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> How do you measure "innate knowledge"? In what units would you express the results? Useful knowledge might include sucking on nipples, being afraid of snakes
by mirimir 7y ago
> How do you measure "innate knowledge"? In what units would you express the results?
Useful knowledge might include sucking on nipples, being afraid of snakes and spiders, being wary of fire, sexual drives after puberty, and so on.
As far as units, why not bits?
> Here is an analogy: consider movies.
I agree that going from a zygote to an adult animal is a
complicated process. There's the genome, the process of development, and a complex mixture of sensory data and actions. And yes, that doesn't do justice to the complexity.
But the question here is how much innate data. Not how substantial a role that data plays. So as a first approximation, wouldn't that be the script? Or maybe the script plus the video file?
> It's a very similar situation with the nature-vs-nurture question (which is really what this is).
I wasn't seeing it that way. There's no question that the environment plays a crucial role in development. But I don't see how any of that can create knowledge of past events. Which is what "innate knowledge" means to me.
- lisper 7y ago> why not bits? Because bits are a unit of information, not knowledge. Not the same thing. But even if you're really interested in information and not knowledge that's still a problem. You can easily measure the information content of the human genome because we know how it's encoded. It's much harder to measure the information content of the human brain because we don't yet have a complete grip on how it works. > I don't see how any of that can create knowledge of past events. That depends on what you mean by "past events". If you really mean individual one-off events, there is no known mechanism for that kind of information to get encoded in a genome. If you mean general information about the world acquired through "experience" (where having natural selection act on your population counts as "experience"), that could be encoded in a combination of information that resides in the genome and information that resides in the environment, where the structure of the brain is part of the environment (of the genome). We just don't know.
- mirimir 7y ago> Because bits are a unit of information, not knowledge. Not the same thing. How can knowledge not be a subset of information?
- lisper 7y agoWell, it is, but it is not just a subset of information. The distinction between knowledge and information is very tricky to get a handle on. Philosophers argue about it all the time. For example, here is some information: "I am wearing a white hat." Is that information also knowledge? Well, it depends. It depends, for example, on whether or not I am in point of fact wearing a white hat, because if I'm not then you cannot possibly know that I am wearing a white hat despite the fact that I have just given you that information. That information may or may not correspond to reality, and one of the things that distinguishes knowledge from information is that knowledge has to correspond to reality in order to qualify as knowledge, and information need not correspond to reality ("false knowledge" is an oxymoron but "false information" is not.) But there's more to the distinction between knowledge and information than mere correspondence to reality. If I am in point of fact not wearing a white hat, the information above does not magically transform itself into knowledge if I suddenly put on a white hat.