Kevin Simler

@sarahdoingthing @Meaningness No I'm still happily mired in academic insanity :). Feel free to ignore what follows, or object as you see fit

@sarahdoingthing @Meaningness 1. Knowledge is never certain. There's no Knowledge with a capital-K, only tentative/hopeful knowledge

@sarahdoingthing @Meaningness 2. Knowledge best understood as a process of making models better align with reality.

@sarahdoingthing @Meaningness 3. It is a physical process. Computers and other non-humans can (theoretically) generate knowledge too.

@sarahdoingthing @Meaningness 3... E.g. natural selection is a knowledge-generating process, encoding its knowledge in genomes.

@sarahdoingthing @Meaningness 4. The most important/broadest thing to say about this process is that it works by conjectures & falsification

@sarahdoingthing @Meaningness 4... In other words, the only way to get knowledge is to weed out non-knowledge, i.e., ideas that don't work

@sarahdoingthing @Meaningness 5. Whenever a system is "learning," this kind of trial&error must be occurring (at some level of description)