about Stevan Harnad’s cognition research. He is a pioneer in understanding at a very basic level how the brain functions. Briefly, the brain remembers things by creating nodes that become networks of nodes as the brain learns more about a subject.
The brain categorizes basic factual information. It expands and creates categories as needed.
At the higher level of functioning the brain cortex stores conceptual information rather than the hippocampus. Concepts are more abstract in thought and may contain many disparate categories that the brain must consider.
The brain's prefrontal cortex is responsible for the higher-level processes of the human brain, including language, memory, reasoning, thought, learning, decision-making, emotion, intelligence, and personality.
Early on in his research Harnad confronted a basic problem, and then later probably discovered a key to solving it. The problem is called the Chinese Room Argument posed by philosopher John Searle.
It works this way: Someone slips papers with Chinese characters under the door of a locked room. Later the papers come back in an order that makes sense. Does this mean that whoever or whatever arranged the characters to make sense actually understood the meaning of the characters? Perhaps a chart was on the wall with the characters listed in a specific order and the entity in the room simply mimicked that arrangement.
The narrow conclusion of the argument is that programming a digital computer may make it appear to understand language but cannot produce real understanding.
Language use by computers' is quite remarkable. You can have a computer search the Internet for information about something. It can summarize it, and even create an article that sounds like a human wrote it. But does the computer actually understand what it wrote?
Behind the scenes of the computer world are people who program the computers. They provide methods of analysis, language rules, thematic rules, even contextual rules, to accumulate, analyze, and produce narrative. The IBM Watson computer can do it faster than a human being. Blazing fast. But the computer doesn’t really understand, it just does what it’s programmed to do.
This characterizes the problem I’ve addressed many times over the years. That is, information does not convey understanding. This applies to both people and computers. It has to do with the nature of words or symbols.
There is a lot of confusion about knowledge. I’ll use building a home as an example to illustrate this.
In this age when knowledge is widely available to anyone with Internet access, suddenly everyone thinks they are the kings of knowledge. We know everything and no one can tell us anything. But do we know what things actually mean or are we just parrots that repeat what we hear?
We have a lot of confusion about what it means to understand meaning, or to phrase it another way, what does it mean to be wise?
Does overloading ourselves with information make us wise? The term information refers to facts about something that are provided or learned. Information isn’t accompanied by understanding.
For example, we might learn that the planet Saturn is swirling gasses and liquids. Tomorrow, not having the experience of trying to land on Saturn, we will probably forget the information.
In the absence of experience, we do not have any emotion about finding a landing spot. So the information doesn’t stick. So let's say we take the next step to acquire knowledge about Saturn.
Knowledge is facts, information, and skills acquired through experience or education; the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject.
Knowledge doesn’t mean that we understand how to apply the information we have, although skills get us closer. But does having knowledge mean that we are intelligent? Hmm, intelligence. Isn’t that measured by an IQ test? Doesn’t intelligence mean we are really smart?
Intelligence is less about the ability to acquire facts than the ability to use them. From Wikipedia: “Intelligence has been defined in many ways: the capacity for abstraction, logic, understanding, self-awareness, learning, emotional knowledge, reasoning, planning, creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving. More generally, it can be described as the ability to perceive or infer information, and to retain it as knowledge to be applied towards adaptive behaviors within an environment or context.”
Now that we’ve fixed Saturn, we get to the building a home example I promised.
I have a wonderful example of all of this. I learned how to design and build homes. It’s kind of a hobby. It began with learning drafting in high school. I also worked with my brother, who is a contractor, between jobs.
You have to be able to represent a home in precise technical terms. This is so that it can be evaluated by building departments for building codes and reproduced in physical form by carpenters. That’s a form of knowledge and skill.
I also had to learn building codes. Wiring, plumbing, HVAC, structural ability to support weight, proper insulation, materials, lot grading, construction techniques … lots of information to know. These are all about knowledge. But they don’t become skills knowledge until put into use.
Home design is a form of architecture. It takes intelligence which is above the level of knowledge. You have to be able to solve problems and think of ways of doing things that aren’t obvious. However, you have to work within the constraints of building code.
In the earliest homes I designed I relied on an old book of construction techniques. The walls were hollow from the basement to the attic with no stops in them. Without experience and a guide I didn’t realize that this was a recipe for mice, rats, and fires raging out of control because there were no fire stops. While I had some intelligence, I lacked wisdom. I was not wise.
Years later when I finally got a home drawing approved by the building department and began construction, I got a lot wiser from experience. I tried to dig a large basement with a Bobcat, which is a powerful earth mover. It took forever and would hardly make a dent in the very dense hard scrabble layer and limestone layer.
So I got a high loader and used it to dig the rest and it completed very quickly with no trouble. Operating these machines is kind of fun. I have a background with farm equipment which really helps.
I’ve also had the experience of being an excellent leader. We’ll discuss leadership and continuing education in a later podcasts and article. Testing my leadership skills, someone brought some automobile factory workers to help who had stick-built houses. Great! I thought.
They really didn’t like going by the building plan. Their attitude was that they knew best. What they didn’t know was building code. So for three weeks, when I got to the job I had to tear out what they did the day before and redo it. I missed one window header they made too small and flunked an inspection. Not long after that I let them go.
One thing I can tell you from experience with all types of people is that if workers have attitude problems, the wise thing to do is let them go early before they can do any damage, because they will destroy and also destroy the morale of the rest of the team so that they leave.
Experience makes you wise. Wisdom is the quality of having experience, knowledge, and sound judgment. The sound judgment part comes from making mistakes and learning from them.
Actual architects – I highly recommend using them – deal not just with the technical requirements but with the many aesthetic features of a structure. I’m not an architect. But from what I know I have designed buildings for MRI and CT installations. I have also designed another home built partly into a hillside, which was challenging.
Wisdom tells me that rather than building to minimum building code specifications for all soil types, if you don’t want your foundation, concrete walls, and garage floor to break, you should build for the soil type you have. For my location that means using extra steel in the concrete, stronger concrete mixes, and pillars in the walls every fifteen feet.
Sometimes you can’t build for the soil type. I was told the soil beneath the MRI machine would not properly support this incredibly heavy device. We had to make do and use creative adaptations or scrap the project.
For the CT, in the garage below we had to brace so that vibrations wouldn’t affect the CT. Some days on construction projects you have to design on the spot from your knowledge and experience.
Wisdom also told me that all the building calculations I had learned for building for loads, most of which were in tables, didn’t prepare me for two roof lines coming together over a fifteen foot window. Broken glass anyone? Wisdom advised me to get an expert to do the calculation to provide the support I needed.
Anyone can pound nails into boards, but do they know the type, size, and quantity of nails to use? Nailing boards together doesn't necessarily mean they can design and build a house. It takes information, knowledge, math skills, intelligence, and wisdom to get a satisfactory result.
I keep thinking my days of designing and construction are over. I’m a communicator, not an architect. But I’m doing it again for another project. And someone recently contacted me about a basement they were remodeling and partially finished.
I had to tell them the bad news: Tear it all out and then do it properly using treated lumber on the concrete, below grade firewall, don't run the drywall to the concrete floor because it will draw moisture and mold, and put in fire stop. I recently tore out my basement because the person who built it in did everything wrong and it caused numerous problems. Argh!
Now let’s have a look at resolving the Chinese Room Argument
In my opinion Harnad’s research got to the root of the problem for the Chinese Room Argument. He found that label strength depends on its emotional strength and other factors.
Computers don’t have emotions. They don't have experience and feel. They have knowledge from others and a certain type of intelligence and certain intelligence-related skills. But intelligence is less about the ability to acquire facts than the ability to use them.
Computers don’t have the ability for abstract thought and they currently don’t have self-awareness, creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving ability. They don’t understand the meaning of information nor can they use it.
People, on the other hand, experience and have emotions and can use the resulting intelligence and wisdom they have.
A computer today is capable of assembling Chinese characters together to make something that makes sense. But the actual meaning and the ability to use the information are beyond the computer. So there is the test for intelligence and wisdom that is a human characteristic. It’s because computers lack a prefrontal cortex and self-awareness.
Briefly let’s look at an interesting example of what can inform computers.
Princeton University has a wonderful and free lexical database called WordNet®. It groups nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs into sets of cognitive synonyms (synsets), each expressing a distinct concept. Synsets are interlinked by conceptual-semantic and lexical relations. It groups words with similar meanings together.
In some ways Wordnet may resemble neural networks in the brain and computers. It’s very advanced in that it has conceptual categories. Computers have difficulty understanding concepts. Wordnet has been around for at least a couple of decades. In some ways this might be the beginning of the basis for a computer prefrontal cortex.
Where will artificial intelligence take us? Who knows!
Wordnet is a registered copyright. Citations for Wordnet are in the article that accompanies this podcast.
What does all of this mean to me?
There is a tremendous amount of knowledge on the Internet and few filters to tell us whether we’re looking at information that may or may not be true. I’m aware that Google is trying to identify authoritative Website information but that’s a tall order.
There are people on the Internet with authoritative backgrounds who love to spread misinformation. Perhaps Google can find a consensus of information to determine fact from fiction and eliminate fiction.
We’re currently not sure if the information we find on the Internet is simply information that can be twisted by those who are not wise into all kinds of things that seem to make sense, like in the Chinese Room Argument. Or are we looking at knowledge that lacks the skill needed to apply it.
An example of information is studies. People release studies very early in their investigation and really shouldn't. Generally these early studies are correlation studies that show the occurrence of two things. But they don’t establish a causal relationship so we don’t know if the presence of one thing, such as sugar, causes another thing such as diabetes.
What we now know is that sugar, a carbohydrate, can be part of the disease development process. It can make diabetes worse and maybe cause an earlier onset, but most people who become diabetic will do so anyway if they aren't careful.
Diabetes is caused by insulin resistance. Your muscles, fat and liver don’t respond as they should to insulin. A family history of type 2 diabetes, Obesity (being significantly overweight and belly fat), an inactive lifestyle, and a diet high in carbohydrates, and high cortisol level are considered risk factors for insulin resistance. We don’t have a filter that tells us true and false about information we find on diabetes. And don’t take my explanation – ask your doctor.
Another example of information we would have difficulty identifying as true or false is information about a virus. It might be described as a zombie that eats brains. But can the virus pass through the blood brain barrier to do this, or is someone not wise telling us that it can eat brains like a zombie? Is this person just trying to spread fear or look wise? Or do they actually know? There is no filter to tell us what to do.
Someone with intelligence might say that the virus can’t pass through the blood brain barrier. But are they correct? There is no filter to tell us what's true, partially true, or false.
Someone with wisdom that comes from experience, critical thinking, and problem solving, might inform us that it is possible for this virus to pass through the blood brain barrier. It might happen because the person takes certain chemicals that are solvents that open the passage. Or it might happen because of receptors.
As in my home building example, wisdom comes from experience. An experienced builder understands that using a high loader to dig saves time and money. An experienced builder knows to build for the type of soil, not the minimum standards in the building code.
This is so concrete doesn’t break and leak and collapse. An experienced builder knows how to solve difficult problems as they occur. Experienced builders save time and money by not using people with attitude problems.
Understanding the difference between information, knowledge, intelligence, and wisdom can save people from a huge number of problems.
In the next podcast we’ll step away from the basic brain research level of Harnad and other researchers and step into the world of experience with symbols and cognition. We’ll also look at the intriguing idea of whether we can speak things into existence.
References for this podcast are in the article that accompanies this podcast.
Reference
WordNet® is a registered tradename. George A. Miller (1995).
Wordnet citation:
WordNet: A Lexical Database for English.
Communications of the ACM Vol. 38, No. 11: 39-41.
Christiane Fellbaum (1998, ed.) WordNet: An Electronic Lexical Database. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
WordNet: An Electronic Lexical Database (citation above) is available from MIT Press.