https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=T4i3s6nDHkI
So my last video I teased that I would be doing a presentation with slides on the knowledge engine. And this is the same as John Vervicki’s four Ps, except we’ve made some changes and a few modifications. And we don’t think it’s four Ps of knowing. We think it’s four Ps of information that lead to two types of knowing. And the reason why we have this model is because we realized when John Vervicki was talking about it that the model was pretty useful in understanding some of the problems that we have today. So what the goals for our model were, because we don’t care about cognitive science, because we’re not cognitive scientists and we don’t have any co-sci friends except John, we are looking to explain what, you know, tie together psychology, right? So we should explain some psychological phenomena. We’re looking to explain why people get stuck in their thinking, right? Like, what does that look like? Why does that happen? And we’re looking to use this as a map to build ways to fix different maladies within thinking, right? So if critical thinking works a certain way due to a bunch of criteria, we’ll say, then we need to know how to deal with that. And that is the goal for the model, right? Is to be able to build things using the model, hopefully that are predictive. So the map that’s laid out by the model for whatever you’re looking at, because you can use a model different ways, will point you in the right direction to build things. Things like games, things like ways of relating to people, right? Things like ways of engaging in conversation to sort of figure out where the other person is, like where they might be stuck. And also to explain what happens with things like our memory that gets rewritten and why it works so well and why it doesn’t. So this model should map to all of those things and a few more. I don’t expect anybody to understand the model fully. I know I’ve talked about the model a couple of times. I talked about it with Paul Van der Kley about a year ago, a little more now in my first conversation with him. I talked about it the next day actually with Karen Wong on the meaning code. So you can check those videos out. They’re a little bit older. We’re still talking about knowledge and not information. And now we’re going to be talking about information. And look, I’ve done up these slides. They took far longer than I expected. I don’t like doing slides. Slides are hard. But I did slides for you. And I hope that they’re helpful. They might be a little harder to see or whatever, but I’ll be sharing them on the meaning community dot com website at some point. And so I’m going to give this presentation as a slide presentation. I’m going to try to explain things at a high level as I go along. There’s a lot more detail there to engage with, but you don’t have to engage with it right now. So I’m just going to try to keep it high level for you. And let’s see how well I can do. When we’re talking about the knowledge engine, and that’s roughly what we’re calling this right now, all of this may change. It’s all changed so far. We’ve had many slides or many versions of this slide. We have other slides coming. We are trying to explain things like rationality to some extent. We’re adding in the concept of opponent processing. We are moving things around a bit so that they make a little more sense in the frame that we’re looking at, which is a model that explains a bunch of different things. So the knowledge engine is supposed to explain what knowledge is and how it happens, what the components are and how the knowledge is generated. OK, so the knowledge is generated on the fly. There’s roughly two results of knowledge generation. And so all of this is just to be a model to help people to understand where people are in conversation, figure out where they might be stuck. So, you know, how to nudge them, roughly speaking, give them better ways to interact in the world, give yourself better ways to interact, build tools, build practices, map practices back to schema. We think this model will do all of those things. The models held up pretty well. We’ve had a lot of people just come up with random things and say, what about this? And we’ve been able to drop them into the model pretty nicely. And, you know, we think it has a lot of utility. And the way we’re explaining knowledge at a high level is knowledge is coming from signals that get put through a perspectival lens or frame. Frame is probably better or perspective. Right. So you’ve got a perspective that get signals. Those signals inform the perspective and the perspective informs the signals. Right. And that process goes between the four four four piece of information. Right. So that filters up that creates knowledge. So that’s how the knowledge is created. It all filters up. So let’s get started with the slideshow and we’ll go through it one slide at a time. I’ve got four slides. Hopefully that’s not too many. And hopefully this will be easy to follow. So we start out with the perspectival capacity. So we’re in John Verveckis model. He’s got perspectival as a way of knowing. And we don’t think it’s a way of knowing. The reason why is because a perspective is required to form things. Right. You have to have a frame or a bucket to create a perspective. Right. Roughly speaking. So when you have that, when signals come in, they get signals are peering sight, touch, smell, you know, whatever else. I don’t want to not trying to enumerate all the possible signals. Your signals are filtered through whatever sense making apparatus you have. Right. Like your sight can be is limited. Right. It’s, you know, as Peterson likes to point out, there’s a little tiny pinpoint. Right. And everything else gets fuzzier and fuzzier. Right. So there’s limitations there. We also have two modes of sight. You have a reptilian sort of sight that senses just movement and it’s very, very good. And but it can’t see detail or color. I think it can’t see color either. So those signals from from your, you know, your body filter into a preexisting perspective. Right. And the perspectival understanding or capacity has a number of qualities, flexibility, fluidity, focus and fluency. I don’t want to go into detail on those. Those are different aspects of what you can do to make sure that you’re able to see the details. So the contextualization, the frame, the perspective is important because that is the form that these signals get put into to create information. OK, so it can’t be information if it’s raw signal because raw signal is noise unless it’s in relation to something else. So the thing that you put it in is the form that you put it in. So that is why we think the perspectival capacity or perspectival understanding comes first. The signals come into that. OK, so once that happens, we go up into this process, which is rationality and rationality is the interaction between the four P’s, which are the four P’s. Right. Procedural, participatory and poetic. OK, so it’s interacting with these individual processing modules that process the same signal or set of signals from the perspectival understanding up into themselves and back down into the process. OK, so it’s interacting with these individual processing modules that process the same signal or set of signals from the perspectival understanding up into themselves and back down again. And then there’s an opponent process. So the signals and the results of the form signals, because they come in first, those formed signals go up into either a discrete processing or a continuous processing. And I’ll go over that in the next slide. Right. Into one of these into all four of these processing systems at the same time. And then if the information that’s been formed from the perspectival understanding doesn’t quite fit in the perspective or there’s a way in which it could change the perspective, that is fed back into the perspective. And so there’s a little back and forth right between the perspectival understanding and the processing, the initial processing. OK, and that is really important because what it means is that the information you get once it’s informed can change your perspective. But that happens as a result of a processing and then this opponent processing. OK, so that’s a process that’s going on. I think that process is rationality. And my rational for that is that we often say that when you provide somebody with information that it goes against something they already understand or believe or think they know what they will do sometimes is find a way to reject that completely. OK, so if you know if if if somebody says, oh, well, you know, this this this thing happened as the result of, you know, the person being a cop. And then it turns out that the person’s not a cop. And you say, no, no, that person’s not not a cop. So right. They might say, oh, well, but they could have been a cop. And you’re like, well, maybe. But like that has nothing to do with it. Right. What that person is doing is rationalizing. And that’s what we say. Right. Oh, they’re rationalizing their belief. Yeah, they’re rejecting new information, rejecting it. Right. They’re kicking it out because they don’t want to change their perspective. And people do that all the time. And so that’s why I think rationality is there. I mean, that’s how we actually talk about it. We say, oh, that person’s not going to change their perspective because that would upset their belief or what they think they know or what they think their understanding the situation is. And so they’re kicking it out. They’re throwing out that information. So we think that’s happening in this in this section. So from there, what happens is this knowledge creation and knowledge creation is once the rationalization is done, is the process where the discrete process is done. The discrete processing side, the left side of the brain and the right side of the brain, which are encompassing these four P’s, roughly speaking. And that’s what makes their difference sort of roll up into either concrete knowledge or intuitive knowledge. Now, I don’t think that you can afford to only have one type of knowledge. But I realize that we may discount intuitive knowledge or we may discount concrete knowledge. But we think that’s a function of this process of the knowledge creation process, roughly speaking. So the reason why these types of knowledge are different is because the processing types on the four P’s are different. Right. So you can see here we’ve got the left brain is discrete processing. The way discrete processing works is you break things up into segments which are discrete and you do your processing. And in math, you do that. There’s a way in which there’s a discrete, discrete mathematics and there’s a way in which there’s a continuous mathematics. And when you do those calculations in a discrete way, you come up with slightly different answers than the continuous way. When you do continuous processing, you’re not stopping. There’s no pieces. Everything’s connected. So there’s a continual signal there on the left brain side. There’s not a continual signal. It gets chopped up. And that’s why the left brain is divided into propositions, which are discrete, linear, solid packages, packets of information and procedures procedural. So the procedural is discrete, linear connections for the propositional packets of information. That’s not the only way you can use them. But that is what they are. That’s that type of processing. So that’s we’re calling it a form of navigation. Propositions are a form of objects. Procedures are a form of navigation of the objects, hopefully. And then on the other side, on the continuous side, participation. You can’t really participate in discrete chunks. I mean, you can. So if you’ve ever seen somebody doing the robot dancing, that’s the closest approximation that I can make to, you know, to discrete participation. And it looks funny, right? It looks really attractive to you. Like, oh, what is that? Right. And that’s why. Because, you know, it’s not it’s not that it’s not natural, but it’s not the way we think of motion of our body. We think of motion of our body as, you know, these fluid, continuous point A to point B with no stopping. Right. And and and that kind of participation, you know, that’s that’s how we like to participate. We also do that in conversation. Right. So participation isn’t just something you do, you know, as a as a physical motion. It’s also something you do in thinking and and in speech. And then there’s the poetic, which is the navigation. Right. So the navigation in this case is continuous. So it’s not divided up into pieces. It’s that flow state thing. Right. That’s a lot about the poetic, about the navigation. So the poetic is, you know, roughly speaking, how you’re in flow state when you’re participating with something. And I think when you get that sort of right brain continuous processing going, that’s what you’re doing. Right. You’re really in the in the in the in the flow realm. And then the problem with talking about the model is that language is primarily propositional and procedural, which is to say it’s discrete sections. Words are discrete packets of information. They get put together in a certain procedure. Right. Which is discrete. Right. So when you talk about the continuous processing, you’re using discrete buckets. Right. You’re using propositions and procedures to discuss participation and the poetic connections. So that’s a problem because we confuse them up for the territory. And I’m trying to give you a description of something in propositions, procedures that isn’t isn’t of the same nature because it’s continuous. So that’s why I think why a lot of confusion happens when we talk about this stuff. But you can see the way in which these two types roll up into different types of knowledge. So concrete knowledge is more dogmatic. It’s what we know. It’s what we’re certain of. It’s it’s it’s things that that we feel as though they are intelligible as units by themselves. So they don’t have to be material objects, although it kind of helps. So I can say, you know, this is a pen. That’s a proposition. I could also say this is a blurt org and it could be a blurt org. What do you know? You don’t know that it’s not a blurt org. That’s just a random proposition I made up. Could be a blurt org. That’d be a neat name for a pen. So those are propositions. Right. And then the procedures could be things like writing. Right. Which is not to say that that writing can’t be poetic. It can in many ways. The act of writing can be poetic. Cursive handwriting is a poetic because it’s continuous. Right. Whereas if you’re not writing in cursive, you can you can write in block letters. That’s very discreet way of writing. So you can see kind of the difference, hopefully, from from from that example. Now, one way that scientists interact with the world or science minded people is propositionally with concrete knowledge. And they come to the table with concrete knowledge and that requires a lot of framing. Right. Whereas if you want to open up the world to new potential and possibility, you need intuitive knowledge. You need to go out into the space of chaos. You need to continuously adjust. So a continuous way of relating to the world might be balancing on your bike. So when you’re riding a bike, you’re balancing. I’m not talking about all the possible things you can do with a bike, but I’m just talking about the balance per se. So you’re pedaling and the pedaling is moving the bike and moving the bike moves the bike along many axes. Right. When you pedal, especially when you’re young, you don’t quite have the hang of it. The bike might move like this. That means your balance has to change as a result of your pedaling. Right. And you might rock back and forth a little bit because people tend to do that. Like the pedals sort of force you to move in a bunch of directions. And your balance is poetic. Right. It’s a poetic participation. It’s not only poetic. Right. It’s a poetic participation with the act of riding the bike. So all of this is rolling up to intuitive knowledge. I can tell you procedurally how to ride a bike. Sure. But it’s absurd for me to tell you to balance when you’re on the bike. I mean, I can say balance. You know what balance means. But me telling you balance doesn’t allow you to balance. What allows you to balance is your intuitive knowledge of balance. And you’re changing your balance. You’re changing your perspectival understanding of balance when you ride a bike. So what does this look like together? Because I’ve modified the latest slide up to with the new colors and the fancy the fancy boxes up to this. So this is the new final slide. It’s got a little bit text on it. I’ll get it posted eventually on the meaning community.com. So it’ll be available there. I know the past versions are there too. If you like those better, you can use those. There’s different text on them. But the basic point of the slide is that there are these two types of knowledge. They are formed from the signals that get come into the place that forms them, which is the perspectival understanding or the perspectival capacity. That allows you to frame the signals in a way that they’re not noise, but they become information. Then they’re sent up for discrete and continuous processing of two different types. There’s a navigational processing. How are things connected? Right. And then there’s a there’s a processing in either movement or participation and a processing in of objects. So every signal is processed all four ways. And then those four ways inform the perspective again. And that loops. That’s the rationality. And then once that’s done, once it’s settled, I don’t want to talk about stopping criteria because I don’t particularly care. Then that is how we then form knowledge. Now we have pieces of information that are relative to a perspective that and also disambiguated from it. So they can be put in other perspectives. So that they form knowledge and that knowledge can be either more concrete knowledge or an intuitive knowledge. Now, what we think is happening is that people are using concrete knowledge or gaining more concrete knowledge through a lack of poetic navigation. Or it could be a lack of also participatory information. And so another way to use this model is to say, well, you know, there’s that old saying about those who can do and those who can’t do. And those who can’t teach, which is funny, but it’s sort of a general truism. And that’s kind of interesting. So this model helps to explain that. And that’s the interesting thing to me is that, you know, you can you can use the model, right? You can use the model. You can say, OK, well, at what point, you know, would that be true? If you know how to do something that might be a physical thing in the world like painting or even good carpentry, you might have intuitive knowledge. Farming is another one of my favorite examples. Those are intuitive types of ways of knowing things. Whereas being able to list all of the aspects of carpentry, right, or being able to list all of the aspects of farming. Right. That’s a concrete type of knowledge. And it’s very propositional. It’s propositional heavy. Right. It’s not participation heavy. So just because the farmer can’t tell you all the things you need to know to farm because they’re not verbally available to him. And maybe not easy to verbalize for anyone. I don’t know. Doesn’t mean he doesn’t know what he’s doing. So I think that’s important. So let’s just get rid of the slides again. I’m going to make them available on the on the Web site and possibly other other places if I can manage that. But the utility in the model is in explaining how we think, how we learn and how we fail to learn. There’s lots of opportunities to fail to learn. And I think that the two types of knowledge explain how we fail to understand one another. So if I know how to do something intuitively, I might have a hard time explaining that. If you know something, how to do something concretely, you might have a hard time actually enacting it in the world or participating with it. And I think that explains a lot of the things that people talk about. And again, there’s this rationality where we rationalize our behavior or we rationalize throwing out information. You know, we say, oh, well, this event happened this way. And then you get video evidence that that isn’t how the event happened. And you go, well, yeah, but, you know, really, if you think about it from a postmodern lens, it’s like, no, all you’re doing is rejecting information rather than integrating it. And so that’s not happening in this model at the level of knowledge. That’s happening at the level of understanding of perspectival understanding of things. And I think I think I want to stick to perspectival capacity because I want to I want to reserve understanding for something above knowledge or after knowledge, sort of like putting all the knowledge pieces together. So you put four pieces of information together, hopefully, to form two types of knowledge, hopefully in that same way. You take the two types of knowledge and then there’s some way of relating to understanding your understanding of something. And the reason why this is important is because it explains different types of insight and flashes of insight. So sometimes with insight, you get a piece of information and, you know, something occurs to you and a bunch of things change as a result. But sometimes in insight, what happens is no new information comes in and you just have some kind of flash or realization. And then all of a sudden, a bunch of things that didn’t make sense anymore make sense to you. Right. So that’s got to be happening one layer up, basically. Right. That’s got to be happening between the information you already have and the types of knowledge that you have. Right. And maybe there’s a third type of insight that happens when when you rearrange knowledge and it collapses something, you know, into into understanding or creates more understanding of the you’re given the same types of knowledge or something or the same amount of knowledge. So I think all of that is possible. And I think that’s the flexibility in the model. And, you know, you can use this to explain a lot of psychology. So, for example, one way to describe autism, and this is just a description, we’re not making prescriptions or predictions about about autism. One way to describe autism is to say that you are participating in the world using procedures. When you participate in the world using procedures, it looks like autism. Right. If if your if your ability to relate to propositions and explain propositions to people is only poetic, you might sound a little crazy. Right. You might not be able to be clear to people because people sort of expect propositions to be connected with discrete procedures. Right. So these are ways in which our knowledge can be off and can be hard to convey or we can convey it perfectly. And other people won’t understand it because if I only have an intuitive understanding of something and you explain it in concrete terms, I may never be able to understand what it is you’re saying. And the reverse is true. Right. If you’re a very concrete thinker and you’re trying to explain to somebody who’s very intuitive, they may never be able to make those connections because they make different types of connections. The navigation of the poetic, the connectedness of the poetic is fundamentally different from the connectedness of the procedural. And you can use the poetic to connect propositions. You can use the procedural to connect participation. And there’s probably a little bit of that going on in good, well-balanced knowledge. But there’s also a way in which you can overconnect or misconnect or boost one signal over another. And I think a lot of individualism and materialism is a rejection of poetic navigation. And one thing that I think our model does that will say the four peas knowledge model doesn’t do is this has a direct interface with narrative. Narrative requires poetic navigation. That’s part of the reason why it’s called poetic. Before it was called parabolic. I still stick by parabolic. It’s very useful. But poetic is a better word. Ultimately, Manuel wins that battle for sure. He gets his poetic. So if narrative isn’t a type of wrapped up in a type of knowing, I don’t know what narrative is in our model. It’s wrapped up in the poetic and your lack of understanding metaphor symbol and narrative is a lack of poetic information. I don’t know if the information is not there or if you’re unable to relate to it or if it’s not able to make it up. Whatever filters there are to create knowledge, because that’s not in this slide. I’m not talking about how we create the knowledge, right? We’re more just talking about the four peas of information. And then the four peas of information do get wrapped up into two types of knowledge. And there’s a balance there for sure. And I don’t know what the right balance is. It’s probably not one quarter, one quarter, one quarter, one quarter, but could be. I don’t know. But this is a useful enough model that we’ve been able to figure out a bunch of things really quickly and easily. And when new things have come along, they seem to drop right into the model with no conflicts with previous conceptions. It seems to work in the space of psychology pretty well to explain a bunch of things. It also seems to work in the realm of modeling how people are dealing with language, like what they’re actually doing when they’re speaking. That’s a lot of this model is what I use on the rest of the channel when I talk about how people are using words, what they’re using words for and how they’re actually getting interpreted. So hopefully this overview is helpful to you in understanding the knowledge engine, the four peas of information, how we’re using them. I could try to go into the differences between, we’ll say, our model and John’s model. If that if that’s something you want, leave me a comment. I’d rather not. I think the best person to go into John’s model, which is ever changing, is John. And his model is used for completely different purposes. He’s really worried about cog-sci and tying things into that. And we’re really not, right, because we’re trying to do some pragmatic stuff that we already have had our eye on long before the model came along. And this model is the model that I use to understand the meaning crisis per se and also segue into the intimacy crisis, because I think it’s a very important model. And I think that’s a very important model to segue into the intimacy crisis, because I think intimacy is lost when you participate with procedures or when you understand participation through procedures and you don’t understand participation as a continuous process. Or you’re not able to make deep, multifaceted, continuous connections with the poetic. And I think that’s a fundamental problem when those two pieces of knowledge are missing or weak or de-boosted or whatever that you’re going to have a hard time interfacing in the world correctly with other people and with nature. So it’s a fundamental loss of connection with nature and other people and everything that we participate in and the fundamental misunderstandings of the world per se. What drives people, where motivations come from, if they’re couched in propositions and procedures, that’s probably not a good way to understand how people are doing things and why people are doing things. It might map well, and it might seem to make sense, but it kind of breaks down, especially when you start asking why questions instead of how questions. So I’m hoping this was clear. I’m hoping that it was helpful. Leave me comments so that I can decide if I need to do more on this slide or if you need to know more about how this interfaces or what we’re using it for. We’ve used it to inform game design. We’ve used it to inform intake forms for homeless people. We’ve used it to help get people unstuck in their thinking. We’ve used it to sort of open people up to potential and possibility in the world, sort of steer them away from nihilism. And so we found a lot of pragmatic uses for the model. And it’s OK if you don’t. I don’t think everybody needs to read the model. I think the only people that need to really read and understand the model are people who are going to build tools to help people. And that’s what this model is all about. And just by engaging with the model, you are helping me because I am forced to try to explain it, which is always good, because it brings me to the edge of my thinking, which is useful and the edge of my articulation, which is also useful. And any feedback you have is most appreciated because I always want to get better at articulating what we mean, why we’re using these four P’s, why they’re different from John Vervecky, you know, where the utility comes from. If you’d like me to go into the perspective, the perspectival capacity and the, you know, the framing, the fluidity, the focus, the flexibility, you know, in the fluency, we can certainly do that. Just let me know. I’m not going to do that unless I get enough requests, though, because it’s quite a bit of work for me to do that. And that work is still, it’s not. We’re not. We’re still struggling with that to some extent. But asking for slides would certainly motivate us to do more on it. So your engagement is critical in helping me refine these ideas so that we can help more people and more types of people in more arenas. And so I just want to thank you for engaging. And I really appreciate that you’ve given me your time and attention.