hard drive to do

The term folk psychology refers to how ordinary people understand and reason about the mind, knowledge, action, and whatever else they think psychology can talk about. In this post, I will sketch out a more-or-less coherent account of folk psychology from where I come: the West Coast of the US circa 2k18. I'll articulate some predictions that this view makes about how people ought to act. Then, I'll provide some scenarios where experience may provide some challenges to the theory I sketched out, and some ways to resolve collisions with reality.


So much orthogonality

Of brains and books


To construct a folk psychology "theory", I'll first collect some sayings about how people's minds work. To do this, I am simply going to search the word "knowledge" on Google images and take statements from text in those images. Let's begin:

There were lots of pictures of brains, books, symbols, lightbulbs, gears, graphs, and combinations thereof.

The hard drive theory of knowledge

We can sketch an account of folk psychology consistent with the list of statements above. To me, the account below doesn't sound out-of-this-world and I think that your average West Coaster wouldn't raise many major objections to it. Tell me if I'm wrong/missing something pls.

Applying knowledge is being able to readily retrieve facts about the world. Facts often take the forms of sentences, which express truths about the world. You can find facts in books. Charts, graphs, pictures, sound and video recordings, are other ways of preserving certain types of knowledge. Knowledge is a thing which may fade away if you don't access it, so it is important to review what you already have and take opportunities to expand it. 
Knowledge can be exchanged, transferred, etc. When you check out a book from the library and "download" its contents into your head, nobody loses anything: you gain knowledge from your hard work, and the book you read is still intact for the next person that wants that knowledge (provided you turn it in). If you write a book, you can dump some of the knowledge from your brain onto paper for somebody else to download to their brain later. 
By itself, however, knowledge is not of much use. We must apply knowledge. Nerds know lots of facts, but don't know how to apply it. On the other hand, there are clever people that don't know many facts, but are very clever using the knowledge they do have to do a lot. In this way, knowledge is a tool like a hammer or a car.

I call this the "hard drive theory of knowledge" because it sounds like knowledge is a bunch of files stored on a computer which you can access and use to do real work.

Source: http://selfsustain.com/blog/psychological-operating-system/hard-drive-brain-2/

Info plz

Taking the hard drive theory of knowledge as a starting point for understanding the world, how do we act intelligently?

First let me add a couple more axioms to the hard drive theory:

Okay, back to talking about how to act smart.

Given the near unlimited storage of the brain, its beneficial to download all sorts of things into the brain. A random fact about Switzerland here, how to make kimchi from scratch there, the three most important ukulele chords... Of course, to know a lot about any particular domain (e.g. your field of expertise) you must have many facts related to that. So, before learning random trivia, do download the things into your brain you'll be required to retrieve.

If you aren't downloading new infos into your brain on a daily basis (e.g. by reading, studying), you're giving up opportunities to gain more knowledge. So, make sure to read, eat your vegetables, and get enough sleep so your hard drive works well and you can efficiently grow your knowledge.

Challenges


This hard drive theory of knowledge is good enough to get by on most things most of the time, I think. But I also think compartmentalizing human brain contents into knowledge and the execution of actions using that knowledge can be a limiting perspective, particularly when applied to understanding how people actually end up learning and interacting with the world.

Consider the task of learning the meaning of a new word. I think a common view of "knowing words" is akin to accessing a mental dictionary entry. Linguistic knowledge is knowing rules for retrieving words and putting them together in permissible combinations, which can then be parsed and interpreted by other humans when we speak. Intuitive?

When we learn the meanings of words outside of school though, my impression is that we hear or see them being used and then eventually we give using them a try ourselves. We may consult a resource such as a dictionary or ask the person we are talking to explain what they mean by a word. But rather than memorizing such definitions verbatim for future retrieval, we "go with the flow" and see how we can use the new tool (for communication) we picked up.

I'm aware of the terms declarative and procedural knowledge from psychology, where declarative knowledge is something like a fact stored on a hard drive, wheres procedural knowledge is more like "know-how"... ...a compiled binary (not necessarily human-readable) on a hard drive (think an .exe on Windows).

However, I don't know how to talk about how some bits of knowledge can transition from being declarative knowledge to procedural knowledge (or vice versa, though I imagine people talking about declarative to procedural more than the other way around). The language of storing and retrieving knowledge becomes cumbersome to use when we discuss people acting in the world, as opposed to fetching facts to answer questions like those found on many exams.

Join the hivemind


A topic that has been attracting some of my attention recently is that of collective or social knowledge. Rather than viewing human minds/knowledge/etc. as being local to individuals, we can instead look at how people know how to act in the world. What sorts of "knowing" are not local to any one individual, but instead "emergent" through social interactions?

One example of this sort of thing is value as determined by markets. No one person knows the "mind of the market", but markets which are populated by actors with all sorts of motives/desires/etc. "decide" together what can be exchanged for what.

Another example is human communication, generally. When two people try to communicate to each other, they come to form some model of what signs are shared between them: if you want yourself to be understood, you'll search for the subset of words/expressions/etc. at your disposal to get the job done. Anybody who has tried to communicate in a foreign language will know that this process involves lots of trial and error as a protocol for communication is dynamically negotiated.

These two examples challenge the notion that individual humans are hard drives with CPUs called self and attention spans called RAM that walk around downloading knowledge from Wikipedia through their smart phones. Rather, humans as individuals collectively figure out how to do all sorts of things through complex interactions that generate the information some other humans will try to distill into theories and put into books.

For the ordinary person, understanding that the knowledge of books is of a different sort than the phenomena themselves which authors try to make sense of can be an empowering distinction to make. In particular, I turn to look at sometimes egg-head dispositioned people like myself that are inclined to spend a lot of time "learning" things with relatively little doing.


This isn't to say that people shouldn't do their homework. But this is to say that skipping the reading and doing the exercises first in a textbook might actually not be the worst idea ever. Looking back on what I have and haven't done, I think that having too much faith in individual knowledge rather than realizing much of what there is "to know" resides in the act of doing in the world has been an egg-head flaw of mine.