The Beginning of Knowledge

An essay in response to the question of "What comes first, observations or conjectures?"

There is a common question asked regarding the role observations play in formation of human knowledge. It is often said that observations have to come first, because how could anything be conjectured and tested if one does not begin first with observations? This conversation goes back and forth like this: For this observation to take place, this other knowledge has to first be present, but wait for that knowledge to be present the other observation has to take place, and on and on. It feels like this can spiral into an infinite regress. According to philosopher Karl Popper, there is no such regress. The answer to breaking this regress lies in the knowledge held in genes.

Imagine following scenario. There is something breathtaking floating in a viscous fluid. It is a human fetus gestating and accumulating resources, growing limbs, and other organs. There is something unique about this fetus - its genetic makeup, which it obtained from its parents’ genes intermingling during the conception of the fetus.

Apart from the uniqueness of the genes, it also contains a certain quantity of knowledge, a code for basic expectations. Expectations for food, shelter, comfort, etc. Although the genes do not directly encode these expectations, the formation of the nervous system that gives rise to these needs is at some lower level encoded in the genes. This knowledge will remain fixed all the way from this point on to when the baby is born, has grown into adulthood, and has ultimately died. (I am discounting the epigenetic changes that take place throughout the human’s lifetime here.)

When the fetus grows and in the due term and a baby is born, a deluge of sensory information starts flooding into the baby’s brain. The genetic knowledge is used in conjunction with the sensory information (i.e. observations), to correct its expectations. The baby’s basic wants come from this genetic knowledge. In achieving these wants efficiently, the sensory information acts as a feedback loop to correct the knowledge. The baby’s genetic knowledge thus is augmented slowly by these experiences, errors and the feedback loops.

This is how (inborn) knowledge comes before any observation. The inborn knowledge is checked against the real world - via observations and corrected for tackling current and future problems. As the baby grows, this kernel of knowledge is grown into a larger knowledge base. The knowledge that is added on could still contain errors - just like inborn expectations. The only way to correct these errors is through conjecturing some outcome i.e. essentially guessing, and checking the sensed outcome (and not the real outcome, because we do not have any direct access to the real outcome), with the guesses.

In this way, the human mind is like an infinite loop running in a computer program. The bootstrapping genetic kernel algorithm then is like the OS booting up when the computer is first switched on. This however is just an analogy, for the computer kernel has no way to update itself, whereas the human does. And it does by the aforementioned process of making guesses, testing the guesses against observations and updating the currently held theories if needed.