Why do you assume you understand data Discarnate?
Most learned information is NOT comprehended it is only relationally organized to define a general awareness. You can learn a lot of data that you memorize, the vast majority amount of which is basic ROM, commonly called facts, but have you personally derived and tested all this information you have copy/pasted into your head at school, from books, over the internet, and from general exposure?
Give me your best and honest estimate; go ahead do you think you can claim to have tested 10% of assumed data personally? 5%? 1%? 0.1%?
Catch my drift? No your cigar is an example of an artificial fact not a Natural Law, you can make it do what ever you want including explode.
But as a subjective quality it is ALSO what we define it to be by definition. Your cigar can suggest many things but it would be foolhardy for me to suggest it was really a can of tuna and I could chop it up and eat it.
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Is memory the same as knowledge?
Do you believe your memory?
Is the belief in your own existence sufficient to define it?
Is "learning" the same as memory, or is learned data RAM instead of ROM? ROM is like saying I believe my data base, it is immutable fact I cannot refute; true Belief. But human law as opposed to natural law (despite legal theorists to the contrary like Hans Kelsen) is not immutable by virtue of its subjectivity.
The idea is that we believe it by "convention" not true conviction. Hence it can be altered it must be known as input/output data different qualitatively from ROM, and for the sake of argument, not true belief (we haven't reached knowledge except tautologically), but it is like RAM, our operational memory suspects and subjects to constant checking and updating all incoming information like a browser window that’s been open a long time.
So while the data that feeds our everyday memory is a hodgepodge of miscellaneous facts and relationships we must continuously update our "awareness" of this RAM and ROM organization in our Operating System called an individual identity. But all we can know is what we believe is perhaps you are trying to say. But do we know that either?
So here you have a data stream of events feeding a RAM like memory function that is modified by learned ROM programs like say dentistry, history, astronomy, physics, methods for playing a guitar, how to mix pigments, are you getting the drift now?
You believe what you have learned but is this yet what many want to distinguish as knowledge?
You would leave us here Discarnate and say the machine is unaware,
IMO computers can only handle data. They don't understand it - and that's the critical difference. People are 'programmed' or 'hardwired' or whatever to do more than just handle the data. Call it pattern analysis, call it insight, call it quantum computing, call it a mess - it's something more.
Call it knowledge and intuitive reasoning (a sixth “sense”); or do you still want to claim that knowledge and belief are equivalent?
OK, let’s keep looking at that. You see what happens is that you can't prove the machine doesn't understand qualitatively less than you do, only quantitatively, because you haven't sufficiently programmed it to... Yet.
The computer doesn't "know," which is equivalent in meaning, as you have used it to mean "understand" the information but it certainly
believes what it possesses in its databank. The machine has no choice that is what its programming determines. The machine can even be required to update and test its information, but it can't understand it you say because the organization is too complex. Why?
You need to go back and re-read what you wrote because while you denied the distinction that knowledge and belief are distinct you were actually utilizing the definition of knowledge as distinct from belief with regard to machines to distinguish ourselves from one. To
understand is a property of knowledge, not belief, by definition.
We do not necessarily understand what we believe in, we know (maybe) what we believe, and we claim to understand what we know, hence we know what our beliefs are (questionable but I’ll let it ride) but we believe also that which we do not know, like an intuition (that intelligent “sense” again) into the fabric of the Universe that can only be said to become knowledge after it has survived a series (subjected to a gauntlet of replicable scientific tests) of objective proofs. This very educated guess is derived from belief and it is called a
hypothesis as opposed to
theory to distinguish it from belief, which of course describes what we believe we know. [wacko]
"Faith" is the basis of belief and it is what people claim they possess in God, or themselves, or in their systems and institutions that they may depend upon but have little in-depth comprehension of, also like the general sensory input that you take for granted as valid (put a lot of faith into) but do not know except existentially and only assume to be true.
I was teasing a little above and here too but do you see how easy it is to get in trouble if you do not distinguish between belief and knowledge? lol
That is how and why the two words entered the lexicon in the first place, out of necessity to define the distinction. Generally we use knowledge in the weak not strong sense. I know how to play a D scale, I know mechanical engineering, it isn’t; “I believe how to play a D scale” or “I believe mechanical engineering.” I may only believe I know and find this to be a false belief but I either know it, or not. [!]
We refer to what we have given serious study to, and "memorized" by wrote, to mean something we
know, but when we say
understand, or comprehend, we are referring to a STRONG category of knowledge. This is why I can suggest that Newton's belief in the true Nature of Gravity constituted a form of knowledge to the limits (testable) possible of his day. While for you, me, and most people it is really still just an article of faith that things fall towards the center of the Earth; faith based upon repeated experience. [huh]
We may have a life long experience of the event to support the belief but it requires more than that to claim knowledge, it requires true understanding or any mythological interpretation of genesis would be just as good as any modern cosmological theory predicated on astrophysics. [B)]
Let’s look at a different angle: So why doesn't a fancy calculator programmed with all the formulation for gravity and now relativity "know" what it has "memorized"?
Because it didn't discover or invent the formula? [ggg]
Neither did you. No, we say the bearer of this information still doesn't "know" the physics and true nature of gravity till the data can be organized (explained) into a much larger model of comparative information, say like a weather model. Oh but that is still something a machine can do and it doesn't understand the weather, and of course you do? [ph34r]
Well you know when it’s raining and sunny because you 'feel” the sensory data stream, but so does the computer. You can go learn how the weather works with all the various interactive forces and then you can claim you know the weather better than the machine but again, why? [unsure]
Oh yeah you understand the weather and the computer doesn't... [wacko]
I wish I could sound more reassuring about this. Maybe you are right there is no difference but then the computer knows as well as believes just like we do. The reason I said the computer only believes is because the computer is not trying to comprehend facts, it is only recording them and comparing them to its gospel, I mean algorithms, and assessing validity to determine (judge) if the data is consistent with the predetermined criterion of the "belief system," oh I mean program, that of course the computer knows, I mean memorizes, oh you know what I mean.
Right?
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