I have a strong desire to comprehend stuff

Great Debates
1

I have a strong desire to comprehend stuff

I claim that comprehending is a hierarchy and can usefully be thought of as a pyramid. At the base of the pyramid is awareness that is followed by consciousness, which is awareness plus attention. Knowing follows consciousness and understanding is at the pinnacle of the pyramid.

Two aspects of this comprehension idea deserve elaboration: consciousness and understanding.

When I was a youngster, probably seven or eight, my father took me with him when he drove to a local farm to pick corn for use in the café the family managed. We drove for a significant amount of time down local dirt roads to a farm with a field of growing corn.

We went into the fields with our bushel baskets and filled them with corn-on-the-cob. Dad showed me how to choose the corn to pick and how to snatch the cob from the stalk.

On the drive home I was amazed to observe the numerous fields of corn we passed on the way back to town. I can distinctly remember thinking to myself, why did I not see these fields of corn while we were driving to the farm earlier?

Today I have an answer to that question. I now say that on the way to the farm I was aware of corn-on-the-cob but on the way back home I was conscious of corn-on-the-cob. There was a very significant difference in my perceptions regarding corn-on-the-cob before and after the experience.

We are aware of many things but conscious of only a small number of things. We were aware of Iraq before the war but now we are conscious of Iraq. There is a very important distinction between awareness and consciousness and it is important for us to recognize this difference.

To be conscious of a matter signifies a focus of the intellect. Consciousness of a matter is the first step, which may lead to an understanding of the matter. Consciousness of a matter is a necessary condition for knowing and for understanding of that matter. Consciousness is a necessary but not sufficient condition for knowing and understanding to take place.

When discussing a topic about which I am knowledgeable most people will, because they recognize the words I am using, treat the matter as old stuff. They recognize the words therefore they consider the matter as something they already know and do not consider as important. Because they are aware of the subject it is difficult to gain their attention when I attempt to go beyond the shallowness of their perception. The communication problem seems to be initially overcoming their awareness and reaching consciousness.

Understanding is a long step beyond knowing. Understanding is the creation of meaning. Understanding represents a rare instance when intellection and emotion join hands and places me in an empathetic position with a domain of knowledge. When I understand I have connected the dots and have created a unity that includes myself. I have created something that is meaningful, which means that I have placed that domain of knowledge within my domain that I call my self. I understand because I have a very intimate connection with a model of reality that I have created. It is that eureka moment that happens rarely but is a moment of ecstasy. As Carl Sagan says “understanding is a kind of ecstasy”.

**When I read I almost always read non fiction. I have tried to read fiction and to learn from reading what is considered to be good literature. However, my effort to read good literature fails because I thing that learning by reading good literature is a very inefficient means for gaining knowledge and understanding.

I claim that I can acquire more knowledge in one hour by reading non fiction than I can while reading good literature for ten hours. That is, I claim that learning by reading non fiction is ten times more efficient than learning by reading fiction, i.e. good literature.

Do you agree that acquiring knowledge by reading non fiction is ten times as efficient as from reading fiction?**

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If the right side of your brain has atrophied into a dry, prune-like inert mass, I would agree completely.

But fiction - good fiction - can help us. It helps us feel, often by not letting us know how we should think or feel. It can take us out of our reality and build our powers of imagination, empathy, and emotional response. It’s no substitute for life experience, but it can, at its best, illuminate life experience by starting us thinking and feeling in ways we might not otherwise.

We run into trouble if we begin to use fiction literally - ie: if you start taking cues from novels or short stories about what it’s really like out there. It’s really art, not reportage. The good stuff has some truth in it, but that doesn’t necessarily make it true or even realistic.

You might consider moving away from pyramids and diagrams and knowledge as a solid mass of facts, and seeking understanding on a fuzzier, touchier-feelier level. Whom would you rather have as a soulmate in life? Someone who understands you - or someone who merely comprehends you?

3

Doug

When we create meaning from the knowledge we have acquired we have truly created through our imagination. When we read a narrative I do not think that we are exercising our imagination to a great extent. We are given too many images without any effort. It resembles much like a movie and we are the passive receipients. Our world of images passively received has robbed us of our creative abilities.

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How can you know who it is that’s merely aware and who comprehends? The way you’ve written one of your bolded sections tends to suggest you don’t think really anyone has ever come up with a reasonable and thought-out rebuttal to your ideas, originating from comprehension.

I have a question back; what process do you use to determine whether someone is coming from a decent position and who may be dismissed? By what means do you recognise comprehension in other people?

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I’d differ with you on a book being just like a movie. In reading a good book, you have to, and want to, use your imagination, playing things out in your head, fleshing out characters, interpreting events, tying up loose ends. Yes, it’s harder to do in today’s video-saturated culture, but it can be done, and many succeed.

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Primarily I check my experience to determine these levels of comprehension. We can start with awareness and consciousness. I experience a state of awareness in such ways as when I have been driving the same path to and from work and then one day I look in the yellow pages for a shoe store and I discover that I have passed the shoe store that I see in the yellow pages every day but have not been conscious of it. Likewise I often do things automatically with out being conscious of it. I drive all the time without being conscious of it. Like I will pass a cop car and all of a sudden my consciousness of driving is completely different.

We are all aware of knowing. And I have on a number of occasions had that experience of understanding. It does not happen often but I can experience that sense of ecstasy that Sagan talks of. I assume that everyone has such experiences that I speak of.

The matter of understanding is, I think , very important. I suspect few people have worked hard enough at an intellectual matter to reach that level of understanding that Sagan speaks of.

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What do you think about my comparison of the amount of learning that takes place when reading fiction versus non fiction?

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I’m afraid I don’t understand you, coberst; you’ll have to dumb it down a bit for me. How about this; imagine you’ve seen a theoretical post which disagrees with you. Run me through your thought processes as you judge the post as being a result of comprehension or just awareness; what does “check your experience” actually entail?

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If you were to read my OP you would know that your statements do not reflect my post.

I will try another tack.

I have for some time been interested in trying to understand what ‘understand’ means. I have reached the conclusion that ‘curiosity then caring’ is the first steps toward understanding. Without curiosity we care for nothing. Once curiosity is in place then caring becomes necessary for understanding.

Often I discover that the person involved in organizing some action is a person who has had a personal experience leading her to this action. Some person who has a family member afflicted by a disease becomes very active in helping support research in that disease, for example.

I suspect our first experience with ‘understanding’ may be our first friendship. I think that this first friendship may be an example of what Carl Sagan meant by “Understanding is a kind of ecstasy”.

I also suspect that the boy who falls in love with automobiles and learns everything he can about repairing the junk car he bought has discovered ‘understanding’.

I suspect many people go their complete life and never have an intellectual experience that culminates in the “ecstasy of understanding”. How can this be true? I think that our educational system is designed primarily for filling heads with knowledge and hasn’t time to waste on ‘understanding’.

Understanding an intellectual matter must come in the adult years if it is to ever come to many of us. I think that it is very important for an adult to find something intellectual that will excite his or her curiosity and concern sufficiently so as to motivate the effort necessary to understand.

Understanding does not come easily but it can be “a kind of ecstasy”.

Understanding is a tipping point, when water becomes ice, it is like a gestalt perception it may never happen no matter how hard we try. The unconscious is a major worker for understanding. Understanding is that rare occasion when there develops a conflation of emotion and intellection.

I have concocted a metaphor set that might relay my comprehension of the difference between knowing and understanding.

Awareness–faces in a crowd.

Consciousness—smile, a handshake, and curiosity.

Knowledge—long talks sharing desires and ambitions.

Understanding—a best friend bringing constant April.

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What you see as shallowness in others when attempting to communicate with them, I see as a lot of people reading what you are saying, thinking it’s either completely wrong or completely obvious, and not caring.

For example, you build up this big complicated construct to explain the fact that you noticed corn fields more after having been exposed to corn growing in a field. You think this is some kind of big insight. But it’s not. It’s not ‘understanding’ - it’s just a matter of focus. You were focused on corn, so your brain noticed corn. Big deal. While you were exulting in your ‘awareness’ of corn, you were probably totally oblivious to, say, the construction of the road you were driving on or the mechanical sounds your car was making, or the interaction of the wind on the environment, or any number of things going on that you can’t possibly pay attention to all at once.

Our brains act as filters of the unimportant. We can’t possibly focus on everything around us at all times, so our brains order and categorize the ‘background’ into a coherent picture devoid of a certain amount of detail, and allow us to divert our processing power to things we see as important at that time.

This is not a great insight. It’s a trivial understanding of how we operate. Likewise, there’s no great insight to be found in the fact that a mother who loses a child to cancer might take on a greater interest in cancers and their prevention. Why you would think this is something profound is beyond me.

You say things like this -

  • As if it is some great insight of philosophy. In fact, it’s utterly trivial. All you’ve said is that you have to pay attention to things to learn about them, but that just paying attention isn’t enough. Well, duh.

Then you seem to go and re-invent meanings of words to make them sound more profound:

To be ‘conscious’ of something MEANS to be aware of it. What you are describing is simply degree of importance. We all assign different degrees of importance to different issues, and expend thought and effort on them proportionally. There is no fundamental difference between our attitude towards Iraq today and ten years ago, other than we are paying more attention to it today. Some time in the future it will cease to be as important and we will turn our attention to other things.

Again, there’s no great insight here.

No it isn’t.

No it isn’t. I can understand the interaction between two charged particles without assigning meaning to anything. Or, I can imbue something with gobs of meaning without really understanding it.

This is very close to being gibberish. How can you be in ‘an empathic position’ with a domain of knowledge? And why is this necessary for ‘understanding’?

You’ve been reading too much Deepak Chopra. He also spouts gibberish, but he makes millions of dollars doing it.

Uh, right. So you have this deep, empathic, complete understanding that you have now subsumed within yourself. A walking Delphic Oracle. Of course, we lesser minds might rephrase “placing that domain of knowledge within my domain that I call myself”, as learning. But to some I guess it doesn’t sound nearly as smart to use one word when twelve will do.

Hey, if you created it, I should hope you have an intimate connection with it. That doesn’t mean it bears any resemblance to reality.

Of course, Carl Sagan was talking about the real kind of understanding - not a mystic, empathic, self-created reality of ‘understanding’. He was talking about doing hard work and trying to ‘understand’ the old fashioned way - through theory, experimentation, observation, and analysis. He was talking about the light bulb that goes off in your brain when a difficult concept suddenly becomes clear, or when a previously mysterious observation is made understandable through the application of science and reason.

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But I have read your OP. Please explain how my statements do not reflect them.

Please don’t. Again, i’ve read this, but you didn’t answer my question. While you are of course free to state some more of your ideas, which again I will read and take into account, i’ve asked you a question, with a suggested format of answer. If you don’t want to answer it, please say so. You’ve just restated your OP.

Keep this in mind; communication means you must make yourself understood. Let’s imagine that you’re trying to talk to someone on the phone. You’re making yourself perfectly clear, but the person on the other end is holding the phone the wrong way up, and speaking into the headphone, so he can’t understand you. The problem is totally on his end. Nevertheless, explaining to him on the phone why he’s wrong isn’t going to do any good, because he still can’t understand you. You’re going to have to actually go round to him and speak face to face - that is, employ a method of communication the other person gets.

In other words, if you don’t think you’re getting yourself across well, and you think the problem is on the other person’s end, you should still attempt to change your own communication. To put it in your OP’s terms; if you cannot find a way to make people conscious of your ideas, rather than merely aware of them, you should try another idea. Simply telling people they need to be conscious isn’t going to work if they aren’t getting your posts in the first place.

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Nicely done, Sam. Spot on.

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I honestly do not mean this to be insulting, but simply because people do not understand or agree with some of your posts doesn’t make everyone else a notch below you. For all of your consciousness-raising activities, it seems that you’re not really conscious/aware/understanding/whatever that you often don’t come off as having a real debate or conversation with others, but instead a monologue in which interlopers are dismissed, typically without giving serious consideration to any criticism, and instead insisting that others aren’t capable of understanding you. That doesn’t seem terribly enlightened to me.

But to my point on fiction vs. non-fiction: I suppose one could read a Cliff’s Notes version of the Bible or Macbeth or Tom Sawyer or any other classic in a tenth of the time, but that would be completely missing the point. There’s knowledge to be gained in literature, but if you are not seeing that, then the literature created by some of the greatest minds in history is passing you by like the corn fields.

I fully understand that some people simply don’t like literature, and that’s fine. But to dismiss the whole canon as not being worth any time because it’s too inefficient, I find that extremely odd. I’d bet that if polled, damn near every member of this Board will say that at least one work of fiction has had a significant impact on his/her life.

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Does anyone have this song running thru their head:

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So let me get this straight. If you study something, you’ll know more about it. Oh, my God, that’s…that’s BRILLIANT!!!

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Basically? Unquantifiable. Apples vs. oranges, or I should say apples vs. fruit salad.

Please excuse the presumption, but I feel as though you’re a deeply left-brain person - scientist, engineer, mathematician, programmer? - who has been frustrated often enough by all the intangibles of being human that you’ve tried to boil them down to only what can be known, measured, and proven.

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Well…no. I don’t. I suppose I could parse this in a bunch of different ways, but the bottom line is…I enjoy reading fiction and I (and I imagine most people) absorb the info much better (i.e. ‘efficient’(ly)) when its told in a story form than in an information only format.

Don’t believe me? Think for a second on how humans passed on information BEFORE we had cool things like books or an alphabet. Want an example? Ever heard of a little known guy named Homer (and for you wise asses out there I’m not talking about Simpson :wink: )? That kind of important information was conveyed in the form of a story…a FICTIONAL story that had some historical facts mixed in. Its how the human brain works.

This isn’t to say that you get as much out of fiction vs non-fiction. Certainly a text on Physics is going to have more data than Star Ship Troopers. From an efficiency perspective, as well as from the perspective of which I absorbed more of, I can tell you at least in my own case that I remember a hell of a lot more about Star Ship Troopers than I do about the various physics courses (or, gods help me, statistics and probability or any of the myriad other subjects I took in college).
Other than that…what Sam said. As another poster said, spot on.

-XT

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Sooo…never read Borges, have we? Or Cabell. Or Calvino. Or PKD. Or Sturgeon. Et cetera.

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…and on a less snarky note: There are people who do research on the processes by which experts in various domains go about developing and using their expertise. You might find it illuminating to read some papers on the topic.

20

coberst, I have found your comments in this particular thread to be enlightening, so I hope that you won’t mind if I comment beyond answering the question that you posed.

But first, your question:

Your definition of knowledge may be different from my own, so I look again at how you perceive knowledge in comparison to *awareness, consciousness, * and understanding:

From this definition, I gather that you see knowledge as “information.” If I am mistaken, please correct me. But if you are speaking of knowledge as “information,” I would say that I am much more likely to find knowledge more quickly in non fiction.

I can read a book on a specific topic to broaden my knowledge. Or I can skim a topic to look for specific information when I want to have certain knowledge at my fingertips.

I can still gain knowledge by reading fiction, but that is not the main purpose of the book.

But judging from the definition that you gave of understanding, I personally am more likely to find that in fiction and poetry. But it’s interesting that you have mentioned Sagan. He was one writer of non fiction who could stir the ecstasy of understanding within me! I certainly miss him.

There are works of fiction which do that for me too, but they require patience. A Prayer for Owen Meany is such a book. And it doesn’t just give you images. It demands something of you and it brings something to you.

I think that your mind likes to absorb a lot of knowledge and organize it, but you also are very creative. Do you ever try writing much about your childhood? Do you write poetry? I would be interested.