Here’s a question that should intrigue such a knowledgeable collection of people.
How long would it take you to sit down with a pen and paper, and prepare an inventory of EVERYTHING that you know. I mean a list of every single last piece of information that is stored in your brain.
Go on, how long?
I’m going to start now:
The Moon’s gravity is 6 times weaker than Earth’s, an elephant’s gestation period is 21 months, 7x7=49, fish has the highest mercury concentration of any food, it’s Easter this weekend, Tony Blair is a Fascist,…
Farlow’s of Pall Mall’s new flagship shop, amalgamated with the previously independent House of Hardy’s shop, is rubbish. It used to be a proper fishing shop with piles of stuff and kit all over the place, to suit all pockets, with old guys who would talk to you for a couple of hours about all sorts of aracane fishing trivia before they’d even consider selling you anything. Now, it’s more of a fishing showroom. There are three floors and only half of the ground floor is devoted to fishing tackle. There is only a limited range of very expensive tackle in glass and wood cases with no prices displayed. The rest of the place is taken up by clothing.
Sportfish has been bought up by Farlow’s and therefore no longer exists.
The Orvis shop behind the Royal Academy has been replaced by an expensive hair salon.
Harrods no longer sell fishing tackle. So what I have learned is that I can’t buy a bloody fly reel anywhere in Central London any more.
Davidoff in St James’ Street do not repair lighters.
In fact, the last Universal Lighter Repairs shop in the UK is run by a man called James Cassify, who works in a box underneath Harrods. You have to walk through miles of passages and storerooms to find him. Now HE really knows his stuff. He could talk about lighters for hours: what a great guy!
I hate free market economics and new retail policies.
Even if you only knew one fact, it would take an infinite amount of time:
X.
I know X.
I know that I know X.
I know that I know that I know X.
etc.
Not to mention facts like:
I know that I’m sitting here making a list of things I know.
I kno I just wrote that.
I know I just misspelled “know.”
I know I’m running out of ink.
It would literally take forever. And that’s another fact.
I dispute the idea that the human brain contains an infinite amount of knowledge. Clearly, it has a finite storage capacity. The closest you can come to a human being who knows absolutely nothing is a newborn baby. But even this little creature knows that it is cold, hungry, that the light hurts its eyes, and of course that it knows that it knows that it is cold, etc. So by that logic, the new born baby has an infinite amount of knowledge.
Zorro, you can descend the recursive chain panache45 proposed literally forever. You simply prepend “I know that I know” to whatever you just wrote. Your brain doesn’t need to have infinite storage, just a simple rule.
That’s recursion. That’s how you can inductively derive the entire set of positive whole numbers from just two things: zero and the ability to add one. (Google up Peano, if you don’t believe me.)
(If you are interested in recursion, google up some references for functional programming languages such as Lisp and Scheme. Those languages get early beginners into simple recursion fairly early.)
Anyway, it effectively makes your little task impossible. To do a complete job of it, we must, eventually, descend into recursion, and from that there is no escape. Like I exist.' I know that I know I exist.’ etc. You have no solid ground to stand on, no base case to break out of the recursion.
It’s this lack of solid ground that makes psychology so interesting. We, being sentient, constantly think about ourselves. We think about thinking about ourselves. We stare into the mirror and, pretty soon, we have knotted ourselves into tight little loops, and we can see ourselves knotting ourselves up, and we can see ourselves seeing ourselves, and so on, until we step outside of the system and get something to eat. Humans can almost always step outside the system, which is what seperates us from machines.
You would also not reach the end of the list because you would have to add your knowledge that you have just written x, then your knowledge that you had just written a statement to the effect that you know you have just written x and so on (same thing as above really).
So the only factual answer I think you’ll get from this question is that the task cannot be completed in a finite amount of time.
Another example, along the same lines: you are constantly aware of time and its passage. I know that the time is now today at 10:15 a.m., I know that in the past the time was 10:14 a.m. today, and 10:13 a.m. today, and 10:12 a.m. today . . . and 10:15 a.m. yesterday . . . all the way back. Furthermore, I know that because it is now 10:15 a.m., one minute ago it was 10:14 a.m., two minutes ago it was 10:13 a.m., and so forth; and this knowledge changes with each moment, so that at every moment you know more than you can possibly write down before you acquire a new, equally infinite amount of knowledge about the next moment. At every moment in your life, you know that every prior moment in your life (indeed, in all of history) preceded it, and that knowledge is infinite–whether or not it has ever actually crossed your mind.
The notion that knowledge equates to facts is a horrible one that is only encouraged by the Internet. You can put together facts into theories and explanations and understandings. That’s where all the books in all those libraries come from. Although you may not think you are capable of writing a book on a subject, that is certainly not true. You could probably write books about lots of things in your life, from your neighborhood to the relations among your relations, to your life at school or work, to whatever subjects you happen to be an expert on. It would take many lifetimes just to string together meaningfully all you know. There is much more to the brain than just a collection of facts.
You could write out an infinite number of true statements that you know are true when you write them, but I don’t think that’s the same thing as knowing them. For instance, saying “300 is greater than 200”. That’s not an atomic statement that I keep in memory. I had to derive its truth from other things. So unless you’re going to keep in memory the fact that you wrote the previous fact, and the one before that, I don’t think it should count. How about, a list of things that you know that you learned more than one hour before you wrote them down? That would really cut into these contrived lists and not deviate much from the OP’s intent, I think.
There is a short story by Jose Louis Borges called “Funes the Memorious”, about a man who remembered everything.
Once he tried to write down everything he did during a whole day. It took him a whole day, so if he tried to write everything he knew, he would continually fall behind.
Writing down everything you know takes more than a lifetime. So, by definition, it is impossible.
OK, I’m going to place some limitations on this: when you run out of knowledge to write down that is of any significance, you stop. This avoids the daft recurrence problem. Knowing that you that you just wrote something does not count.
Now we get into a discussion over what is significant. For example, which seconds of which day are or aren’t significant? Some people find several, even infinite, levels of recursion significant.
I don’t consider this significant, but it’s Jorge Luis Borges, not Jose. (Perhaps Jose was the ‘other’ Borges?). And “The Library of Babel” is another story pertaining to this thread.
